My friend George featured on the blog fairly recently (in February in fact) — but I like her purple hair, just right for this very pleasant morning in West Sussex, so let’s feature her again…
Regency Square was first laid out in the early 1800s and was one of the first sea-front housing developments in Britain with social cachet; until that time the upper classes wouldn’t have dreamed of living near the sea, which was full of smelly fisherman types. But it was a success and became the template for many similar British seaside towns since.
What the Georgians would have made of the 450-feet-high tower that has sprung up at the end since last I was here, I have no idea. It’s nicely corporate, being sponsored by British Airways, for no immediately obvious reason, and is to become the “tallest moving observation platform in Europe”, or something. At least it will be until someone else builds a bigger one, which may turn out to be equally pointless and intrusive. I’m not a conservative — surely anyone following this blog can see that — so I’ll judge anything new on its merits. At the moment, I just can’t see that this has any.
My fourth-ever trip to the Amex stadium, home of my beloved Brighton & Hove Albion since 2011, and this is the third time it has appeared on the blog. This was also the first time Joe has been able to visit. He’s declaring for the Albion, which is a brave move for a Yorkshire-born 11-year-old, so it was good to see an exciting game, and a win — 4-3 for Brighton over Birmingham City. This picture was taken just after Inigo Calderon put the Albion 2-1 up.
A bit of catching up to do after spending the weekend in Brighton. The ruined West Pier is always good for a shot, probably looks as photogenic now as it ever did when it was standing. This one is taken from the extent Palace Pier (now just known as Brighton Pier).
Yes, a conference I want to attend in a place I want to go to full of people I want to see. There is a reason that Brighton, despite being hundreds of miles from my house, has featured on this blog reasonably regularly.
This is the ruined West Pier’s second appearance on the blog, the first — accompanied by a huge flock of starlings — being way back on Day 72. Earlier this year it lost another chunk of ironwork to the winter storms, although that damage is not really visible on this shot. The photo also proves that it was a glorious morning on the south coast today — rather nicer than the foul wind and rain back in the north when I got home tonight, I can tell you (grumble).
And so, after one more morning of definite, but rather vague and low-level, looking back — it’s probably some mid-life crisis or something — we all left my old stamping ground for points more northern and, to tell the honest truth, far more interesting. It’s been nice to go back, confirm the continuing existence of places remembered, but there’s no need to come back again.
Once in a while you will get a photo on here that is posted not for artistic merit (though I don’t mind this shot in that regard, I think it captures the small and prosaic nature of this establishment), but just because it means something to me. This trip to Sussex has been undertaken partly because I wanted to go and have a nose around the places where I lived when I was a child, until 1988 when I left aged about 19, these being the town of Crowborough in Sussex and the nearby village of Rotherfield. I could bore you with how it all felt but there’s not a lot of point, you’ve never been there and it’s not, to tell the truth, the most exciting part of the world although it is a very pretty one.
The reason this photo is here is because of all the places I expected to have disappeared, this was the most unexpected survivor; my old neighbourhood store. Seeing this place and going in to buy sweets (and I did, well, a Bounty Bar anyway) really did make me feel like I was 10 years old again. It’s not called ‘Mace’ any more but long may it last.
Ah, the English seaside on a hot summer’s day. Sand? That’s for those continentals, of suspicious morality and lacking in backbone.
I grew up in the South of England but left 20 years ago and don’t tend to come back if I can help it. This place, however, is the one exception. Sometimes I wish they would swap it with Blackpool – the one carbuncle on the face of the North – then all the really good places would be up there and all the naff places down South, But it’s probably better this way round. However, a warning – there are plans to build some huge ‘observation tower’ in front of the ruined West Pier. Remember, if there is anything cool and beautiful, someone, somewhere, is planning to fuck it up.
Being 42 