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| Brighton Information |
| Recorded as the tiny fishing village of
Brithelmeston in the Domesday Book, BRIGHTON seems to have slipped unnoticed
through history until the mid-eighteenth-century sea-bathing trend established
a resort that has never looked back. The fad received royal approval in
the 1770s when the decadent Prince Regent, later George IV, began patronizing
the town in the company of his mistress, thus setting a precedent for
the "dirty weekend", Brighton's major contribution to the English
collective consciousness. Trying to shake off this blowsy reputation,
Brighton now highlights its Georgian charm, its upmarket shops and classy
restaurants and its thriving conference industry. Yet, however much Brighton
tries to present itself as a comfortable middle-class town, the essence
of its appeal is its faintly bohemian vitality, a buzz that comes from
a mix of English holiday-makers, thousands of young foreign students from
the town's innumerable language schools, a thriving gay community and
an energetic local student population from the art college and two universities.
The Town Any visit to Brighton inevitably begins with a visit to its two most famous landmarks - the exuberant Royal Pavilion and the wonderfully tacky Palace Pier , a few minutes away - followed by a stroll along the seafront promenade or the pebbly beach. Just as interesting, though, is an exploration of Brighton's car-free Lanes , where some of the town's diverse restaurants, bars and tiny bric-a-brac, jewellery and antique shops can be found; or an idle meander through the quaint, but more bohemian streets of North Laine . |
| Arrival Information |
| Brighton train station is at the head of Queen's Road, which descends to the Clock Tower and then becomes West Street which eventually collides with the seafront - a distance of about half a mile. Buses arrive at Pool Valley bus station, tucked just in from the seafront on the south side of the Old Steine. The tourist office is at 10 Bartholomew Square, behind the town hall on the southern side of the Lanes (June-Sept Mon-Fri 9am-6pm, Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 10am-4pm; Oct-May Mon-Sat 9am-5pm; tel 0906/7112255), a maze of narrow alleyways marking Brighton's Old Town. You'll find most budget accommodation clustered around the Kemp Town district, to the east of the Palace Pier, with the more elegant and expensive hotels west of the town centre around Regency Square, opposite the West Pier. Brighton's official campsite is the year-round Sheepcote Valley site (tel 01273/626546), just north of Brighton Marina; take bus #1 or #1A to Wilson Avenue, or take the Volks railway and walk up Arundel Road to Wilson Avenue. |
| Eating, Drinking and Nightlife |
| Brighton has the greatest concentration
of restaurants in the southeast after London. Around North Laine are some
great, inexpensive cafés , but for classier establishments head to the
Lanes and out towards Hove. Many of the cheaper places fight hard to attract
the large student market with discounted deals of around ten percent,
so if you have a student ID, use it. Nightlife is hectic and compulsively
pursued throughout the year, making Brighton unique in the sedate southeast.
There are a couple of outstanding clubs, lots of live music and more cinema
screens per head than anywhere else in Britain. Midweek entry into the
clubs can cost just a couple of pounds and cinema seats are similarly
priced before 6pm. For up-to-date details of what's on , pick up a copy
of the monthly Insight (£1) from newsagents or the free monthly listing
magazines What's On or Source from the tourist office while the similarly
free Gscene , covering gay events, can be found in gay bars, clubs and
shops. If you've access to the internet, you can log on to the highly
praised website , . Every May the three-week-long Brighton Festival (tel
01273/700747, ) takes place in various venues around town. This arty celebration
includes fun fairs, exhibitions, street theatre and concerts from classical
to jazz. Brighton is hoping to emulate Berlin by staging its very own
version of the latter's Love Parade, a day-and-night-long Dance Parade
, held in mid-July. Cafés and Bars Bar Centro 6 Ship St. Brighton's biggest, most spacious pre-club bar with occasional in-house DJs spinning tunes. Bar Latino 62 Middle St. Tapas bar with regular live screenings of Spanish and Portuguese football matches and a healthy dose of salsa too. Grinders 10 Kensington Gardens. Upstairs trip-happy café serving tasty cheap snacks and great soups, with a balcony for watching life in North Laine go by, and lots of club fliers to hand. Mock Turtle 4 Pool Valley. Old-fashioned teashop crammed with bric-a-brac and cheap, home-made cakes. Closed Sun & Mon. The Sanctuary 51-55 Brunswick St East, Hove tel 01273/770012. Cool and arty vegetarian café with soft furnishings and a cosy, relaxed ambience. Deservedly popular, despite its not-very-central location. Zanzibar 129 St James's St. Premier pre-club gay bar out towards Kemp Town. Restaurants Al Duomo 7 Pavilion Buildings tel 01273/326741. Brilliant pizzeria, with a genuine wood-burning oven. Has a more intimate sister restaurant, Al Forno at 36 East St tel 01273/324905. Inexpensive. Black Chapati 12 Circus Parade tel 01273/699011. Innovative Asian cooking with Japanese and Thai influences as well as more conventional Indian dishes, which are brilliantly executed. Something of a Brighton landmark despite its out-of-the-way location, more than a mile inland, at the point where the London road enters town. Moderate. Browns 3-4 Duke St tel 01273/323501. A mixture of steak, seafood and pasta dishes as well as traditional favourites such as Guinness-marinated steak-and-mushroom pie, served in a sophisticated continental setting with wooden floors, palms and background jazz. Moderate. Casa Don Carlos 5 Union St tel 01273/327177. Small, long-established tapas bar in the Lanes with outdoor seating and daily specials. Also serves more substantial Spanish dishes and drinks. Inexpensive. English's Oyster Bar 29-31 East St tel 01273/327980. Three fishermen's cottages knocked together to house a marble and brass oyster bar and a red velvet dining room. Seafood's the speciality with a mouth-watering menu and better value than you might expect, especially the set menus. Brighton institution famed for its atmosphere as much as its food. Expensive. Food for Friends 17 Prince Albert St tel 01273/202310. Brighton's ever-popular wholefood veggie eatery is imaginative enough to please die-hard meat-eaters. It's usually busy, but well worth the squeeze and offers discounts for students and music on Sun evenings. Inexpensive. Le Gastronome 3 Hampton Place tel 01273/777399. Well known for its good-value classic French cuisine, friendly service and outstanding selection of wines; choose the dish of the day for £8 or a five-course blow-out for £22.50. Closed Sun & Mon. Moderate. Havana 33 Duke St tel 01273/773388. Very stylish continental brasserie with just a hint of colonial ambience - palms and rattan chairs - to evoke tropical luxury and a feeling of being pampered. The menu is eclectic, ranging from Med to Thai - the lunchtime menu is particularly good value. Moderate. Melrose Restaurant 132 King's Rd tel 01273/326520. Traditional and decent seafront establishment which has been serving seafood, roasts and custard-covered puddings for over forty years. The Regency Restaurant next door is a similar and smaller option. Inexpensive. Piccolo 56 Ship St tel 01273/380380. Informal Italian restaurant with pizza and pasta dishes from around £5 and special deals for students. Inexpensive. Tamarind Tree 48 Queen's Rd tel 01273/298816. Mellow Carribean café decked in turquoise and wickerwork, with a surprisingly large range of veggie dishes. Main dishes around £9, or you could just have a filling starter. Moderate. Terre-à-Terre 71 East St tel 01273/729051. Imaginative, global, veggie cuisine in a modern arty setting. Closed Mon lunch & Sun. Moderate. Thai Spice Market 13 Boyces St tel 01273/325195. Classical Thai interior and cuisine, serving meat, seafood and vegetarian varieties. Inexpensive to moderate. Yum Yum Noodle Bar 22-23 Sydney St tel 01273/606777. Serves anything Southeast Asian - Chinese, Thai, Indonesian and Malaysian noodle dishes at good-value prices - situated above a Chinese supermarket. Lunch only. Inexpensive. Pubs The Cricketers 15 Black Lion St. Just west of the Lanes, this is Brighton's oldest pub and it looks it too; very popular with good pub grub served in the pleasant setting of its Courtyard Bar. Dr Brighton's 16 King's Rd. Popular gay venue. Druid's Head , 9 Brighton Place. Great, old pub in the heart of the Lanes with a flagstone floor and a raucous jukebox. Font & Firkin Union St. Spacious converted chapel with a bar in place of the altar and occasional live music. The Great Eastern 103 Trafalgar St. Relaxing pub with bare boards and bookshelves, lots of real ales, and no fruit machines or TV. The Hand in Hand 33 Upper St James St. An agreeable pub with its own brewery out the back. The Prince Albert 48 Trafalgar St. A listed building, right by the train station, popular with students. Live rock upstairs, real ale downstairs; free pool in the afternoon. The Smugglers 10 Ship St. A young crowd packs out this place, with a good jazz club upstairs, dance club downstairs, and free pool during the day. Nightlife The Beach King's Road Arches tel 01273/722222. R'n'B, classic grooves and occasional stand-up comedy nights. Casablanca 3 Middle St tel 01273/321817. Basement venue featuring live bands and all types of funk, including latin and jazz. Concorde 2 Madeira Shelter, Madeira Drive tel 01273/207241. Live music venue, with an admirable booking policy featuring everyone from Bert Jansch to Sparklehorse; also has club nights at the weekend and a Tues night comedy club. Escape 10 Marine Parade tel 01273/606906. Brighton's trendiest nightclub packs them in night after night, specializing in funk and techno. The Jazz Rooms , Smugglers Inn , 10 Ship St tel 01273/328439. Popular jazz venue in the basement, with the livelier Enigma upstairs catering for active ravers and fronting the occasional abstract dance troupe. Paradox 78 West St tel 01273/321628. The best option after the Zap Club . Its Wild Fruits gay nights on the first Mon of the month are particularly popular. Revenge 32 Old Steine tel 01273/606064. The south's largest gay club with Mon night cabarets plus upfront dance and retro boogie on two floors. Zap Club 188-193 Kings Rd Arches tel 01273/821588. Brighton's most durable club, right on the seafront opposite Ship Street. |
| Exploring Brighton |
| Brighton's Museums Across the gardens from the Royal Pavilion stands the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery (Mon, Tues & Thurs-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 2-5pm; free), which is entered just around the corner on Church Street. The paintings here are generally nondescript, but there's an interesting collection of classic Art Deco and Art Nouveau furniture as well as Dalí's famous sofa, based on Mae West's lips. There's also a large selection of pottery, from basic Neolithic earthenware to delicate porcelain figurines popular in the eighteenth century. Brighton's other big municipal museum is the Booth Museum of Natural History (Mon-Wed, Fri & Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 2-5pm; free), a mile up Dukes Road from the centre of town. Purpose-built to house Mr E.T. Booth's prodigious collection of stuffed birds, this is a wonderfully fusty old Victorian museum with beetles, butterflies and animal skeletons galore, but which also puts on very imaginative temporary shows. Perhaps more immediately gratifying for younger children is the Sussex Toy and Model Museum (Mon-Fri 10am-1pm & 2-5pm, Sat 11am-1pm & 2-5pm; £3), housed in an old stables underneath the train station. The collection is impressive, ranging from an entire cabinet full of Smurfs to a set of Pelham puppets, but it's the working model railways that are likely to be the focus of most children's attention. Rest of The Town Tucked between the pavilion and the seafront is a warren of narrow, pedestrianized thoroughfares known as the Lanes - the core of the old fishing village from which Brighton evolved. Long-established antiques shops, designer outlets and a concentration of bars, pubs and restaurants generate a lively and intimate atmosphere in this part of town. North Laine , which spreads north of North Street along Kensington, Sydney, Gardner and Bond streets, is more bohemian with its hub along pedestrianized Kensington Gardens. Here the shops are more eclectic, selling second-hand records, clothes, bric-a-brac and New Age objects, and mingle with earthy coffee shops and downbeat cafés. Most of the seafront is an ugly mix of shops, entertainment complexes and hotels, ranging from the impressively pompous plasterwork of the Grand - scene of the IRA's attempted assassination of the Conservative cabinet in October 1984 - to the green-glass monstrosity on the seaward side of the Lanes. To appreciate fully the tackier side of Brighton, you must take a stroll along the Palace Pier whose every inch is devoted to fun and money-making, from the cacophonous Palace of Fun to the Pleasure Dome, and from the state-of-the-art video games to the fairground rides and karaoke sessions at the end of the pier. Brighton's architecturally superior West Pier, built in 1866 half a mile west along the seafront, was damaged in World War II and then fell into disrepair, but is being restored its former glory. Across the road from the Palace Pier, on Marine Parade, is the Sea Life Centre (daily 10am-5pm; £5.50; ), one of the best marine life displays of its kind, with a transparent tunnel passing through a huge aquarium - a walk along the bottom of the sea with sharks and rays gliding overhead. Nearby, the antiquated locomotives of Volks Electric Railway (April to mid-Sept; £1.60 return) - the first electric train in the country - run eastward towards the Marina and the nudist beach, usually the preserve of just a few thick-skinned souls. Royal Pavilion In any survey to find England's most loved building, there's always a bucketful of votes for Brighton's exotic extravaganza, the Royal Pavilion (daily: June-Sept 10am-6pm; Oct-May 10am-5pm; £5.20; ), which flaunts itself in the middle of the main thoroughfare of Old Steine. The building that originally stood here was a conventional farmhouse. Then in 1787, the fun-loving Prince of Wales commissioned something more regal, and for a couple of decades the prince's south-coast pied-à-terre was a Palladian villa, with mildly oriental embellishments. Shortly after becoming Prince Regent, George commissioned John Nash, architect of London's Regent Street, to build an extraordinary confection of slender minarets, twirling domes, pagodas, balconies and miscellaneous motifs imported from India and China and supported on an innovative cast-iron frame, creating an exterior profile that defines a genre of its own - Oriental-Gothic. Queen Victoria was not amused by George's taste in architecture, and shifted the royal seaside residence to the Isle of Wight, taking the pavilion's valuable fittings back to Buckingham and Kensington palaces and selling the building to the town. The pavilion was then pressed into a series of humdrum roles - tearoom, hospital, concert hall, radar station, ration office - but has now been brilliantly restored. Inside the pavilion the exuberant compendium of Regency exotica has been enhanced by the return of many of the objects which Victoria had taken away. One of the highlights - approached via the restrained Long Gallery - is the Banqueting Room , which erupts with ornate splendour and is dominated by a one-ton chandelier hung from the jaws of a massive dragon cowering in a plantain tree. Next door, the huge, high-ceilinged kitchen, fitted with the most modern appliances of its time, has iron columns disguised as palm trees. Nearby, the stunning Music Room , the first sight of which reduced George to tears of joy, has a huge dome lined with more than 26,000 individually gilded scales and hung with exquisite umbrella-like glass lamps. After climbing the famous cast-iron staircase with its bamboo-look bannisters, you can go into Victoria's sober and seldom-used bedroom and the North Gallery where the King's portrait hangs, along with a selection of satirical cartoons. More notable, though, is the South Gallery , decorated in sky blue with trompe l'oeil bamboo trellises and a carpet which appears to be strewn with flowers. |
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