There’s a bloke down on Brighton beach today wearing a T-shirt which reads
‘Sex Drugs Sausage Rolls’ – which just about sums up the
seafront in my home town, with its bizarre mix of sauce, grit and comfort
food.
The beach itself – pebbled, peopled, pitched on a daring tilt to the sea – isn’t exactly what you’d write home about. Kylie Minogue, for one, never did: «Oh come on, I’ve been to Brighton,» she once said. «Have you seen that place? I mean, the city itself is nice but the beach is full of rocks and pebbles! Not something I’m used to back home, I must say.»
It irks me, but she has a point. There are arguably better beaches up the road at Climping, vast and romantic beneath the Turner sky, or at Rottingdean, with its rock pools and near-empty dreamscape. Brighton’s beach, though, is about what’s up. Or, more precisely, who’s up. Usually, you’ll find a fascinating collection of specimens in among the eight million tourists who rock up each year. Just as Brighton has its own micro-climate (the locals reckon it’s a few degrees warmer than you’ll find north of the Downs, so it has its own human sub-species of what rock critic Steven Wells called «crusty-wusty, hippy-dippy, twat-hatted, ning-nang-nongers». Again, fair point. But they’re my ning-nang-nongers. And I love them.
I particularly love the skateboarding terrier who performs tricks down by the pétanque pitch, and the Somalian guy forever playing the mbira, on and on, day on day until it has become the song of the sea in these parts. I love the bracing, embracing liberalism of the place. The whatever-ness, the anything-goes. Not long ago, a giant Lego man washed up on the beach, and everyone just shrugged and got on with getting along.
The beach – all 614 billion pebbles of it, cast out beneath the hulk of the Thistle Hotel and the scandalously ugly Brighton Conference Centre – is really the people, not the place. The whole scene moves, grooves, ebbs and flows like the roiling sea beyond. On a summer’s day, laced between the tangle of tourists who’ve paid a fortune to park and more again for a sorry portion of fish’n'chips in a polystyrene tray, you find the city’s fitness fanatics, the gad-abouts, the fly guys and the show-offs, most of them on wheels. Skateboards, mountain boards, rollerblades, road bikes, unicycles, trikes, buggies, the occasional penny farthing – they’re all jockeying for position down on the prom, while up on the road above, it’s still more wheels, from the tailgating traffic to the swarms of Lambrettas, Harleys, classic cars or naked cyclists which descend in their thousands each year to peacock about down by the pier.
Besides being a glorious gaudy sideshow, though, Brighton beach is a living, working environment. There are police patrols and beach cleaners, professional dog walkers, cockle and whelk vendors, lifeguards, DJs, barmen and baristas and a man who will walk the length of the strip to tell you that you can’t have your dog on this particular beach (there are designated dog areas; even anarchy needs rules. An idle ice-cream eater can wander past beach volleyballers, barefoot joggers, paddleboarders, kayakers, basketball players (very serious, very tall, huge shorts, stunt-bike riders, Fit Bitch trainees, a handful of tentative bikini wearers with goosebumped buttocks, Ultimate Frisbee freaks and a geezer making meaningless sculptures with sand. At night, the music kicks up and the beach chills out, home now to the pot smokers, night paddlers and the punters at the Fortune O’ War pub, which sells beer in plastic pints so you can take it down to the water’s edge and look for phosphorescence.
It’s a sensual place, this beach. The view to the horizon as an orange sun sets equals any in the world, whatever Kylie says. There’s power here, and an odd, messy kind of glory. It’s about the naked black bones of the West Pier, stark against the sky, and the starlings in their cloud formations, circling the Palace Pier’s Helter Skelter, sketching pictures in the air. It is the accent of the hurdy-gurdy of the carousel, art galleries tucked away in salt domes and blow loose the chill-out tired from beach club that talk about the morning after the night before, while a man sleeve tattoos and multiple piercings sweeps last night spilled beer and broken promises by the wayside. Is that many chickens falls in pink cowboy hats on the beach flakes in the recovery position, even with eye shadows last night brightness and angel wings. As a snore, a singer in a bar stool out of the room numbers Brighton Music Frank sings into a microphone, "Fly Me to the Moon", soaring above the PAB bacon and hot sweet tea.
My favorite section is by far the seaside neighborhood. There is a quaint little museum here, a place out of time and pushed under the arches, recalling the days when the beach was full of boats, gear and catch and Brighton industry was the fish, not fun. These days, offshore boats are mostly weekend boats and sailing Hobie Cats, launched Sunday morning from the Brighton Sailing Club (the club is run by a couple called Roger and Virginia Barnacle that is so perfect it makes my heart sing. the way, you can still buy fresh fish from Jack and Linda Smokehouse, jellied eels in tanks (this is London-by-Sea, after all, or a mackerel sandwich hot.
Further west of the pier, things slide luxury and Hove residents have their own beach quarter – an "esplanade", please – even beyond the renewed Victorian gazebo, where you can get married or simply tone for a macchiato, beyond the chain of huts light green (the color is designated by the Council, and woe to the mavericks, Hove lawns beyond and outside the lagoon. In the other direction, eastward, Volks Electric Railway will distance along leisurely pace, past the Sea Life Centre, which always smells and algae bottom boat for me, beyond the climbing wall rock the playground screaming, down the great Regency crescent, vanilla, decadent and voluptuous curve, beyond the nude beach in Kemptown ("a nimble little in the winter," no soul to waste, what Specifically Marina and back. There is a giant Asda there, and it feels like the end of the world.
Back on the beach, beyond its daily quirks, there’s a perpetual roster of races, championships and parades, the runs and rallies, the festivals, the circuses, big events like Pride, Paddle Round the Pier and the Burning of the Clocks, when paper lanterns are released to mark the Winter Solstice. The seafront is soon to get jazzier still with the arrival of a 45m-high Ferris wheel and, if sponsorship materialises, the i360, a towering observation needle allowing visitors to ascend to 150m and see far up into the skirts of England and out into the Channel, some say as far as France.
Not that I’d want to go. Sit for a while on Brighton beach, and you’ll get the drift. People say it’s impossible to be a misfit here, and I reckon that’s about right: 600 billion pebbles, don’t forget, and no two of them the same.
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