Channel Shore Read online

  Then there was, or is, i360, a futuristic viewing tower waiting to thrust its slender tip 600 feet into the air from where the stem of the wrecked West Pier meets the seafront. This, the consultants confidently predicted, would create 500 jobs and draw an extra 800,000 visitors to the town each year. So anxious was the council to have something to show for the latest product of its dream factory that it offered £14 million from its severely squeezed reserves towards the overall cost of £38 million. After the company behind the project reported a ‘slippage in time scales’ for the rest of the money to be forthcoming, the council upped its contribution – in the form of a loan – to £36 million.

  A local builder quoted in the Brighton Argus assessed the chances of the tower being built as slightly less than that of Nelson getting his eye back, but work on it is in progress and – barring disasters – it is due to open in 2016.

  Brighton Beach

  Brighton remains a curiously beguiling amalgam of the flashy, the trashy, the bizarre, the ugly and the lovely. Lord knows how much public money has been blown on drawing up, consulting on and discarding various ‘big projects’. Meanwhile the budget for the boring, basic maintenance of the surviving fabric of the resort is slashed. The Big Wheel, no different from all the other Big Wheels elsewhere, makes its tedious revolutions. Underneath, the glorious latticed ironwork and cast-iron pillars of Madeira Terrace are left to rust and discolour, and the paving slabs to crack and list.

  Brighton has its nude bathers and now nude cyclists, but you can still buy rubbery whelks and cockles in vinegar from the stall on the Palace Pier, with a little fork to stab them with. Anglers hoping for a plaice or a dab lob their lugworms from the platform at the end of the pier. Elderly couples nod in their deckchairs and recall the days when Tommy Trinder topped the bill at the theatre.

  The aquarium is still the aquarium, even if it’s called the Sea Life Centre. Candy-floss machines still occasionally whirr into sugary life. Along the Madeira Drive promenade, bolted to the grimy concrete wall, is a ‘public artpiece’ consisting of big steel letters stating that ‘I Have Great Desire My Desire Is Great’. Its purpose, according to its creator, Naoimh Looney, is to remind those who pause in front of it of their own desires, and that desire is a great force. Brighton, Ms Looney asserts, is defined by a diverse set of desires.

  Quite.

  8

  BUGGER BOGNOR?

  Southwick used to be a proper village, close to but distinct from the western edge of Hove. It lost that distinction a long time ago, gobbled up by the coastal conurbation that now stretches almost unbroken from Brighton to Littlehampton. But its village green and its cricket club survive as reminders of a quieter age.

  In 1932 Southwick Urban District Council banned cricket from the green on the grounds that it constituted a danger to passers-by and the increasing volume of traffic using the roads along the boundary. But the council had not bargained for the fighting spirit of Southwick CC and its president, the writer, broadcaster and all-round champion of England and things English, S. P. B. Mais.

  Mais – the initials stood for Stuart Petre Brodie, but he was usually known as SPB – lived in The Hall, an imposing brick-and-flint residence with fine upstanding chimneys overlooking the cricket square from the angle of wide mid-wicket (or deep third man, depending on which end is bowling). He wrote books celebrating the countryside, walking, pubs, churches, local salt-of-the-earth characters, morris dancing and folk singing, with titles like This Unknown Island and England’s Pleasance.

  Permanently beset by financial pressures, forever veering between prosperity and indigence, SPB produced books at an amazing pace – around 300 in all, sometimes as many as eight in a single year. In addition to travelogues, he churned out novels, undemanding studies of English literature, meditations on English history and character, a history of a steel company and another of pneumatic tools, and a torrent of newspaper and magazine articles – anything, in fact, that helped pay the bills. His vast output is now pretty much forgotten, all except five words – he is credited by the Dictionary of Slang with having coined the insult ‘dead from the neck up’.

  The edict from Southwick Urban District Council roused SPB to bulldog stance. To him an Englishman’s right to play cricket on his village green was as sacred as a vicar’s to preach in church. He orchestrated a clamorous publicity campaign that culminated in the police solemnly recording the names of the Southwick eleven and their opponents as they stood in their whites beside the pitch. SPB announced that he would take the case to the House of Lords if need be. He also refused to pay his rates, which gave the council the chance to prosecute him and have him evicted from The Hall.

  A new council elected the following year had the sense to rescind the ban. By then, though, SPB and his family had moved from Southwick down the road to Shoreham. But he always considered Southwick to have been his true home, and in his autobiography wrote that if he ever came back as a ghost he would be found hovering over the oak seat given to the cricket club by his daughters.

  The Hall is still standing, looking across the green to the Cricketers, a singularly nasty 1960s rebuild of the old pub where SPB once quaffed good Sussex ale and swapped tales with Sussex men of gallant deeds with willow and leather. There is a blue plaque on the front of the house remembering the man ‘who fought for cricket on the Green’ which would surely have pleased SPB greatly. A notice on the front of the club’s modest wooden pavilion appeals for colts, players, umpires and scorers to step forward. ‘There is magic on this Green,’ SPB wrote in an article for the Sussex County Magazine. There still is, just about.

  * * *

  Shoreham

  Shoreham is harbour and housing. The harbour, scooped out of the eastern spur of the elongated mouth of the river Adur, is edged by wharves, cranes, warehouses, chemical tanks, stacks of timber and pre-stressed concrete and steel girders, heaps of sand and gravel, lines of containers and lorries. On the western side of the harbour entrance stands Shoreham Fort, a mid-nineteenth-century coastal battery. Extending west from the fort like a thumb stuck horizontally between the sea and the Adur is Shoreham Beach, now a prime residential area filled by the usual mishmash of mediocre gated mansions with swimming pools, tarted-up villas, derivative new-builds and shiny glass and steel apartment blocks.

  Shoreham Beach’s past, not that distant in time, has been pretty thoroughly wiped from the map. But, far from being forgotten, the genesis and short life of the old beach community are celebrated with love and loving attention to detail by a splendid website, www.shorehambysea.com. One of the first colonists was a popular Edwardian music-hall star, Marie Loftus, who happened to visit on a day off from performing in Brighton. She was smitten by this out-of-the-way stretch of shingle and built a bungalow to which she invited her many friends in the vaudeville and theatre business. Some were as beguiled as she was by the peace and remoteness of the location, and acquired their own bungalows along Old Fort Road.

  Over the years the bungalows and chalets multiplied and spread west. A number were constructed of carriages purchased from the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway Company for £10 each and dragged by carthorse across the estuary to the beach. Others were built more conventionally of wood, but with towers, pinnacles, castellations and carved gables to proclaim their individuality. There was no electric lighting or mains drainage; paraffin lamps were the norm, and waste was taken away by night in a horse-drawn tank and dumped at sea by a barge.

  By 1938 the spit of land between the sea and the estuary was home to around 700 dwellings. Many were let as holiday homes and many had become somewhat shabby as a result of neglect and battering by storms. Two years later the Army gave residents forty-eight hours’ notice to leave, then cleared away most of the bungalows to prepare for the expected German invasion.

  Hostilities over, some of the plotholders returned to reclaim their patches of beach and personal freedom. But government, local and national, had other ideas. The 1947 Town and Co
untry Planning Act enshrined in law the principle that owning land conferred no right to build on it. Henceforth planning permission was required; and furthermore the local authority had the power to compel owners to sell land for approved development to take place.

  That is what Sussex County Council did in the case of Shoreham Beach. The notion of allowing the reappearance of what, in effect, had been a shanty town was horrible to a new generation of town planners trained to know exactly what was best for everyone. In the words of Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward, in Arcadia for All, at Shoreham ‘order and geometry replaced spontaneity’.

  But not entirely. Along the inner side of the beach the old spirit is alive and kicking. Around forty redundant vessels, including a German minesweeper and a Royal Navy ammunition barge, have been hauled into positions at right angles to the bank of the Adur estuary and converted into individual – and in some cases downright bizarre – residences. The beach is close, there are no cars, there is a view over an RSPB bird reserve, and freedom reigns.

  * * *

  Worthing Pier

  Worthing has a pier, not the best but not abandoned to wrack and ruin either. It has a first-rate cycle path along the seafront, and the shingle beach parcelled out by the groynes is as appealing as anywhere else’s along this shingly shore. Almost all its outstanding buildings have been demolished, but quite a number of pleasant Regency terraces and squares survive, as do many rows of nice, neat brick cottages.

  It has some bits and bobs of history. George III’s fifteenth and last child, Princess Amelia, was sent to Worthing in the hope that a course of sea-bathing would help her tubercular knee. It was celebrated for its glasshouse tomatoes in the late nineteenth century. Oscar Wilde stayed there with his family and wrote The Importance of Being Earnest when not consorting with a newspaper delivery boy called Alphonse Conway, a dalliance which was picked over in excruciating detail at his trial. Harold Pinter lived in Worthing for a time in the 1960s and wrote Homecoming there.

  My own particular reason for lingering there was to visit Broadwater Cemetery, a magnificently characteristic Victorian burial ground spread over many acres on the inland side of town. It has been nursed back to something like decent order by a gallant band of volunteers after decades of neglect and vandalism. Twenty-five thousand of Worthing’s finest are buried there. Two of them – though not strictly speaking Worthing men – were incomparable observers and chroniclers of the wonders and beauties of the English south country, and of the ways of the country people.

  They lie almost side by side, Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson. It was Hudson’s wish to be near Jefferies, whom he loved and hero-worshipped. Sharing Hudson’s grave is his wife Emily, to whom he was married for forty-five years – ‘I was never in love with my wife nor she with me,’ he wrote after her death. She was a martyr to ill-health and lived in a boardinghouse in Worthing for the last eight years of her life. Hudson visited her regularly, but Worthing’s charms were lost on him: ‘I hate the place and have never met anyone there who was the slightest use to me. It is talk, talk, talk but never a gleam of an original or fresh remark or view of anything that does not come out of a book or a newspaper.’

  Hudson was, I think, the better writer, certainly the more approachable. His once famous South American romance, Green Mansions, has dated beyond hope of retrieval, but his memoir of his boyhood in Argentina, Far Away and Long Ago, is a masterpiece, and there are many passages in his books about nature and country life in his adopted England which still hold the attention.

  There is a beautiful account in his Nature in Downland of visiting the cottage in Goring where Richard Jefferies died, and of going down to the beach and watching a group of dotterel feeding on a patch of sand enclosed by shingle. He meets an old man, a carter, who feeds his horses bunches of ribbon seaweed. The carter explains to Hudson that not all horses like it, but those that do are the stronger and healthier for it. ‘I was happy and I laughed with the old carter as we talked,’ Hudson wrote. ‘But the thought of Jefferies, slain before his time by hateful destiny, still haunted me, and deep down beneath my happiness was an ineffable sadness.’

  Passing through Goring myself, I got talking – not to an old carter about feeding seaweed to horses, but to an elderly lady about her beach hut. Hers, like all the others, was made of wooden planks painted white, with a symmetrical pitched roof and a rectangle of concrete slabs in front on which to sit and soak up the sun. She had bought it for £300 in 1980; now they were going for £10,000 each.

  Beach huts are integral to the English seaside scene. Media attention invariably focusses on stories about huts selling for fabulous and ludicrous prices. Travel writers tend to be condescending or downright disdainful about them and the people who love them. Paul Theroux, in Kingdom by the Sea, dubbed them ‘shallys’ and mocked them for their furnishings and prints of dogs, cats and sailboats, and for having names like Sunny Hours and Bide-a-Wee. He asserts that the shallys, although very close together, are very private, their occupants unwilling or unable to engage with neighbours. This is nonsense. They can be private, if that’s what the beach-hut person wants, but if you bother to talk to them, you find that the easy, informal sociability of the settlement is a huge attraction. Friendships are forged here, and marriages – good, solid ones.

  To the lady at Goring her beach hut had been one of the blessings of her life – for her and her husband, for their children, and now for their grandchildren. She liked the fact that you had to make your own fun; there was no amusement park or funfair, not even a chippie, just an old-fashioned café where you could get a cup of tea and an ice cream. She liked there always being someone to chat to. There were 130 owners, all with something to say about dogs on the beach or ever-increasing council charges or the weather. Always the weather.

  She had one sadness. To shore up the beach and restrain the eastward drift of shingle, the groynes had been reinforced by ramparts of granite boulders. One incidental effect had been to make the slope of the shingle into the water steeper – too steep for her to get out unaided any more. So she had had to give up her daily swim, which was a shame.

  She offered me a mug of tea brewed on her little stove. But time was pressing, so I politely refused and pedalled off in a westerly direction.

  I passed through Ferring, Angmering-on-Sea and Rustington – and quite possibly East and West Preston as well – without having any idea which one I was in at any particular time. The sameness of these coastal settlements is reinforced by the presence along much of the shoreline of a thick barrier of the salt-tolerant shrub Elaeagnus, separating the beach from an extended band of communal greensward.

  Cycling is not encouraged on the greensward, but I kept to it where I could. The alternatives were to drag my bike over the shingle, which is very tiring and annoying, or detour far inland. I asked a bloke walking his dog how much the mansions backing onto the greensward went for. Three million, some of them, he said. I said that if I had three million, I didn’t think I would choose to live there, wherever there was. Nice and quiet, though, he said, which was true. And there was the beach, very wide and empty at low tide. I watched a couple walking along the sea’s edge, where the shingle gave way to wet, grey sand and the lines of waves queued for their turn to break and lose themselves. I envied them their closeness to the water.

  There is an imposing convalescent home on the sea road at Rustington described in Nikolaus Pevsner and Iain Nairn’s Buildings of England: Sussex as ‘the best kind of seaside building’. There was an elderly man going turn and turn about along one of the gravel walks, visibly striving to impose his will on his dodgy pins. It struck me that there must be many worse places to recover your strength after injury or illness.

  Rustington gives way to Littlehampton’s rather meagre sliver of seafront, the main part of the town being to the north, arranged around a baffling one-way system along the side of the Arun estuary. E. V. Lucas, in his Highways and Byways in Sussex, records an anecdote of the poet Coler
idge encountering the celebrated translator of Dante, Henry Francis Cary, on Littlehampton Beach. Cary was accompanied by his thirteen-year-old son and was quoting passages from Homer’s Iliad to the lad, which is not something you would be likely to come across today. A feature of the beach that would have astonished poet and scholar alike is the celebrated East Beach Café, made of misshapen layers or ribbons of rusted steel wrapped around a glass frontage, so that from a distance it looks like an outsize piece of wreckage or flotsam.

  * * *

  As a small boy my brothers and I and our first cousins were taken on holiday to Middleton by my grandmother. Two nannies came as well, as did Gladys and Ern – Gladys an intimidating dragon who had been my granny’s parlourmaid or some such in a long-departed era of prosperity, and Ern her exceedingly henpecked husband. We stayed in a largish house called Château Vert, although I can remember nothing green about it. The beach was greyish, the stones sharp beneath tender feet, the sea very cold. We had more fun crawling around the foundations of the house, which for some reason had been built above ground and left exposed. We paid out lengths of string to enable us to find our way back, and pretended we were being pursued along secret tunnels by enemy agents.

  Returning well over half a century later, I had a sentimental notion of trying to find Château Vert. Middleton disdains straight roads leading anywhere, comprising instead a maze of crescents and circles and dead-end closes in which I quickly lost my bearings. I thought I remembered Château Vert being much bigger than most of the other houses, but now I found that they were nearly all big; and furthermore that most of them were clearly less than fifty years old. It was clear to me that the chances of the château having retained its name and escaped demolition were nil, so I gave up.