By strict reckoning the Regency period is only the decade from 1811 when George III became finally and incurably insane, to 1820 when the Prince Regent ascended the throne as George IV, but it is usually used, as here, to cover roughly the period of the Napoleonic wars and the reign of George IV- approximately the thirty years from 1795 to 1825. It was during this period that the Pavilion, the Regency terraces, the squares and crescents of Brighton and Hove were built, and when large-scale schemes of development, not only in Brighton, but in Worthing and Bognor were formulated, and partly completed.

 

Brighton was recorded in Domesday as a fishing village. It possessed a harbour of some importance, presumably where the Steine and Pool Valley are today, and flourished during the Middle Ages. It was fortified during the Hundred Years' War, and, at the time of the Armada, still possessed a 'bulwark' which was renovated only to fall later under the assaults of the sea.

 

Brighton's decline was, in fact, due partly to the silting of the harbour (as at Hastings) and partly to the sea's encroachments. Defoe, in his tour through England and Wales (1724), describes it as: 'A poor fishing town, old built and on the very edge of the sea ... the sea is very unkind to this town and has, by its continual encroachments, so gained upon them (the townspeople) that in a little time more they might reasonably expect it would eat up the whole town, above a hundred houses having been devoured by the water in a few years past, they are now obliged to get a brief granted them, to beg money all over England to raise banks against the water; the expenses of which will be eight thousand pounds which ... would seem to be more than all the houses in it are worth'

 

Such was the town which Dr Russell of Lewes managed between 1750 and 1780 to popularize as a salt-water spa. He advocated sea bathing and sea drinking as a cure for most ills and established a hydro where the Albion Hotel now stands. In 1783 the Prince of Wales first visited the town, returning again the following year, and in 1786 he purchased the site of the present Pavilion. The following year the Pavilion was built to a design of Henry Holland in the record time of five months. It was then a simple Georgian villa which was later to form the nucleus of the building we know today.

 

For the rest of his life Brighton continued to be the Prince's favourite residence. This set the seal on the place's growing popularity as a fashionable resort. In 1780 the population had been 3,600, already a sizable town for the period. By 1794 it had risen to 5,669; by 1801, to 7,337; and by 1821 to 21,429. It was in fact an increase which rivalled the most remarkable parallel developments in Lancashire and Yorkshire, but for entirely different reasons; and so it has continued ever since - for recreation, retirement and commuting from London.

 

The first residential terrace - the Royal Crescent - was built in 1806, the Royal Stables and Riding School (now the Corn Exchange and the Dome) in 1804. Plans for extending the Pavilion and completely transforming it were drawn up first by Repton and finally by Nash, and the Pavilion as we know it was completed in 1821.

 

With the death of George IV Brighton ceased to be the favourite resort of the monarchy. Much of the furniture of the Pavilion was removed to Buckingham Palace, and finally the shell of the building which had cost in all over half a million pounds was bought, as the result of a small majority vote, by the citizens of Brighton in 1850 for £50,000. Brighton has had no reason to regret this purchase: today, refurnished with much of the original furniture, it forms a major attraction.

 

During most of this period from 1796 to 1815 England was at war with France under Napoleon, and, for at least two years, from 1800 to 1802, a threat of invasion hung continuously over the South Coast. Troops were stationed behind Brighton, and guns had been set up at various points, many on the exact sites used over two hundred years before as gun emplacements against the expected Spanish Armada. Along all the flatter coast from Eastbourne to Kent, where the invasion fleet was expected to land, Martello towers were built; a considerable number of these remain, partly ruined or converted to various uses--an example is the Wish Tower on the front at Eastbourne.

 

After 1815 for a decade expansion was particularly rapid and grandiose schemes such as that for Kemp town in 1825 on the East Cliff, and that for Brunswick town in Hove were started; both were only half completed, when the tide of popularity turned away from Brighton. By the time it flowed again, after the opening of the Brighton to London railway in 1841, fashion had changed, and the ordered and dignified terraces, squares and communal gardens of the Regency development gave place to the individualism and petty pretentiousness of the Victorian era.

 

What happened at Brighton was followed, though on a smaller scale, very closely in Worthing and, through the enterprise of Sir Richard Hotham, in Bognor. In 1801 the population of Worthing was approximately 1,000; in 1831, approximately 5,000; that of Bognor in 1801, about 700 - in 1831, nearly 3,000.

 

It is in this period that the turnpike system and the stage coach reach the peak of their development. Cobbett wrote in 1823: 'Brighton is so situated that a coach, which leaves at not very early in the morning, reaches London by noon: and starting to go back in two hours and a half afterwards reaches Brighton not very late at night. Great parcels of stockjobbers stay at Brighton with the women and children. They skip backward and forward on the coaches and actually carry on stockjobbing in Change Alley though they reside in Brighton.'

 

This perfection of the London to Brighton coaching system led to Brighton becoming for a few years the main cross-channel port of England. Before the development of the railway, there was little difference between the speed of the early cross-channel steam-packets and the stage coach, and Brighton, not Dover or the parts to the east, lay on the direct route from London to Paris.

 

The Chain Pier at Brighton

 

A chain pier, destroyed in a storm in 1896, was built in 1823 to enable passengers to embark directly onto the packet boats from the coaches, without the intermediary of unstable rowing boats and the broad shoulders of the ferry-men. A few years later, the building of the railway in 1847 and the improvement of Newhaven harbour brought this to an end; soon afterwards the Brighton Packet Boat fleet was sold to the railway company. Then, in its turn, Newhaven declined in competition with Folkestone and Dover, for railway speeds became so much faster that the longer land routes with shorter channel crossings became more attractive.

 

Inland the new canals and the turnpikes were gradually changing the face of the countryside. In addition the Regency period made itself felt by the widespread imitation in town and village of the stucco used in the fashionable terraces of Brighton and Hove. Innumerable brick, flint, stone and even timber cottages and houses were indiscriminately plastered over and painted. The creeping rot of urban-inspired uniformity had begun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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