Channel Shore

by Tom Fort

  A footbridge over the narrow inland end of the mill creek leads into the eastern fringe of Newhaven, where the railway line serves the harbour. A little way down the line is the mysterious Newhaven Marine Station, which has been closed to passengers since 2006 for ‘safety reasons’ but continues to make ghostly appearances on timetables. Newhaven has three railway stations (including the spectral Newhaven Marine) but no bank; you feel that without the Dieppe ferry service, which runs at a heavy loss, the town might be in danger of disappearing altogether.

  Newhaven and its harbour

  It is an odd place, and another of its oddities is its link – real or imaginary – with the Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh. It is well-known that as a young man Ho travelled widely in Europe and the United States, working in ships’ kitchens, a bakery and – allegedly – as a pastry chef in London. It is difficult to know where the story that he worked on the Dieppe–Newhaven ferry service came from – Sophie Quinn-Judge, author of Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years is more than a little sceptical. But to Newhaven’s civic leaders any celebrity – even one specialising in war, mass murder and the ruthless elimination of rivals – is better than no celebrity. In February 2013 a bronze statue of Ho – seated, pen in hand, perhaps about to sign a liquidation order – was unveiled at Newhaven Museum. It was donated by the Vietnamese Embassy and the event moved the Mayor of Newhaven to look forward to ‘a long and fruitful friendship between Newhaven and Vietnam resulting in exciting business, tourism, educational and cultural opportunities for the town.’ Does one detect the whiff of wishful thinking here?

  If Ho remembered Newhaven he kept quiet about it. Other nuggets of local history are more firmly based. For instance the Ford Corsair that Lord Lucan bolted in after murdering – or, just conceivably, not murdering – the family nanny was certainly found abandoned in Norman Road. (Lucan’s best friend, John Aspinall, always believed that he drowned himself jumping off the ferry to France.) And the last King of France, Louis Philippe, certainly arrived in Newhaven after his abdication and flight from Paris in February 1848. Among those who called on ‘Mr Smith’ at the Bridge Inn was none other than the Bishopstone tide-mill tycoon William Catt, who in happier times had been summoned by the King to his country mansion, Château d’Eu, to advise on building a mill.

  It is entirely likely that Mr Catt – possibly Mr Smith as well – refreshed himself with a pint ofNewhaven’s most celebrated liquid comforter, Tipper Ale. The brewer of this elixir, Thomas Tipper, is buried in the churchyard with these lines inscribed on his stone:

  Honest he was, ingenious, blunt and kind;

  And dared do what few dare do, and speak his mind.

  Philosophy and history well he knew,

  Was versed in physick and in surgery too.

  The best old stingo he both brewed and sold

  Nor did one knavish act to get his gold.

  Tipper’s ‘best old stingo’ was a strong dark ale, admired by – among many others – the Prince Regent, later George IV. Mrs Gamp, in Martin Chuzzlewit, took ‘a pint of the celebrated staggering ale, old Brighton Tipper’ for supper, being ‘very punctual and particular’ in her drinking.

  * * *

  Peacehaven

  This is Iain Nairn on Peacehaven: ‘It has been called a rash on the countryside. It is that, and there is no worse in England. Whose haven is it?’

  And Virginia Woolf: ‘All that is cheap and greedy and meretricious has here come to the surface and lies like a sore, expressed in gimcrack red houses and raw roads and meaningless decorations.’

  And the writer Geoffrey Morehouse: ‘It is a two mile strip of bungaloid horror. It should have been a home for heroes and became a monument for rapacity.’

  Peacehaven’s problem is that it tells the world what it is so directly. It has no centre, therefore it is easy to conclude that it has no heart. It has no buildings of distinction, no subtleties or surprises. It is constructed on a rigid grid system – roads east to west, avenues north to south – on which stand bungalows, just bungalows. Viewed from above on Google Earth it resembles some kind of electrical circuit box assembled for efficiency and compactness.

  It is easy to spend half an hour or ten minutes in Peacehaven and shudder at it, and laugh, and wonder how anyone could bear to live in such a place, and then move swiftly on; which is what journalists and travel writers and self-appointed arbiters of taste and defenders of the English countryside have always done. But I wanted to find someone to stand up for the place, so I put my bike on the train to Brighton intending to go and find that someone.

  When I got to Brighton I found the back wheel was slightly buckled. I took it to a bike shop near the station, and while the wheel was being fixed I got chatting with one of the owners and told him where I was heading and why. ‘I live in Peacehaven,’ he said, looking slightly embarrassed. And? ‘People laugh at it but it’s a really nice place to live. I mean, a nothing place to look at, but nice, friendly. And it’s a great cycle ride along the sea wall to get here.’

  He was originally from Leamington. The best thing about Leamington was catching sight of it in the rear-view mirror. Whereas Peacehaven . . . ‘Thing is, it knows what it’s for. People like me – wife, three kids – can afford to buy there. It’s clean and safe, there’s the sea. Plus a great ride into Brighton.’ He was right: it is a great ride – sea and rocks and shingle one side, soaring white cliffs the other, hard, flat concrete under the wheels, the wind in your face or behind your ears.

  I called in on Fred in Cairo Avenue, who happened to be at home with his dog. Fred and his wife had moved from Derbyshire to Hove; she’d always been on at him about living by the sea. They had a flat there and a view of the sea, and they were happy. Then Fred’s wife died and he couldn’t bear the loneliness and the memories, so he bought the bungalow in Cairo Avenue.

  ‘Saved my life, that did,’ Fred said. He extended a hand towards the sea, glittering under blue sky and racing clouds. ‘I wake up to that every morning. What could beat that?’ He’d done a lot of work on the bungalow over the years. He was good with his hands and in no hurry because he wasn’t planning to move anywhere. ‘Brighton people look down their noses at Peacehaven. They call it Windy City, but it’s just as windy there, plus the people here are a lot friendlier. I love it. Everything I need is here, plus there’s the sea, every day just outside the window.’

  I pedalled slowly along Peacehaven’s roads and avenues, immersing myself in variations on a bungalow theme. There were bungalows in plain red brick, white pebbledash, brown pebbledash, bungalows with timber features, stone cladding, tile cladding, bungalows sideways on, front on, L-shaped, rectangular, with green concrete roof tiles and brown concrete roof tiles. They were all different, all the same. Almost none of the originals – put up less than a hundred years ago – survive in their original form. But the spirit of the bungalow, the spirit of Peacehaven, is entirely intact.

  Photographs of Charles Neville, the creator of Peacehaven, suggest a speculator, a showman, a bit of a chancer. His lapels are too wide, his watch-chain too showy, his hat too tilted back for him to be mistaken for a gentleman. As a young man, Neville travelled extensively in America and Australia, making money in real estate. He saw how townships could be made quickly and profitably in the middle of nowhere, given pioneering enterprise and energy and a healthy contempt for rules, regulations and other people’s opinions. He brought the idea home with him.

  At the beginning of the 1914–18 war Neville and his wife drove west from Newhaven, across a broad tract of downland empty except for the sheep and the odd farmhouse. He started buying up the land at knockdown prices, around £15 an acre, and set up the South Coast Land and Resort Company. In 1916 he announced his plan for a new town on the clifftop and invited the public to enter a competition to name it. With the entry form they received an offer to buy a plot of land. Although the winner, New Anzac-on-Sea, was quickly discarded, the plots were snapped up and the money rolled in.

>   Because of the war and the subsequent acute shortage of building materials, the first dwellings did not appear until 1920. They were made of sheets of asbestos nailed to wooden frames, with asbestos roof tiles. It was an adventure for those early Arcadians. Many had fought in the war and longed for a simple quiet life in a place of their own. Some brought redundant army huts with them. Others built their own bungalows buying the materials from Neville’s company, which offered the use of machinery for free. Neither they nor their landlord needed the permission or help of the local authority. They didn’t mind the primitive or non-existent drainage, the lack of street lighting, the unmade roads.

  Neville’s ambitions went beyond making a buck from selling building plots. He wanted to make Peacehaven into a pleasure resort as well, somewhere to holiday and spend money. He had a swimming pool dug and built the Peacehaven Hotel, complete with sunken Italianate garden, on Phyllis Avenue. In 1922 the Rosemary Tea Rooms opened, with a room for entertainment, inaugurated by Miss Flora Robson reciting ‘The Highwayman’ and ‘The Matinee Hat’. The following year saw the opening night at the Pavilion Theatre, a converted Army canteen imported from France. It was run by two brothers, Felix and George Powell, who had achieved immortality with their 1915 patriotic song ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’.

  As well as staging comedies and musicals and Gilbert and Sullivan, the Powell brothers acted as cheerleaders for the Peacehaven brand. One of their more forgettable compositions went:

  Come to Peacehaven,

  Come to Peacehaven and build a bungalow

  As many have done, you know

  Up on the Downland, purple and brown land,

  And near enough to townland

  If you want to go

  And you always find the southern winds

  Make you free and fresh

  So for rest and recreation, wealth and happiness

  Come to Peacehaven by the sea.

  The sales slogan was ‘Come In On The Rising Tide’. Nor were rest and recreation and sea the only inducements. One advertisement offered ‘specially selected sites . . . eminently suitable for Angora wool farming . . . large enough to ensure a profitable business’ either from the exotically fluffy Angora rabbits or from more conventional kinds of rabbit fur. ‘The tide of a new industry is rising at Peacehaven,’ the ad proclaimed. ‘Let your barque upon it and ride at the flood to a harbour of happy industry and contentment.’

  Few, it seems, chose to sail on Peacehaven’s Angora rabbit barque. But many found the harbour of contentment by other means.

  Saltdean

  Charles Neville’s empire expanded steadily westward during the 1920s, and with it the breadth of his vision. Peacehaven grew an extension, Telscombe Cliffs, but there was space beyond for another kind of settlement: classier, more elegant, much more expensive.

  It was to be known as Saltdean, and the first radical decision was to jettison the grid system in favour of curves and arcs and ovals and crescents. There were bungalows, but they were smart, spacious bungalows with bathrooms and roofs tiled in diamond patterns. They were mixed in with superior detached residences in various styles: mock Tudor, Hollywood Spanish (stuccoed with green tiles), colonial and several blocks of luxury flats. There were even three uncompromising concrete cubes in Wicklands Avenue designed by the Connell, Ward and Lucas partnership, all fierce disciples of Le Corbusier.

  Two buildings summed up the comparative splendour of Saltdean, both the work of the architect R. W. H. Jones. One was the Ocean Hotel: a 400-bedroom extravaganza complete with American bar, ballroom, swimming pool, tennis courts and gardens, with a concave curvilinear frontage overlooking an ornamental pool and fountain. The other was the famous Saltdean Lido, a riot of pavilions and terraces and pillared canopy, inspired by Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion, but with an exuberance and lightness all its own.

  For a short time both these gleaming showpieces trumpeted Charles Neville’s vision and magnetised visitors with their glamour and opulence. But that kind of frivolous hedonism was shattered by the outbreak of war, and neither ever recovered its joie de vivre. The hotel was requisitioned as a fire station and was subsequently acquired by Billy Butlin and remodelled to fit the Butlin brand. The lido fell victim to a familiar cycle of neglect. It lost some of its most distinctive features, including the three-tiered concrete diving board and the boating pool. It closed, reopened, closed again, while its fabric decayed. It was eventually delivered by Brighton and Hove Council into the hands of a property developer who proposed to get rid of it altogether in favour of a block of one hundred flats. The news was greeted with outrage and the campaign to save the lido was born.

  It has now been reprieved from destruction, but remains on the critical list. Several millions need to be spent putting right the injuries of the past; it remains shut and shabby while the great scheme for its eventual resurrection creeps towards fulfilment. Meanwhile the Ocean, having been closed as a hotel in 2005 and having narrowly escaped being turned into a reception centre for asylum seekers, has now been converted into apartments.

  Saltdean these days looks and feels like just another coastal suburb. The high ambition of its fast-talking founder faltered, and Charles Neville’s spirit is long departed. But in Peacehaven – despite the disappearance of the original dwellings, the quadrupling of the population and the advent of proper drainage, asphalt roads, schools and other facilities – it remains obstinately and rather appealingly alive.

  The snobs – Nairn, Virginia Woolf and the rest – miss the point. They sneer at the ordinariness of seaside settlements such as Peacehaven, at the architecture, the absence of high culture and fine dining. They find it hard to forgive the presumption of lower-and middle-class people in intruding their bungalows and rock gardens and suburban attitudes into territory that should, by rights, have been declared off-limits to them.

  But the point about the seaside is its cheerful democracy. Very obviously, it is situated at the edge, between land and water. It takes from both but belongs to neither. It is a realm of its own, with a different code, and no one can claim ownership of it. It is open-handed in its welcome. It is a playground for children and their parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts and special friends. It accepts with equal ease the gregarious and the solitary, who wish for nothing more than to watch the waves and feel the unfailing beat of the sea’s heart.

  The seaside inspires a distinct delight which can be found nowhere else. That is why so many choose to live there, and so many more ensure that the pattern of their lives makes room for regular exposure to it. The snobs do not like the seaside’s generosity, the way it spreads its special quality around. So they damn Peacehaven, not that Peacehaven cares.

  I learned something valuable there.

  7

  PRAWNS ANCIENT AND MODERN

  Beneath the chalk cliffs the ebbing tide uncovers a marine edgeland of great interest to those who like to delve with nets under curtains of weed or thrust them into dark overhangs. Between Peacehaven and Brighton the chalk platform extending from the shore has been worked by the motions of the sea into a pitted, serrated moonscape, split by miniature canyons, crested by toothy outcrops. This is the realm of the rock pool.

  When you are down there, the cliffs shut out the tame upland where Peacehaven gives way to Saltdean, and Saltdean to genteel Rottingdean, and genteel Rottingdean to the stark forbidding institution that is Roedean School. You must take care when you venture out. Much of the rock is blanketed in bladderwrack, which offers a treacherous footing. Beneath the tresses of rubbery weed are jagged rock edges armoured in skin-tearing barnacles and mussels. Limpets and anemones are glued into the cracks and crevasses. There are occasional drifts of sand between the rocks, welcome relief to the feet, where shattered mussel shells gather like some exotic blue ore. Small, sandy-bottomed pools are formed in the bowls in the rocks, where bright-green weed of soap-like slipperiness mingles with another weed, coral in colour, rough and filamentous to the tou
ch.

  Such pools are lovely to look at, like miniature aquariums. But these are of no interest to the prawn hunter, who is creeping his way with extreme caution towards the sea, scouring the moonscape for promising refuges. The ideal pool is shut off from the waves and has rock faces that drop vertically – or even better at an inward angle – into at least a foot of water, with bladderwrack or other weed giving shelter along the edge. It may have an island or two, with hidden holes and hiding places beneath the surface. There must be room to manoeuvre the net into the nooks and crannies, and sweep it beneath the weed. These are the places beloved of prawns and those who hunt them.

  My mother became headmistress of Roedean School for girls in 1960, when I was nine. We – my three elder brothers and I – were all away at boarding school so we tended to come in the holidays, when the vast institution was echoingly deserted but for a skeleton staff of caretakers and my mother, closeted in her study with a packet of Senior Service and a mountain of paperwork. We had the use of the school gym, which was fun for a while, and the swimming pool, which was fun in fine weather (of which there was very little in the 1960s), and of the cricket nets (Roedean took cricket very seriously). There was Brighton of course: the pier and candyfloss and toffee apples, and Bredons and Beals bookshops in the Lanes. I was too young to take advantage of the town’s more exotic attractions.