by Al Shaw

Created on: June 19, 2009

What do you want a history of Brighton for?

If you live here or want to visit, you'll know that it's the here and now that matters, hey?

The city is happening, full of students and gays and it's got a pebbly beach.

What more do you need to know?

Oh yeah, and it's got a rubbish football team. (Soccer if you live in America)

You don't care that Brighton was a fishing village 1,000 years ago, do you? Or that it was destroyed by the French in 1514.

You just want to know where the good clubs are. Am I right? Or the shops if you're a girl. Cause girls like shopping don't they? And blokes like footie. (That's soccer if you're from America.)

(Or Canada.)

The Lanes where all the posh shops are was the original village before the rest got burned down. By the French. They weren't shops then though. They were cottages for the fishermen.

Herring.

That's what the fishermen caught. Herring.

How did they manage without nice clothes shops, hey?

Anyway, you don't care about that. Just need to find somewhere to stay. How about them massive Georgian hotels on the sea front?

Know why they call them Georgian? You know, them big white houses with columns and tall windows. I'll give you a clue. It's something to do with George.

Nah, not Boy George, although he does live here when he's not in a police cell for being a very naughty boy.

The other George. King George. That's why they call them houses and hotels Georgian. Cause they were built while George was king. Get it? George un.

Four of them.

Georges that is, not houses. Four kings called George. Kings George of England.

The third one fought a war against the rebel Americans. He lost.

Anyway, they built loads of houses and stuff while he was king and the two before him. Georgian they called the style, for reasons I have already explained. Was you not listening?

Bit like calling a type of architecture Obama-esque, hey? Not quite the same though, is it, cause the four Georges was around for ages. 170 years in fact. That's longer than your president, hey?

So, lots of Georgian houses and hotels in Brighton.

Because the kings (George, George and George) went to Brighton a lot, it became fashionable, which it still is today of course, even though there's no king there anymore.

But one of them did leave a palace behind near the sea. It's called the Pavilion now and it looks like a mosque, sort of. Inside it's full of Chinese furniture and stuff like that. If you live in Brighton you can go round it for free. If you don't, you gotta pay.

Anyway, that's how it got turned from a herring village to a trendy town.

The Victorians added more bits to it, like the two piers and the train station and the Grand Hotel, which the IRA blew up in 1984 when Mrs Thatcher was staying there.

All the rest of Brighton is just modern housing, in the loosest possible sense of the word. I think when they built all them parts of town, that's when they decided to drop the t from the name of the place. So that's why when we say its name, we call it Bri-un.

So that's how Brighton got here.

But you don't care about that do you?

I forgot.

Oh, yeah, one last thing. They filmed Quadrophenia here. It's a film about working class youth and teenage angst.

Whatever that is.

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