Viva Brighton Issue #39 May 2016

BITS AND BOBS
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PUB: THE GRAND CENTRAL
The Railway Hotel opened its doors
before the railway even arrived in
Brighton: it’s first listed in the 1839
Pigot’s Directory, with a Mr Charles
Penfold its landlord. The owners knew
what was coming, obviously, and custom
must have picked up significantly when
the station opened up (for trains to
Shoreham in May 1840 and to London
in September 1841).
It wasn’t the only pub that opened in
order to mop up the thirst of the new
customers arriving in town. If anything
there were too many in the vicinity. By
the mid-1850s there were five on Surrey
Street alone, three of which closed between
1920 and 1924. The destruction
of the Terminus Hotel and Shades on
the other side of the road in 1924 meant
that the pub was now visible from the
station. It is probably for this reason
that Tamplins decided to redesign the
building in 1925, using their chief architect
Arthur Packham, who replicated
the design for the copper dome he had
fashioned for the Alibi pub in Hove, on
top of the central tower of an impressive
baroque structure.
There’s not much news of the place to
be found between then and 1986, when
a theatre was built on the first floor, and
the pub was renamed The Nightingale.
It was one of the venues where the Siren
Theatre Company – a hard-hitting,
raucous lesbian collective which grew
from Vaultage band the Devil’s Dykes
– performed drama which is still talked
about today.
The nineties being the nineties, the place got another
rebranding in 1997, when it briefly became known as
Finnegan’s Wake, after Joyce’s everyone’s-got-it-nobody’sread-it
final novel. And finally as The Grand Central, with
the Nightingale Theatre still above it, a situation which
persisted till 2013, when Fullers took over and did an
extensive, and clearly expensive refit.
The theatre is still used – we had our last Christmas party
there – mostly for comedy and burlesque nights. The pride
of the place, just coming into season, is the roof garden (a
vast improvement on the ramshackle space before Fullers
took over) which smells of jasmine in the early summer,
and fills up fast on a sunny afternoon. As does the large
space downstairs, as it’s still the first pub in sight after
leaving the train station, which means now as ever, it’s a
bolthole for thirsty travellers.
Alex Leith, painting by Jay Collins
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