Viva Brighton Issue #60 February 2018

TALK
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Christopher Horlock
Early Brighton photographs
The West Pier, 1868
In 1972, James Gray brought out a book
called Victorian and Edwardian Brighton
from Old Photographs and I thought ‘wow!’
My interest in the history of Brighton was just
starting and I’d been taking photographs myself
of the changes I’d been noticing in the town. I
had to meet him. He worked in insurance and
lived with his wife in a little bungalow in Shirley
Avenue. They had no children and I think, in
some respects, I was the inheritor of his knowledge.
I went to see him every couple of months
for 20 years. He was the historian of the period.
He lived to be over 90 and his earliest memory
was of a horse bus outside Brighton station. A
horse bus!
I’ve managed to collect well over 20,000
items related to Brighton’s history – mostly
photographs – over the last 45 years. The talk
I’m giving is about the earliest photographs in
my collection. The first photographs of buildings
were seen in the 1830s but as soon as you get
into the 1850s and 60s you see people. I have
a picture from the early 1860s with all these
fashionable people on the seafront in crinolines
and top hats. The Grand Hotel is being built, the
West Pier doesn’t exist yet and the Chain Pier is
in the distance. The whole place comes to life.
As soon as portraiture became fashionable, in
around 1860, everyone wanted it. There were
lots of photographers in Brighton. Some of them
had studios on the seafront to take portraits of
the wealthy but occasionally they turned their
camera out of a window and captured the building
of the Grand Hotel, the piers being built…
These are rare views. There were some bath
buildings on the seafront - one called ‘Brill’s
Baths’ was a great round bathhouse that stuck
out into the road. It was known as ‘the bunion’.
I have a photo of it from 1871, just before it was
demolished. Another photograph shows all three
piers. The West Pier, the Palace Pier being built,
and the Chain Pier in the foreground. It just
shows how progressive Brighton was.
As told to Lizzie Lower
The Keep, Sat 24th Feb, 2pm, £3 per person. Visit
thekeep.info or call 01273 482349 to book your
place. Christopher’s book ‘Brighton from Old
Photographs’ is published by Amberley
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