How I see The North Laine.

Aside from the beach, The North Laine area  is probably one of the most recognised and photographed areas of Brighton. Calenders, travel books, Beautiful Britain pamphlets & posters, Lonely Planet guides - there's always pics. of the outdoor cafes, fabulous graffiti, unconventional people and crazy inventions.

I love the North Laine - but I tend to look at it through different lenses each time I'm there. At The Regency Town House we have a huge data-base of knowledge about how North Laine grew, the people for whom the houses were built, those which doubled as schools, pubs, grocers, dressmakers, and information about all the people who lived in them.    But what about this?

Did people move into these from Brighton slum areas? Was this the first time some people had proper kitchens instead of dank cellars? Did they luxuriate in heated rooms for the first time? And did they feel a sense of release and even Overlordship, gazing down into the crammed and thronging streets of North Laine so far below?

And who was in the architects mind when this North Laine building first went up?  Was it meant for Brightonians, or was it built to cope with the influx of people moving here from other centres?  Were the 8-pane windows and bow treatments meant to blend in with the idea of a Regency Brighton? Was it expected to slot seamlesslessy into place in the North Laine?

And this scruffy mish-mash - what was it all about? The token rounded tower - another nod to Brighton themes, perhaps? An attempt to introduce modernism into the old streets? Was it hoped that the building would seed itself and lead to other red-bricks re-defining the North Laines? Or was it, too, incongruously slipped down a side-street in the hope that no-one would notice?

When this lofty building went up was it part of a Victorian kind of gentrification? Was it hoped that, due to it's proximity to the centre of Brighton town, The North Laines could gradually over-lay its humble beginnings and become an exclusive neighbourhood for the better class of person?

And this one green oasis in what had been an area of gardens on the outskirts of the Brighthelmstone's main streets? Was it hoped that the northern area outside the old town limits would, as elsewhere to the west of the Old Town, morph into picture-perfect squares with pretty little houses where the only people of the lower orders to be seen would be those attending on the good and the great all round them?

Was there hope that, in its old age, the area would sink into the refined and genteel sociability of the average English town?

It hasn't yet.  It's stubbornly clinging to its curiously diverse beginnings: where whores and embroideresses, schoolteachers and the destitute, lived parallel lives on either side of a notorious       * brick wall as divisive as the Berlin Wall. It's a place first inhabited by the hopeful and the hopeless. It was both profane and genteel, and it homed people from social and economic extremes.

How I see the North Laines may not be through the same lense as many others, but I find it endlessly fascinating; combining all it's colour and patterns as if part of a kaleidoscope. 

*The wall is still there. It forms (as it did in the 19thC)the back perimeter wall to the properties on Gardner St. And it forms one side of the alley known as 'Orange Row' .(Mrs.Simpson's blog http://www.rth.org.uk/node/925 discusses it further.)