North Laine
Encyclopedia
Brighton
Brighton is the major part of the city of Brighton and Hove in East Sussex, England on the south coast of Great Britain...
, on the English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
south coast immediately adjacent to the Royal Pavilion
Royal Pavilion
The Royal Pavilion is a former royal residence located in Brighton, England. It was built in three campaigns, beginning in 1787, as a seaside retreat for George, Prince of Wales, from 1811 Prince Regent. It is often referred to as the Brighton Pavilion...
. Once a slum area, nowadays with its many pubs and cafés, theatres and museums, it is seen as Brighton's bohemian and cultural quarter.
History
Due to its geographical relation to The Lanes, North Laine is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the "North Lanes". However, a "laine" is a Sussex dialectSussex dialect
The Sussex dialect is a dialect that was once widely spoken by those living in the historic county of Sussex in southern England. Much of the distinctive vocabulary of Sussex dialect has now died out...
term for an open track of land at the base of the Downs
South Downs
The South Downs is a range of chalk hills that extends for about across the south-eastern coastal counties of England from the Itchen Valley of Hampshire in the west to Beachy Head, near Eastbourne, East Sussex, in the east. It is bounded on its northern side by a steep escarpment, from whose...
, which is derived from an Anglo-Saxon
Anglo-Saxons
Anglo-Saxon is a term used by historians to designate the Germanic tribes who invaded and settled the south and east of Great Britain beginning in the early 5th century AD, and the period from their creation of the English nation to the Norman conquest. The Anglo-Saxon Era denotes the period of...
legal term for a kind of land holding. The space that is now North Laine was once occupied by five open farming plots of a type that seem to have been generally unchanged in style since the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
. By the 19th century, the farming plots (which had been for centuries subdivided into hides
Hide (unit)
The hide was originally an amount of land sufficient to support a household, but later in Anglo-Saxon England became a unit used in assessing land for liability to "geld", or land tax. The geld would be collected at a stated rate per hide...
and furlong
Furlong
A furlong is a measure of distance in imperial units and U.S. customary units equal to one-eighth of a mile, equivalent to 220 yards, 660 feet, 40 rods, or 10 chains. The exact value of the furlong varies slightly among English-speaking countries....
s) were encircled by major municipal roads for Brighton. With building developments across Brighton beginning to encroach upon the fields, the tracks that had divided the individual hide plots were normalized into streets, and the area was soon appropriated as a new settlement and market area. John Furner planted a market garden in the plots, and by 1840 a rail hub had been set up on the northern border of North Laine, Brighton railway station
Brighton railway station
Brighton railway station is the principal railway station in the city of Brighton and Hove, on the south coast of England. The station master is Mark Epsom...
.
During the reigns of George IV
George IV of the United Kingdom
George IV was the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and also of Hanover from the death of his father, George III, on 29 January 1820 until his own death ten years later...
and William IV
William IV of the United Kingdom
William IV was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of Hanover from 26 June 1830 until his death...
and through the first quarter of the reign of Victoria
Victoria of the United Kingdom
Victoria was the monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death. From 1 May 1876, she used the additional title of Empress of India....
, despite the grandeur of their Royal Pavilion, the North Laine section was known mostly for its squalor, abysmal living conditions and high concentration of slaughterhouses. One resident of note was George Herbert Volk
George Herbert Volk
George Herbert Volk , known as "Bert", was an automobile and general engineer noted as a pioneer builder of seaplanes...
, second son of railway engineer Magnus Volk
Magnus Volk
Magnus Volk was a pioneer British electrical engineer. He is most notable for having built Volk's Electric Railway, the world's oldest extant electric railway. He also built the unique, but short lived, Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway, together with its unusual Daddy Long Legs...
, who worked in a small workshop at 86 Gloucester Road in the years 1910 - 12 - this building is now home to Silicon Beach Training http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk. By the 1860s, the city began to clean up the area, knocking down old tenement houses (population density in one slum neighbourhood, Orange Row in the Pimlico slum district, was approximately 130 people to 17 houses) to replace them with more modern streets. A famous resident at this time was Tom Sayers, a popular British heavyweight boxing
Boxing
Boxing, also called pugilism, is a combat sport in which two people fight each other using their fists. Boxing is supervised by a referee over a series of between one to three minute intervals called rounds...
champion of the middle Victorian Era
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
. He was born in the Pimlico slum area and trained in North Laine. At his death in 1865, 10,000 people attended his funeral at Highgate
Highgate
Highgate is an area of North London on the north-eastern corner of Hampstead Heath.Highgate is one of the most expensive London suburbs in which to live. It has an active conservation body, the Highgate Society, to protect its character....
, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
.
Today
Today North Laine is a bohemian shopping area popular both with locals and tourists, well served with cafés, bars and entertainment venues including theatres such as Komedia, which is in a former Tesco supermarket. The latter had been closed for some years in anticipation of major redevelopment of the area which failed to materialise; in the building was for some time a covered market with a number of small stallholders, until Komedia moved in from their previous home in KemptownKemptown
Kemptown is a small community running along the King's Cliff to Black Rock in the east of Brighton, East Sussex, England.-History:The area takes its name from Thomas Read Kemp's Kemp Town residential estate of the early 19th Century, but the one-word name now refers to an area larger than the...
. The first branch of Anita Roddick
Anita Roddick
Dame Anita Roddick, DBE was a British businesswoman, human rights activist and environmental campaigner, best known as the founder of The Body Shop, a cosmetics company producing and retailing beauty products that shaped ethical consumerism...
's Body Shop
Body shop
Body shopping is the practice of consultancy firms recruiting information technology workers in order to contract their services out on short-term bases...
, later to become a multinational business, was opened at 22 Kensington Gardens. Typical retailers include art, antiques, architectural salvage, second-hand books, CDs, "retro
Retro
Retro is a culturally outdated or aged style, trend, mode, or fashion, from the overall postmodern past, that has since that time become functionally or superficially the norm once again. The use of "retro" style iconography and imagery interjected into post-modern art, advertising, mass media, etc...
" clothing, graphic novel
Graphic novel
A graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format...
s, musical instruments and new age
New Age
The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and then infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational...
paraphernalia. There is a high turnover of boutique-style shops in North Laine in general.
One of the less shopping-oriented streets, Upper Gardner Street, is closed every Saturday for an on-street market. Amongst the houses of this street are several antiques dealers.
The City Council redeveloped a gap site, constructing a new library and public square which became available to the public in 2005. This significantly changed the flow of pedestrians, which prior to this had been predominantly straight through North Laine on the main shopping streets, and is now more two-dimensional.