One of my intentions with this story was to incorporate the newer communities of Sudan, Iran and China into the town’s history. The results are mixed but the intention was honourable. The bombastic style can be blamed upon Herman Melville. I was halfway through Moby Dick when I wrote it, and some of the barnacles seem to have rubbed off. All I can do is apologise. Well, that and point the blame.

The Founding of Brighton

Brighton was a winking beauty in the groin of England’s southern coast.

Upturned from their beds by the heat and madness of bank holidays, the uplanders would beat their way towards her. Headbutting car horns in stagnated traffic, shuffling their weight from trainer to trainer in the standing crush of the Thameslink, they swarmed to her in frustrating passage, static in their metal coffins.

And she brought them in to land with twinkling lights along her runway thighs. Here the pier, uncomprehending phallus thrust over the sea. Here the pavilion, winter palace of globular mammary domes. Here the beach and here the rub: the brass has teeth of stone! A beach in a wonderbra. A storm defence co-opted by sun-dunkers. Unlucky barefoot children, their jelly shoes sucked away by the tide, wail as they stagger across this Somme of jagged pebbles. This is no beach. The Lady Brighton’s smile is as false as dentures.

Once, the waters thronged with Victorian health freaks riding great metallic spiders along rails beneath the waves. Once, the electric railway had even flung its tracks out on stilts to sail over the water. A cable-car had been strung across the Dyke. A monorail had linked Hove to Kemp Town. A Regency metro had tunnelled beneath the Laines, closed now since the great flood. All these antediluvian Golems of iron and steel had been eroded and erased. Now only their stumps remained.

The town was founded by pirates. History records that Calico Jack Rackham fathered two bastards in the bellies of Mary Read and Anne Bonny- the same bastards that spared them from the gallows. These children formed a gang, peppered with Killigrews, who first named the beach their Haven. In time this became Hove, and the sprawling settlement made its way toward the standing stone circle of the Old Steine. The town was a rookery to rival Port Royal. But in time the settlement began to settle. The pirates turned professional in their new lives as apothecaries and illustrators. They began to smuggle opium and hashish, and the town has since remained a magnet of low prices and fresh imports. Their trade was bolstered by tolerance: Brightown was the first in England to have a Chinese quarter and an Iranian quarter. But it was the artistry of Coptic sailors from Cairo and Khartoum that brought the first taste of money without crime; they opened strings of tattoo parlours for passing seamen under the sponsorship of the founding fathers. The shops flourished and brought with them further demands for body modification. By the time of Prince Albert’s famous visit, there was said to be no-one left in town who did not have some metal somewhere skewered through some part of his body.

All of which libertarianism and bohemia attracted the deluded daubings and prattle of a thousand poetasters and performance artists, exiled from their London garrets for the offence of pretension without prettiness.

This new influx prided itself on the cosmopolitan authenticity of their new home and, by doing so, destroyed it. Rents and rates increased. Twitterns were bulldozed to beautify them. Squares and parks were “reclaimed” from vagabonds and mendicants. The rats were driven out and, with them, the underclass of rat-catchers and, with them, the publicans. There was an uprising against the new invaders. It was led by an apprentice laudanum addict by the name of Spikes Harvey. The uprising ended in a bloody riot with three hundred dead ‘neath the trees of the Level. To suppress further incidents, the forest of the Level was removed and replaced with grass. The bohemians walled themselves in to the gardens of Park Crescent for safety, creeping out at night through a secret tunnel. Records state that the tunnel led out to the sea via a concealed door in the base of the fountain in the Steine.

When they built the fountain, they were forced to uproot the standing stones that had circled the spot since antiquity. Legend attests that, upon one careless navvy chipping a corner off the head stone, all of the stones burst open and poured forth a million pebbles. These were initially piled into a “Children’s Mountain” on the site of the Sea Life Centre. After the great flood, they were moved down to the beach to serve as a sea defence against the mansions of Neptune.

And the city would have remained safe and deranged ever since. But the second duty of a wall between Brighton and Haywards Heath was sadly abandoned and the work never completed.