English's of Brighton has been serving seafood in The Lanes since 1945, which makes it younger than the pub round the corner by exactly four hundred years. It does Dover sole and platters, and it has been doing them long enough that ordering feels like joining a queue that started before the war. The Lanes themselves are the reason to begin here: a tangle of narrow twittens — the local word for alleyways — laid out on the site of the old fishing town of Brighthelmstone, now filled with jewellers, antiques dealers and boutiques. It is small, it is easy to get lost in, and getting lost is more or less the point.
A few streets away is the four-hundred-year part. The Cricketers on Black Lion Street is Brighton's oldest pub, the first inn in old Brighthelmstone, founded in 1545 as the Laste and Fishcart to serve the town's fishermen. It later became a coaching inn, it is Grade II listed, and it has kept an intact Victorian servery. There are three changing cask ales and live music. Upstairs is the Greene Room, named for Graham Greene, who drank here and put the pub into Brighton Rock. Two other Lanes pubs, the Black Lion and the Spotted Dog, were already open by 1791 and still are.
If you want the real-ale pub rather than the famous one, the Basketmakers Arms is regarded as one of the finest traditional examples in the city. Near the Theatre Royal, the Colonnade Bar was built in 1894 as part of the theatre complex and still works as an interval bar — one real ale, and a gin list out of all proportion to the size of the room.
Head north from The Lanes and you reach North Laine, which is a separate place with a confusingly similar name. This is the good bit. Three hundred and more independent shops, vintage stores, record shops and cafés spread across Kensington Gardens, Gardner Street and Sydney Street. At weekends the roads close and fill with stalls, tables, buskers and people who have committed fully to a look. It gets called Brighton's Greenwich Village, which tells you roughly what to expect. The landmark here is Snoopers Paradise on Kensington Gardens, a sprawling indoor flea market of second-hand goods, vintage clothing, records and things you did not know you were looking for. You can spend an hour in it without buying anything and still feel you got your money's worth.
The eating in North Laine and along London Road runs to Fatto a Mano, which does Neapolitan pizza with soft pillowy bases — the buffalo margherita, the Diavola, a Burrata and Parma, and an 'nduja lasagna fritta for anyone who felt the pizza alone was insufficiently committed. For South Indian there is Curry Leaf Cafe, run by chef Kanthi Kiran Thamma, with mix-and-match plates and a vegetarian side that carries the menu rather than apologising for itself. Near London Road the Brighton Open Market is a permanent covered run of independent food and craft traders.
The seafood is the city's proper specialism, and there is a lot of it. Riddle & Finns does champagne and oysters in The Lanes and again on the beach — scallops, rope-grown mussels, a seafood risotto and linguine. The Coal Shed cooks over live fire: 28-day-aged steaks and South Coast seafood over open flame. The Salt Room, out by the West Pier ruins — reopening after a refurbishment, so check before you book — does the fire-led thing too: charred scallops with Café de Paris butter, whipped cod's roe, red Argentinian prawns, and a Salt Room Daiquiri of rum, strawberry, basil and citrus. Over in Kemptown the Gothic Crab is the city's first dedicated seafood boil house, which means shellfish, your hands, and no pretence otherwise. For the plainer version, the Regency Restaurant on the seafront has been doing classic fish and chips overlooking the sea for a very long time.
Fish and chips has its own small league. Bardsley's on Baker Street near the Open Market is the traditional standby. Wolfies of Hove has been going twenty-five years and is the one to know for gluten-free. Lucky Beach Café on the Hove seafront sources sustainably and sells its fish and chips faster than anything else on the menu, eaten on the shingle. Captain's, on the front by the Palace Pier, has been there since 1990.
Kemptown, east of the centre around St James's Street, is worth a stay in its own right. Grand Regency townhouses of the Kemp Town Estate, seafront squares and gardens, the heart of Brighton's LGBTQ+ scene, and a compact grid of delis, second-hand bookshops, vintage and cafés a few steps from the beach. West of everything is Hove, the quieter and statelier half — the other name in Brighton & Hove — with wide lawns, beach huts, Regency squares and a calmer seafront. Rockwater and Lucky Beach are the Hove-front places to eat.
The beach is pebble and shingle the whole way, with a thin strip of sand that shows itself at low tide and then thinks better of it. Bars, arcades, galleries and artists' studios fill the arches under the promenade, and the front between the two piers is where most of the day happens. At the eastern end, about a mile past the pier towards the Marina, is the Brighton Naturist Beach, which opened on 1 April 1980 as the first public naturist beach in the UK — a date that reads like a joke and isn't.
The Palace Pier, opened in 1899, is the survivor of Brighton's three piers, and it is the archetype: arcades, funfair rides, food stalls, the lot. Its counterpart along the front is the West Pier, or what the sea has left of it. Designed by Eugenius Birch and opened in 1866, it peaked in 1919, closed in 1975, then burned twice in 2003 — the pavilion in March, the concert hall in May, both widely believed to be arson — before a storm collapsed its centre in 2004 and English Heritage declared it beyond repair. Its skeleton still stands in the water, black against the sky, and is now photographed more than it ever was when it worked.
Between the piers is the Royal Pavilion, which is the thing people picture when they picture Brighton. It began in 1787 as a modest neoclassical villa for George, Prince of Wales, who had first come to Brighton in 1783 aged twenty-one, sent by his doctors to take the sea air. Between 1815 and 1822 John Nash turned it into an Indo-Saracenic fantasy of bulbous domes, minarets and cusped arches, with interiors that mix Chinese and Indian styles without deciding between them. The Banqueting Room has a forty-five-foot dome painted as a tropical sky with a giant plantain tree, from which a silvered dragon holds a one-tonne, thirty-foot chandelier that cost, on its own, over five thousand six hundred pounds. The Music Room held the largest English-made organ of its day. Queen Victoria found the whole thing not to her taste, preferred Osborne House, and sold the Pavilion to the town of Brighton for fifty-three thousand pounds in 1850, which is one of the better property decisions the town has made.
The other landmarks reward a wander. Volk's Electric Railway runs along the seafront from the pier towards Black Rock and the Marina; Magnus Volk opened its first section in August 1883, making it the oldest operating electric railway in the world. SEA LIFE Brighton opened in 1872 as the Brighton Aquarium and is the oldest continuously operating aquarium anywhere, its High Victorian Gothic vaulting still intact behind a 1920s front, with around 5,500 creatures and two turtles called Lulu and Gulliver. The Booth Museum of Natural History, free to enter, holds half a million specimens, chiefly Edward Booth's Victorian taxidermy of British birds posed in recreated habitats, plus a killer-whale skeleton and a dinosaur bone. And at Preston Circus, the Duke of York's Picturehouse opened in 1910 as the oldest purpose-built cinema still in use in the UK, built for three thousand pounds by the actress-manager Violet Melnotte-Wyatt, with a pair of giant can-can legs on the roof.
For green space, Preston Park is the largest, about sixty-seven acres of playing fields, tennis courts, bowling greens, a rose garden, a pond, two cafés and a garden for the blind. It also has some of the world's oldest elm trees and the endangered White-letter Hairstreak butterfly. The Level, between the centre and Preston Park, has a big skate park, water-play fountains and a play area, and works well with children who need running-around before dinner.
Some of the history is best told straight. The town was made by a doctor. Richard Russell prescribed sea-bathing, and sea-water drinking, as a cure for glandular disease, moved his practice to Brighton around 1753, built the largest house in town on the Old Steine, and is credited with turning a fishing village into a fashionable resort — which is why the place was once nicknamed Doctor Brighton. Royal patronage did the rest. The reputation that followed was never entirely respectable: razor gangs, dirty weekends, the Mods and Rockers who fought along this seafront in 1964, and the 250,000 people who turned up to Fatboy Slim's free Big Beach Boutique II in July 2002 — four times the expected crowd, 160 tonnes of rubbish, a clean-up bill over £300,000, and no free beach concert permitted since. Keith Waterhouse summed the whole city up better than anyone has managed to top: "Brighton is a town that always looks as if it is helping the police with their inquiries."
Getting here is easy, which is half of why it fills up every weekend. Brighton station runs about seventy-five trains a day, reaching London Victoria in a little over an hour, with fast coastal links to Lewes, Eastbourne, Hastings and Chichester, and Gatwick Airport around thirty minutes off. The A23 and M23 come down from London, the A27 runs the coast east and west. The centre is small enough to walk, and the seafront is best done on foot or from the wooden bench of Volk's little railway, rattling along at a pace that has not changed in a hundred and forty years.
Somewhere on the beach, most afternoons, someone is eating chips out of paper while the West Pier stands in the water doing nothing at all, and both of them look entirely at home.