3-12 Charles Street, Brighton – Charles Knight

Dr. Richard Russell of Lewes(1), who had written a book, in 1754, on the tonic and remedial properties of sea-water, sent so many patients to Brighton that he ended by following them up and moving there. The town began to grow, but at no sensational rate. In 1772, all the area east of the Steine,(2) where Charles Street runs down to the sea front, was still green and empty downland. The history of what we now think of as Brighton began exactly ten years later when ‘in the year 1782 his late Majesty George IV, then Prince of Wales, and twenty years of age, paid a visit to his illustrious uncle the Duke of Cumberland.(3) The visit was repeated in the following year, when so much attached became the young prince to the rising town, to its thymy downs and clear sea, that he signified his intention of making it the place of his summer residence. This determination of His Royal Highness decided the fate of Brighton.’(4)

Though Horsfield is too discreet to say so, there was, as well as those aromatic herbs, Mrs. Fitzherbert.(5) Her house was destined to become the local headquarters of the Young Men’s Christian Association, and from the first it seems to have resounded to the cries of virile and high-spirited youth. Young Mr. Barrymore(6) took a pair of horses up her staircase, and had to summon blacksmiths to get them down again. Outside on the Steine, now a busy roundabout, Prinny(7) stalked the groves made loud by the mallets of his builders, aimed his single-ball firearm at the flustered doves, and ‘lowered the tops of several of the chimneys of the Hon. Windham’s house’.(8)

As a minor contributor to these tremendous doings, Charles Street arose in the last years of the century. ‘These mansions have bow-windows in front, bulging out with gentle prominences, and ornamented with neat verandahs’ – the description (from The Newcomes)(9) of a neighbouring street fitted, like a glove, every street for miles. The continued employment, at one point, of cobble-fronting, is worth noting. We can see, from Mr. Knight’s drawing, how Charles Street must once have appeared. But again (as at Portland Street), had he faced the other way, he would have been compelled to give us a preview of what, already and far from beautifully, it is becoming.

Recording Britain, Vol 4, Sussex, p 170-171.

Image: Charles Knight.

Text: Arnold Nottage Palmer

1. Richard Russell (1687-1759) was a British physician who began his medical practice in Lewes in 1725, but later moved to Brighton to be nearer the very seawater he so vociferously championed. His major work, A Dissertation on the Use of Sea Water in the Diseases of the Glands. Particularly The Scurvy, Jaundice, King's-Evil, Leprosy, and the Glandular Consumption, ran to six editions by 1769.

2. The Old Steine is a major thoroughfare that runs through the centre of Brighton. Russell had a house built at its southern tip, near the sea, in 1759.

3. Prince Henry, Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn (1745-1790), a younger brother of George III, who stayed in Russell’s house following his death, and was instrumental in the development of Brighton as a popular resort.

4. The quotation is from Thomas Walker Horsfield’s The History and Antiquities and Topography of the County of Sussex (1835).

5. Maria Anne Fitzherbert (1756-1837) was an 18th-century socialite and lover of the Prince Regent (later King George IV). She was a long-time resident of Brighton, also living on the Old Steine at Steine House, which was taken over by the YMCA in 1884.

6 Richard Barry, 7th Earl of Barrymore (1769-1793), was a noted 18th-century nobleman, rake, gambler, and all-round party animal.

7. A contemporaneous nickname for the Prince Regent.

8. The quotation here is almost certainly taken from E. V. Lucas’s Highways And Byways in Sussex (1904). In full it reads: "On Monday, June 27, [1785] His Royal Highness amused himself on the Steyne for some time in attempting to shoot doves with single balls; but with what result we have not heard, though the Prince is esteemed a most excellent shot, and seldom presents his piece without doing some execution. The Prince, in the course of his diversion, either by design or accident, lowered the tops of several of the chimneys of the Hon. Mr. Windham's house."

9. An 1854/55 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, partly set in Brighton. The full quote is from chapter 9 and reads: “In Steyne Gardens, Brighton, the lodging-houses are among the most frequented in that city of lodging-houses. These mansions have bow-windows in front, bulging out with gentle prominences, and ornamented with neat verandahs, from which you can behold the tide of humankind as it flows up and down the Steyne, and that blue ocean over which Britannia is said to rule, stretching brightly away eastward and westward.”