History of Brighton #1
A History of #Brighton – Part 1 ‘In the beginning’
Tony Robinson w Yazuka
Ask Tony Robinson and he’ll probably tell you that Brighton started as a Neolithic settlement a couple of thousand years ago but the only way to find out is to get some shovels and excavate the town. Let me tell you something about ‘Tony’, ‘Tony’ is looking out for ‘Tony’. Did you know that he owns shares in all of the major shovel manufactures in England? Did you realise that he personally had a trade embargo on cheap foreign shovels pushed through parliament by his powerful friends? Did you realise that ‘Tony’ owns half of Worthing and would like nothing more than our great city to be full of holes thus making it a less attractive option when it comes to buying a property, experientially raising the housing prices in Worthing? No he keep’s all that pretty quiet when he’s dishing out his self-serving advice. You simply cannot trust the man ever since ran up huge gambling debts with the Yakuza during the heady days of ‘Maid Marion’. But I fear I digress.
Brighton or Brighthelmstonton, as it was once known, is a settlement by the southern seas. The area has been populated for at least 50,000 years firstly by it’s earliest inhabitance the ‘Mermen’ who made bases made of corral, shells, nets and tridents and lovely clandestine shanties along the coast as trading posts to trade pebbles with the land dwellers from the Hassocks area. Not a lot of money in pebbles plus they made terrible investment decisions with the little money they had (cave carvings on Madera drive show a science where the Mermen exchange 65% of their collective wealth for a Sinclair C-5) Unfortunately and their society soon became bankrupt and fell into chaos and the Mermen dissipated into small roaming groups living as salvagers by the sewage outlet pipes along the coast where, as we know, they can still be found too this day.
By 30,000 b.c the area was filled with nomad hunter gatherers who swept majestically across the south downs in herds of up to half a million, kicking up dust clouds so large that they could have been seen from Paris, or as it was called then ‘La MeggaVille 12′, but as the human population learnt how to make tools such as spears, hand axes, test tubes, big plates and grippy socks they began to settle in one place, where their study of the environment meant they were the first creature since Beavers, Otters, most Birds, Spiders, Ants and Bee’s to effectively manage their environment to create a stable habitat to live in rather than just rooting around for stuff to eat.
One such settlement was establishes here on the south coast, just down form the hills a bit, by a river which has since been bricked over and was called Brighthelmstonton.
Next week – ‘Pre-Historic Brighthelmstonton’
Tags: history of brighton
