Early Cafe Culture to Sailing Marina

Storming a teacup

The pre-historic settlers of Brighton were of various origins, even in it’s infancy it was a mixing pot of life styles, cultures and fashionistas. Digs at early settlements have shown that as early as 15,000 b.c. there were a string of café bars along the coast serving a bland Colombian coffee blend, but im sure the inhabitancies new that the Kenyan roast was only around the corner. The majority of the peoples of this new town came from 5 main areas.
There were the Saxons, who moved to the area when they found out that Peter “Biff” Byford had bought a beach kibbutz in the area, they were a distinctive peoples, with long hair, low brows and distinctive leather clad dress shirts. They tended to stick to their own, and settles around what is now London Road, but used to be a seasonal river. Finding found in this area show that they lived on a diet of obsidian skulls and judging by their grotesquely disintegrated necks and the surprisingly high amount of fatalities due to massive burns to the top of the skull, spent their leisure time rocking out in thunder storms.
The second group were the Angles, who had moved from the Rhineland’s as they thought it was all the lines were too flowing and faced persecution from the Romantics, the Orange order and Mr Tickle. They landed in Brighthelmstonton c. 20,000 b.c and lived in square mazes that were built with boring old Prussian precision. They lived off the land, growing square watermelons long before the Japanese, harvesting waffles, toblarones and walnut whips (though they would only eat walnut whips in times of starvation as the base was circular). They were generally happy enough apparently.
The 3rd group were people who were cruising about the med in boats and got caught in a storm, these were the Marinas. They needed somewhere to shelter their boats and happened across the natural harbour to the east of Brighton, which is now the marina (names after them). Where the marina is now, their was a natural coral bay, which the concrete walls have been built on top of. It you want to imagine it, think of the cliff as a stomach and the ‘arms’ (or walls) of the marina looking like someone doing a mime of how over weight someone they have met or seen is to a friend. The Marina people were from all over Europe and brought many strange and exotic items to trade with the locals such as beads, spices, oil, tiles, horse meat and Speedos. Some of them left when the storm cleared up but some stayed and these people opened up Brighthelmstonton to trade with the rest of Europe for the first time
The 4th group were the Celts, who had travelled far and wide. They liked to booze it up right nice a lot of the time, though their system of laws was far superior to our own in many ways. They used shells as currency, the down side to which was that after heavy storms loads of shells would wash up on the beach and the value of the currency would crash through the floor, meaning that they had either hyper inflation or massive depressions. The bones of many skeletons of Celtic merchants can still be found at the bottom of the cliffs to the east of Brighton and make an excellent substitute for chalk.
And the 5th group was a man called Geoff, who moved down with his family, he remembered having a nice time in Brighthelmstonton once when he was younger and used his redundancy money to build the beginnings of what developed into Hollingbury Hill fort (but more of that later).
These groups got along in general, they traded, they interbred, they laughed together, though there was inevitable skirmish’s, however the 5 settlements were still fairly separate and the area could not really be considered a single settlement as yet, though the town was finally taking root.

Next week: ‘The age of metal’ Brighthelmston goes Bronze

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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’