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Breakfast in Brighton: Adventures on the Edge of Britain
Inspired by Brighton as a state of mind as much as a place, Nigel Richardson returns after a gap of 20 years to capture its spirit. The narrative is woven from strands of memoir, travelogue, reportage, and fiction, and touches on actors and fantasists, drunkards, writers, chancers, and maniacs who haunt its sloping streets.
- GenresNonfictionTravel
221 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
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About the author
Nigel Richardson
41 books5 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 19, 2018
An engaging, meandering trove of triv
On a slow news day in August 2013, and according to a dubious poll by a travel website called Real Holiday Reports, Brighton and Hove was voted Britain's worst holiday resort. Some tourists accusing the city of being "too trendy" and too "full of bohemians and bad art". Yes, exactly. As Nigel Richardson explains with wit, charm and eloquence, it's all part of the myriad, enduring appeal of the city. Always the same, always different.
I adored this book. That said, it ticks all my boxes. History, and plenty of it: local, personal, social, and cultural. And it's mainly focussed on Brighton and Hove, one of my favourite places in the world, and a place I know very well indeed having lived here on and off since the early 1980s.
Nigel Richardson returned to Brighton and Hove after a gap of 20 years and attempted to capture the spirit of the place. He succeeded - and how. Lodging with a theatrical landlady he takes us through the city's mythology, landmarks, pubs, art, communities, murders, literature, diversity, architecture, and history, whilst also introducing us to some of his friends and other local characters. As a reasonably well informed resident, I found this book to be an engaging, meandering trove of triv. I felt sad as I reached the last few pages, wanting the book to last longer.
Nigel Richardson has also written another book about Soho - 'Dog Days in Soho: One Man's Adventures in 1950s Bohemia'. Soho is another part of England for which I hold a long and enduring fascination. I cannot wait to read it.
5/5
On a slow news day in August 2013, and according to a dubious poll by a travel website called Real Holiday Reports, Brighton and Hove was voted Britain's worst holiday resort. Some tourists accusing the city of being "too trendy" and too "full of bohemians and bad art". Yes, exactly. As Nigel Richardson explains with wit, charm and eloquence, it's all part of the myriad, enduring appeal of the city. Always the same, always different.
I adored this book. That said, it ticks all my boxes. History, and plenty of it: local, personal, social, and cultural. And it's mainly focussed on Brighton and Hove, one of my favourite places in the world, and a place I know very well indeed having lived here on and off since the early 1980s.
Nigel Richardson returned to Brighton and Hove after a gap of 20 years and attempted to capture the spirit of the place. He succeeded - and how. Lodging with a theatrical landlady he takes us through the city's mythology, landmarks, pubs, art, communities, murders, literature, diversity, architecture, and history, whilst also introducing us to some of his friends and other local characters. As a reasonably well informed resident, I found this book to be an engaging, meandering trove of triv. I felt sad as I reached the last few pages, wanting the book to last longer.
Nigel Richardson has also written another book about Soho - 'Dog Days in Soho: One Man's Adventures in 1950s Bohemia'. Soho is another part of England for which I hold a long and enduring fascination. I cannot wait to read it.
5/5
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January 15, 2025This was a surprise and astute gift from a friend who knows my desire to get under the skin of my new home city, Brighton, and it doesn’t disappoint. Much of the book is taken up with the author’s curiosity about the Edward Le Bas painting that gives the book its title, and a fruitless search with the author’s friend Roger for the authenticity (or otherwise) of another painting, said to be a likeness of Shakespeare. However, there’s plenty of time for Richardson to characterise Brighton’s unique persona: a surreal mix of unselfconscious eccentricity, faded gentility, the seedy and the downright scary: a place where legendary drunks, dandies and luvvies rub shoulders with the local mafia and fresh-faced rent boys, and everyone despises the ‘DFLs’.
Richardson namechecks the roads, buildings and hideouts that make up Brighton’s ragged, congested streets, usually combining that with a lengthy shaggy dog story that can vary from his (several) visits to psychics and mediums to the discovery of a secret tunnel leading to posh private girls’ school Rodean. Whether he's in Preston Park visiting Shakespearian sceptic Francis Carr, laying bets at Kemp Town’s down-at-heel racetrack that features in Brighton Rock, poking around in nearby Lewes (‘a desiccated old bird with some racy stuff in the cupboard’) or in Rodmell (‘a dirt-rich hamlet occupied by TV presenters and international show jumpers’), Richardson’s amusing and at times fanciful meditations on Brighton and its people are pure pleasure.
Occasionally, a sour note is struck. The book was written in 1998, so we can’t give Richardson much leeway on the racial, homophobic and misogynistic slurs that crop up and that I won’t dignify with examples. These might be a misguided attempt to capture Brighton’s air of a saucy postcard, but somehow I don’t think so: they come across as a bit too felt and personal for that. It's sad, because it belies one of Brighton's most attractive and unsung characteristics of warm tolerance and acceptance: you can be whoever you want to be here.
That false note (and the absence of Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club, which surely deserved a mention) apart, I relished this. In the final quarter, Richardson comes into his own, starting with a hallucination he experiences at the Bloomsbury Group’s home studio, Charleston, where Edward Le Bas had posed on a crucifix for Duncan Bell to paint him as Christ, followed by an utterly crazy story about Derry Mainwaring-Knight, the ‘Sussex Satanist’, who swindled his local rector, the Bishop of Lewes and several other dignitaries out of thousands of pounds by convincing them that he had been inducted into Satanism at the age of eight by his grandmother and needed the money to purge himself of its evil influence through ‘the purchase of regalia (including Satan’s throne) in an office suite off Pall Mall and the trappings of a temple in an old air-raid shelter in Essex.’ The story is related in the Grosvenor pub to an increasingly inebriated Richardson by Brian Behan, younger brother of the more famous Brendan, who concludes that Mainwaring-Knight had been punished ‘for exposing the sheer fucking stupidity of the upper-class, church-going English’, that England’s insanity was evident to everyone except the English themselves, and finally that only in Brighton can you see ‘England with its madness hanging out.’ Amen to that.
Richardson namechecks the roads, buildings and hideouts that make up Brighton’s ragged, congested streets, usually combining that with a lengthy shaggy dog story that can vary from his (several) visits to psychics and mediums to the discovery of a secret tunnel leading to posh private girls’ school Rodean. Whether he's in Preston Park visiting Shakespearian sceptic Francis Carr, laying bets at Kemp Town’s down-at-heel racetrack that features in Brighton Rock, poking around in nearby Lewes (‘a desiccated old bird with some racy stuff in the cupboard’) or in Rodmell (‘a dirt-rich hamlet occupied by TV presenters and international show jumpers’), Richardson’s amusing and at times fanciful meditations on Brighton and its people are pure pleasure.
Occasionally, a sour note is struck. The book was written in 1998, so we can’t give Richardson much leeway on the racial, homophobic and misogynistic slurs that crop up and that I won’t dignify with examples. These might be a misguided attempt to capture Brighton’s air of a saucy postcard, but somehow I don’t think so: they come across as a bit too felt and personal for that. It's sad, because it belies one of Brighton's most attractive and unsung characteristics of warm tolerance and acceptance: you can be whoever you want to be here.
That false note (and the absence of Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club, which surely deserved a mention) apart, I relished this. In the final quarter, Richardson comes into his own, starting with a hallucination he experiences at the Bloomsbury Group’s home studio, Charleston, where Edward Le Bas had posed on a crucifix for Duncan Bell to paint him as Christ, followed by an utterly crazy story about Derry Mainwaring-Knight, the ‘Sussex Satanist’, who swindled his local rector, the Bishop of Lewes and several other dignitaries out of thousands of pounds by convincing them that he had been inducted into Satanism at the age of eight by his grandmother and needed the money to purge himself of its evil influence through ‘the purchase of regalia (including Satan’s throne) in an office suite off Pall Mall and the trappings of a temple in an old air-raid shelter in Essex.’ The story is related in the Grosvenor pub to an increasingly inebriated Richardson by Brian Behan, younger brother of the more famous Brendan, who concludes that Mainwaring-Knight had been punished ‘for exposing the sheer fucking stupidity of the upper-class, church-going English’, that England’s insanity was evident to everyone except the English themselves, and finally that only in Brighton can you see ‘England with its madness hanging out.’ Amen to that.
February 5, 2025
I liked this but then I grew up in and around Brighton which makes you appreciate it more.
January 16, 2020
Delightful!
January 5, 2021
take a shot every time Richardson mentions Brighton Rock
May 19, 2014
Beautiful, just beautiful. It is a travel book and than again it is not. Nigel Richardson just takes you to Brighton, but you've met and seen the world once finished. What a gifted writer & journalist.
January 8, 2009
I'm afraid this book is for a different kind of Anglophile than I - one with a very specific interest in (knowledge of) Britain in the mid 20th century.
June 17, 2013
I loved this book. Maybe it was because of the mention of so many familiar places or the clever wit and occasional pathos that engaged me, but I would recommend this as an enjoyable read.
February 17, 2014
A very different kind of book, with a fun perspective of the British people.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews