Brighton to Shoreham

Beach resort to industrial decline

This series of photographs was taken along a stretch of my local beach, going west from the centre of Brighton to the suburb of Southwick – a walk of 3 miles or so. The character changes markedly as you pass from the tourist beach between the city's two piers to its declining industrial area, near the port of Shoreham.

Brighton is seen as a busy, cosmopolitan seaside resort; and it is – the council has spent a lot of money sprucing up the seafront adjacent to the city's centre. But this changes as you leave the garish Palace Pier with its candy floss and arcades and approach the burnt skeleton of the West Pier. From there, as you walk along the beach towards Hove, you start to notice signs of neglect: paint peeling from once-elegant Victorian buildings, the crumbling concrete of an empty 1970s paddling pool. About 2 miles west of the Palace Pier, you leave Hove and enter Portslade. Here, industry starts to intrude – the metal hoppers of a gravel merchant appear from around a bend, and Southwick Power Station and the port of Shoreham can be seen in the distance, but these are exceptions, as the shoreline is mostly empty, littered with bricks, rusting metal and other debris from demolished buildings and sea-battered jetties; the remnants of wooden groynes pierce the shingle like rotten teeth. This stretch of beach is a monument to the decline of British industry. There are no tourists here – only seabirds and the occasional fisherman.