It's the Palace Pier: Local Secrets, Honest Stories & the Real Brighton
It is the Palace Pier. Pat has never once called it anything else and she took the money at the gate.
I was born in Whitehawk in 1982 and left it at nineteen for a warehouse job in Reading. I came back in September 2023 because my mum had a fall and someone had to be in the house. Twenty two years is long enough for a city to stop waiting for you. The West Pier I left was a building. The one I came back to is a frame. Churchill Square had changed hands twice. There was a tower on the seafront I had never stood under and a bill for it I had never voted on. So I am from here and I am also not, and I say that first because the groups will say it for me if I don't.
Pat is eighty one. She lives two doors down from my mum, always has. She did the deckchairs on the beach as a girl for the concession, then decades in the Palace Pier ticket booth, and she was on the gate in 1984 when they stopped taking twenty pence to walk on. She does not repeat herself, so I started writing her down. This book is what she said, checked against what the council, the Argus and Brighton and Hove News say happened, and where the two disagree I tell you which one to believe. It is not a tourist guide. It is the seafront as someone who worked it sees it, written by someone who had to come back and learn it again.
What's in it
The pier by its name, and the pound at the gate. Why it is the Palace Pier and not Brighton Pier whatever the sign said between 2000 and 2016. The one pound admission from March to October, who it applies to (anyone over two), and how a BN postcode gets you the Local Resident Card that waves you and three guests through for nothing. What the toll was in 1984 (twenty pence), why it stopped, and what Pat thinks of a pier that has been up for sale since the second of January with no buyer named by September.
Madeira Terrace, counted. One hundred and fifty one arches along Madeira Drive, twenty seven in the first phase, fifteen standing again and six with the walkway concrete poured as of late September 2026. The cream tarmac that is going on top, the lift that is taking shape, the contractor who will not give a date because dates are "the kiss of death", and the council's own line that it opens early next year. Where to stand on the pavement to see the new ironwork against the old, and why there is no money to paint the benches east of the pier before it opens.
The starlings, and the people who get the month wrong. They come in November and go by the end of February or into March, not October, and they roost in the Palace Pier substructure, which is why the pier is the closest you get. Where Pat stands (not on the pier), what time to be there against the sunset that day, which end of the West Pier frame they favour, and what to do with the forty minutes before they turn up.
The Wheel is coming back. The i360 bill is not going anywhere. The cabinet backed a twenty five year lease on the Dalton's Bastion site just east of the Palace Pier on the seventeenth of September, to a new company expected to be the people behind the Zip. The original Wheel ran from 2011 to 2016 and came down to make room for the i360. The i360 went into administration in December 2024, sold for one hundred and fifty thousand pounds, reopened in March 2025 under new owners, and the council wrote off fifty one million with about thirty two million still owed to government over sixteen years. I explain how those numbers happened, in plain terms, and what a ticket costs now against what Pat says it should.
Chips, and the Hove argument. Where Pat buys hers and why it is not on the seafront ("the queue is all people filming it"). The century old fried fish shop on Baker Street off London Road that your nan went to. What a portion costs on the pier against what it costs two streets back from Hove Lawns. The rule about eating them below the prom in a west wind, and the gulls, which are not a joke, they will take it out of your hand.
The seafront road, the arches under it, and the cycle lane. Thirty eight arches under King's Road are getting forty one million pounds of repair, phases six and seven this year from the Shelter Hall to the volleyball court and in front of the King's Road playground, so expect lane closures. The seven million pound two way cycle lane from Hove to Portslade starts this autumn now the schools are back, with the Tandridge Road bus stop kept where it is. Which side to walk, which crossings actually work, and what the Western Road red route, Montpelier Road to Holland Road with camera enforcement, means if you drive in to Hove for anything.
Whitehawk, from the inside. What the estate is, what it is not, and why September's drinks licence hearing for the Valley Social Club on Whitehawk Way (six objections, none from the police) tells you more about the place than any crime map. The bus that gets you from the seafront to my mum's door, the walk over the top to the Racecourse and down to the Marina, and the Enclosed Ground, which is the best afternoon of non league football on the south coast and nobody outside knows.
The Albion, in the season they beat the champions. Three nil against Arsenal at home on the nineteenth of September, the one hundred and twenty fifth anniversary match, Gross, Kostoulas and Andres, three days after winning three two at Old Trafford in the League Cup. How the train from Brighton station to Falmer works on a match day, when to leave, where you will not get a drink, and what the Goldstone was to people like Pat who never wanted to leave it.
What's gone, and what it costs to stay. The floral clock in Palmeira Square is beyond repair and the council is asking until the eleventh of October what to put there instead. Uniqlo is taking the old H&M unit at Churchill Square on the Western Road side for next year. The average house here was four hundred and nine thousand pounds in July, the average private rent one thousand eight hundred and eight a month in August, both down a touch on last year, which is the first time in my life I have written that sentence. Who is leaving, who is arriving, and what DFL means when Pat says it.
How it works
It is an ebook of around seventy pages. You pay once, you get a download link straight away, and you read it on your phone standing on Madeira Drive if you want. When something changes, and in Brighton it changes every cabinet meeting, I update the book and you get the new version for nothing, for as long as it exists. No subscription and no account.
Who this is for
People who were born here and went away, and are not sure the place is theirs any more. People who moved down and want the city rather than the brochure. People who left for the money and still read the Argus on their phone at lunch. Anyone who has ever said Brighton Pier in front of someone like Pat and wants to know what they did wrong.
It is not for anyone wanting a top ten. There is no top ten. There is a woman who took twenty pence off half this city at a turnstile and remembers most of them.
Download it now, free updates for life
Pat, when I read her the chapter about the gate: "You've put I was on the pier forty years. I was on the beach first. Put that in or don't put me in."
Instant download. Any device. Written under the pen name Jason Boardman.