Come to Brighton, it’s ‘great’!
When I meet new people, and the question ‘where are you from?’ crops up – most people say, ‘Oh, you’re from Brighton? That’s a cool place’. My common response to this is usually a slightly disgusted smirk or some quip that yeah, it’s better than Bognor but it ain’t THAT great.
Brighton used to be really shit. Yeah, you had the beach – in summer it didn’t matter when you saw fucking condoms and human shit floating about in the sea because you had pebbles, and a pier! Yeefuckinghaw!
In recent times, it seems that Brighton has become an epicenter for outrageous pretension, you can literally smell the amount of art students fingering their vegan slop that cost £15 and the ‘organic food’ only mothers force feeding their bratty kids innocent smoothies and Manuka honey biscuits they probably bought from some expensive twattish café.
I’m going to give you my thoughts on some of the things I hate most about Brighton (which is pretty difficult when you have a word limit.)
The Palace Pier
To me, this is an emblem of the depressing shit that Brighton has come to represent. The entrance welcomes you with the potent smell of exchange students, drug addicts and rotting burgers served by some poor immigrant who day in, day out has to make slop for the horrid foreign kids with their neon rucksacks. There is a distinct air of misery on the Pier. Hardly anything is ever open, even in summer. The poor fucks that actually have the misfortune to work here must have the daily reminder that their life is shit.
Don’t bother going into the Arcades. If you were to go all CSI shit in there, I’m pretty sure that you would find buckets of semen, piss, blood and whatever else. I’ve seen people fucking on those driving game-seats so you can only imagine what horrors the machine guns have seen. The prizes you can win are laughable. They are so awful and all fake. So, unless you want to waste money or win a ‘cuddly’ toy that is probably a fire risk, don’t bother.
The rides are an option for you, should you wish to be gawped at by the grim staff who have nothing else to do with their day apart from press buttons and stare at you as you try to ignore the fact you & your friend are the only people on the Dodgems, or even on the pier. I’ve never liked or enjoyed the ‘ride’ section of the Pier. It’s not just the safety aspect (growing up, there have been innumerable rumors of people falling off rides into the sea etc etc) it’s just that there is no sense of fun or anything. I wish Brighton had that strip like the one in Lost Boys. So avoid the pier, it’s a waste of time and you’ll probably need to get pissed afterwards to wash the disappointment and sadness away.
The North Laine & The Lanes
The North Laine is basically a set of parallel streets containing a vast array of bullshit shops and cafes with the odd crap hairdresser thrown in. It hasn’t changed much since I was young; although now I always think I can smell regurgitated Innocent Smoothies, probably because I always see these three-wheeled-pram using mothers force feeding their bratty (and weird named) kids organic slop instead of Mr. Juicy which was good enough for me as wee’un. There are those shops where you can get dildos, vibrators, and gimp masks right next to some bland beige boutique where someone like Judi Dench would perhaps shop. There are a few cafes selling overpriced lentil shit or ‘meat-imitation pasties’. There are one or two good pubs, but it’s normally hit and miss with the people inside. I’ve seen far too many middle-aged, seemingly alcoholic Mods for one lifetime. There is nothing really to buy. Even the places that were once good, e.g. Snoopers Paradise (an emporium selling everything old and strange) has now become infected with pretentiousness and is ridiculously overpriced).
The Lanes consists of an amazing amount of rank jewelers and the only decent record shop in the whole bloody city. Just don’t bother.
Clubs
There is not one good club or even club night in Brighton (Smack That nights apart). Seriously. The biggest ones are on the seafront and you can normally find any STD you want in these places. The music is normally so mainstream and dire, the people so vacuous and dressed head-to-toe in River Island, afterwards you would probably want to wade into the sea with rocks stuffed into your pockets and die, just to avoid the same experience. The stench of semen dribbling out saggy vaginas from the night before is always too much for me to bear. Even the people that are relatively ok, are not, if they venture into these shitholes. Away from the seafront, there is no real night that is worth going to. Most of the people that go to the club nights that are tolerable, are pretty uninteresting. I’m pretty sure almost all of them are illustration/graphic/photography students because they are all fucking boring. I have no idea where the interesting people of Brighton hang out. In all the good pubs, they are never to be found. To be honest, all the good people have probably returned to London.
Students
The ‘human rats’ proliferate the streets like rubbish. I have no idea how many there are, but it must be a lot. Too many than is normal. Everything in Brighton seems to be controlled by the student population in some way. They are everywhere…they are the ones who do all the shit nights, the ones who are in every pub and cafe (no matter where you are in the city) and the ones who have exhausted all supplies of K. If I have to talk to, or just encounter another curly quiffed, quilted jacket, deck shoe wearing prick with a bow tie again, I’m going to sew up my vagina and remove my womb so that in the event of an apocalypse, I do not have to procreate with one.
Probably best to stay where you are.
Words: Nina Lily Gill
Photos: Sam Hiscox and Google
What colour is a mirror? Is it the colour of whatever it is reflecting? Is it clear/invisible? No. The correct answer is silver. Silver seems to be the new black at the moment. Starting the new decade in the most futuristic way possible, the youth in the south-east are covering themselves from top to toe in shiny, metalic, reflecting silver. As you can see in the image below, model Worcester Aprons is sporting an all in one silver jumpsuit, a mask in post Renaissance style and sneakers to match. In six months time we’ll all be dressing like Mr. Aprons. Related Posts:Beachdown Cancelled SHOCKER!New Metronomy EPTHE TEE(N) WOLF PHENOMENONEat Your Art OutPassport LutworthPowered by Contextual Related Posts
Ha, Rory and Andy as students.. lolz
This is the best thing I have ever read
Word up! Look at the complete wanker in the last picture with the fucking mong glasses on. He also makes me want to do hideous things to my reproductive region.
see I’d remove the north laine hate and replace it with the new age hippy/smelly dreadlocks/ anti anything cowley club locals and their kind
no one cares about whatever it is that’s on the agenda that week as they won’t change anything, eating shit food seems to make for arguments with holes in
ERMMMMMMMM
fair play for tiny aspects of what your saying, but to cut a long story short brighton is still one of the best places to live in england… the summers fucking sick and you have clearly never been Burnley.
cheer up you GOF. X
if this isn’t a poorly crafted joke then its a total fucking piece of shit
you want to come of sounding like Vice, but you really come off sounding like the Daily Mail
I bet you read the Daily Male. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA……
There’s a poorly crafted joke for you
So true, so true… yet when your only other previous experience of ‘urban’ is the likes of Leighton Buzzard or Slough, Brighton is quite a discovery. It’s a treasure trove of jewel-like, twinkly tolerant independence: just-breaking-even-retailers; make-it-up-as-they-go-along-club-promoters; restauranteurs; freelance designers; amateur artists; pub poets… all squeezed together between the South Downs and the English Channel.
But, as the author suggests — and, assuming we can make observations without being heckled by the ‘you’re either with us or against us’ nouveau PC fascist brigade — life is a bit disappointing sometimes. The jewelled and twinkly Brighton has always been contaminated by a grubby underbelly. All fur coat and no knickers (my mum would say), and it’s the same today.
Saying so doesn’t need to warrant a ‘fuck off if you don’t like it then’ attitude, does it? Observing that changes are occurring and commenting on them is ‘normal’, isn’t it?
Questioning the results of our council’s so-called Regeneration Policy to attract tourists and shoppers is reasonable, especially when shopping isn’t top of your To Do List; noting that multi-national chains descending on us and raising rents in the North Laine, (to reassure NeuLabor Consumers that they can guzzle their bucket-o-coffee in familiar, yet bland surroundings) and being disappointed in that, is worth a grumble. Feeling marginalised and witnessing the changes doesn’t mean we woke up and found we’d become Daily Mail Bigot’s overnight, does it?
In very recent years Brighton’s attracted a huge rise in New-Comers, (really it has), student population has trebled, Islington-Media-types have bought up swathes of the Town Centre and the demographic has changed. It’s all very well basing yourself here because you love the independent, bohemian, tolerant mis-match of All-Sorts rubbing up alongside each other, but if the New-Comers then choose to place themselves in Starbucks and Waggamama, then the little independent caff or shop next door will go out of business. If The New-Comers buy up the North Laine then the rag-bag of ex-students and low-rent Brightonians (and let’s face it – that’s us), move to the Back of Beyond The Level.
And so, when we nip through town navigating the herds of Yummy Mummies and their 4×4 Buggies; The New Student Brigade (packed in to Grand Parade like grateful sardines) and the Nouveau Consumer in their Identikit Costumes, murmuring their judgemental and humourless, picky, spiteful and all-too-earnest PC schpeak, what’s wrong with going: this is bit shit, innit?
We’re a little bit tired of the homogenised, bland, non-place our town (City) has become. We’re not wowed by Churchill Square, we’re not inspired by the globally indistinct stores and coffee shops and we’re not fussed about the city centre clubs and theme bars run by Corporate Business who dictate to us who’s allowed in.
What we like is something a bit different, a touch fancy, or just something plain honest — and we know that Brighton is capable of offering much more than what appears on the corporate surface. oh, and Bitchin’ about stuff is our entertainment.
This is awful, truly. This whole site is utterly banal.
ta
I couldn’t agree with you more, those pretentious art students are sheepish, insecure and have a huge sense of entitlement just cos they live in a small town so they can look like ‘the bomb’.
I especially hate the ones that make websites publishing articles about how shit their town is when they are actually the biggest hipsters in it. Yeah, photographers, fucking lame. Who took those pictures? Same guy that takes pictures at every single ‘musically mainstream and dire’ night. Yeah, you and all your friends have nothing to do with the promotion of Shameless at Life on Thursdays. None of you wear flat-peak New Era caps, or American Apparel hoodies with the drawstring laced. No not at all, I’m sure.
Immersionist journalism man, for sure, telling it how it is, you guys are so post-ironic and disillusioned, blank generation man, all the way, yeah so cool to be a scumbag (aren’t you all middle class?). Rock n Roll man. You guys are so punk rock, but new school. Cutting edge. Nu-rave man, (is that still cool?) you guys are actually JUST LIKE the Skins cast. So f-ing cool.
Waste-man-chic for sure. Rebel (with a cause?). So totally Catcher in the Rye, poster children for teen-angst, so alienated and misunderstood. But brilliant (not narcissistic). This meritocratic capitalist system we live in just can’t benefit you guys on the fringes of society. Society’s strictly for the mainstream, the youth are so underappreciated (Screw life, fuck shit up!). This unjust materialistic society thus created a vacuous existential system all us sheep are imprisoned to wander, you guys aren’t though, you’re fighting the system with your words (poorly ripping off Vice magazine?) trying to tear down the foundations of this culture with your outsider perspective. I’m sure.
I must admit where I live on poets corny in hove, I have never felt so out of place and annoyed by most utterly banal, passionless, safety minded conservatives I have ever met in my life. It’s a cold quiet wintry hearted place. Even the good old grubby pubs are being converted into Gastropubs by greedy little passionless shits like these. It seems that money down here is the only thing that matters, these people’s human souls are dead.
This website is full of hypocrisy; ‘photos by Sam Hiscox?! That prick lounges about every shit club in Brighton. Half of the writers on this site are stuffed down Shameless every Thursday. You talk about pretentious, every single contributer on this site is a fucking hipster, you all look like you read last month’s Vice then crashed your car in To Be Worn Again. This article stinks of arrogance, it seems like all you’ve done is write about yourselves. Smack That nights are the main offenders in ‘whats wrong with Brighton’, I’ve never been greeted by so many pussies with pin-rolls in my entire life.
This whole site is just some pathetic attempt to be Vice by some scrawny middle-class wankers without a hint of imagination. The only people who give a fuck about your stupid opinions are your fucking stupid friends, you self important cunt.
oh… you are one of those ironic funsters that reads this website, checks back for updates and leaves comments of no helpful nature whatsoever? congratulations, give yourself a fist up the asshole.
You hate it, but who really cares? This is the thing and that’s the way it is! OH WELL! The end of the road will be the vicar in an altercation with your parents who hate us all along the way anyhow. Now I have my say, so respond you carp in the sea. Did we win?
If we didn’t then who cares and you did. Nothings that worth it. My Mum is fucked, so is yours one day and no one has the moral high-ground. Wii. Take Care. Murley x.
Sorry, I didn’t realise this article was written to help people. I just thought you guys were a bunch of pretentious, self important pricks who have nothing better to do than stroke each other’s egos, I guess the charitable nature of this piece just went over my head.
Christ, either you know this tittyfuck or they are a extremely good judge of character! It’s scary…this girl really ‘does’ need to know when to ‘use’ speech marks though. It’s like reading through a Sun article when they put random words in bold haha
He quite clearly won.
Murley Bassey and fucktitty, I swear I saw you guys on that Adidas Originals ad with N-Dubz and David Beckham. Oh wait, no, that must have just been your hipster daydream I walked into.
That was terrible….
w8 til i rip your face off
Alright, don’t shit yourself.
Your blog reads like shit too.
I bet you’ve already sewn up your vagina and removed your womb.
Nobody would want to shag you anyway
*sneers