Brighton, Brexit, and an Imagined England: The Pleasures and Perils of Nostalgia

Josie Glausiusz
Jul 25, 2017 · 5 min read
Beach chalets, Hove. Photo credit: What’s the Rush, via Flickr

Happy childhood memories, seen through the veneer of middle age, can often seem sunnier than they were in reality. Such is the case with my recollections of summer holidays with my grandparents in the seaside town of Brighton, England. Or rather Brighton’s quieter neighbor Hove, which is where my grandparents, David and Amelia Harris, bought a large house in their retirement, painted it parakeet green, rented out rooms to elderly single men, and welcomed their grandchildren every August of our youth.

Though my memories are sunny, the truth is that it probably rained quite frequently. Even when the weather was mild and pleasant, the threat of a storm was ever-present, or, to quote a recent headline in the local Brighton newspaper, The Argus, “Crowds make most of sun before rain comes.” Brighton, on the Sussex coast of England, “has a marine west coast climate that is mild with no dry season;” the average daily temperature is 51 degrees Fahrenheit.

The nostalgia I feel for childhood summers in Brighton is not dissimilar, I think, to the sentimental feelings that many Brexit-voting Brits have for olde Englande, that small island once populated by Celts until an influx of Germanic Anglo-Saxons arrived in the 5th century AD, bringing with them the Old English language that we do not speak today. The Britain that Brexiteers pine for — a tiny homogenous island that once colonized and ruled over a quarter of the Earth’s total land area — was never homogenous. Through the centuries, it has welcomed immigrants from Spanish and Portuguese Jews in the 17th century to post-World War II immigrants from Jamaica and other islands in the Caribbean. It wasn’t always an island, either: among its first inhabitants, 100,000 years ago, were Neanderthals who crossed a land bridge from what is now Northern France when sea levels were lower.

We do not speak Old English because our native language was transformed, over centuries, by successive waves of invasion and immigration — most notably by the Norman French, who brought Old French words like chanel (from Latin canalis) as in the English Channel, that expanse of grey sea that divides England from France, into whose crashing waves I loved to throw the pebbles that covered Brighton’s rocky beaches. (Oh, the satisfying plop as they landed in the water.) The French language also gave us the words “marine” meaning “of the sea” (the old English word was saelic) and coast (from Latin costa — rib, side, wall.)

Immigrants brought much to Britain, from Marxism to our current Royal Family (descendants of prince George of Hanover, later King George I of Britain) as well as fish and chips, that not-quite-quintessential British dish. Portuguese Jews, from whom my grandfather David Harris was descended, introduced fried fish to England; the origin of the chips is in dispute, but may have come from Ireland, Belgium or France. An outing to the local fish-and-chippie restaurant with my grandparents remains one of my hallowed childhood memories.

In childhood summer holidays, I remember glorious sunny days in which I wandered, unsupervised, over the stony beaches, clambering over the concrete, mussel-covered groynes that divided the beach into sections, collecting sea shells and seaweed and pebbles, which I would lug home by the bag-full and paint in primary colors. The sea air smelled briny, the cries of the seagulls were loud and ever-present; the deck-chairs, for hire, were filled with fully-dressed day-trippers.

My grandparents would sit outside their colorful wooden chalet (later, they upgraded to a more expensive rented brick hut) drinking tea and sharing McVities’ chocolate digestive biscuits with passing friends. A short walk from their chalet was a penny arcade, a constant lure though I never won a prize in any of the probably-rigged games. The West End Restaurant sold ice creams and ice-lollies, and in the distance was the West Pier, designed by Eugenius Birch, a 19th century English seaside architect. It opened in 1866, closed in 1975, and has been slowly crumbling into the sea ever since.

The Brighton of my childhood is a place that exists mostly in my imagination. Nowadays, the town is London-on-Sea, a 51-minute train commute from the capital. House prices in Brighton have risen 490 percent in the past two decades — the most substantial rise of any city in England and Wales, including London — and chic boutique hotels and antique shops have replaced the dingy bric-a-brac shops of my youth. Not far from the dilapidated remains of the West Pier is the British Airways i360, a 162-metre tall observation tower that opened on August 4, 2016 and resembles a giant bagel on a stick.

There is danger in viewing the world through the lens of nostalgia. A two-thirds reduction in immigration, the dream of Brexit voters, will likely shrink Britain’s economy by nine percent and lead to raised taxes, according to a May 2016 study by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. Immigrants from the European Union make up about five percent of National Health Service staff, and one-third of all workers in food product manufacture.

Departure from the European Union, far from bringing the sun-splashed sovereign past that its touts promoted, will likely be a “long, tortuous process,” with economic and political costs that will stretch into the coming decades, according to the Financial Times. More than a year after the Brexit vote and following a general election that cast away Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative majority, the best most Britons appear to be hoping for, according to David Goodhart in the New York Times, is some sort of “fuzzy Brexit” in which the country will somehow stay inside the European Union’s customs union.

Holiday in Hove

On one holiday to Brighton, a tenant of my grandparents’ bought us a large bag of sugary Brighton goodies: oversize lollipops, a set of teeth made of sugar, the celebrated Brighton Rock. My mother, in her wisdom, threw away that giant bag of candy. Sugar, as she knew, rots the teeth. Too much sentimental yearning for a mystic past can befuddle the brain, too.

Josie Glausiusz

Written by

I'm a science journalist writing for Nature, National Geographic, Scientific American, Hakai, Aeon and Undark Magazine. Follow me on Twitter: @josiegz

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