Brighton’s 1930s Show Homes

Front page of Modern Home News, 1934

Nearly eighty years ago, in December 1932, the corner of Prince’s Place and North Street, in the heart of Brighton, was transformed into a piece of tranquil suburbia. Amongst the banks and department stores stood a detached Elizabethan style house complete with garden.

In fact, this house was the property of Braybon’s, house builders, and was designed as a show house to promote their estates on the outskirts of the town.

The Brighton Herald commented:

‘ To passers-by in Brighton it must have seemed that a familiar wonder story of Christmas pantomime had suddenly come true … The exploits of the slave of Aladin’s lamp who built a palace in a night, had found rivalry in the achievements of Braybon’s Ltd. A single night had removed a hoarding and revealed a house’

The house was surrounded by a garden comprising of rockeries, a lily pond, a rustic bridge, pergola and shrubs and flowering plants. Inside were a drawing room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom and three bedrooms. It was described as an ‘all electric house’ in the ‘best Elizabethan style’.

Braybon's show house, North Street, Brighton, 1932. Image courtesy of James Gray Collection / The Regency Society

All this could have been yours for £795.

Sir Cooper Rawson MP, formally opened the house with a golden key and a banquet was held in the Grand Hotel afterwards.

Show house at Hill Brow Road, Withdean, 1934

The show house was removed in August 1934 for the building of Prince’s House and was re-erected in Hillbrow Road, Withdean where it stands today.

Braybon’s second attempt at building a show house in the centre of Brighton was not so successful. According to the 1934 March edition of Modern Homes News , Brighton Corporation had given permission for Braybon’s to build a show home on a vacant site in Western Road. Work had started and the brickwork was up to the first floor when the Corporation announced that they had leased the site to International Stores, grocers. The show house was never completed and Mitre House was built on the site in 1935.

Paul Jordan, Senior History Centre Officer

Missing the Titanic

There have been a number of events taking place this week to mark the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic. A few days ago we posted a piece about the response from people in Brighton.  News of the tragedy was met with public expressions of shock and grief, but a more muted personal reaction can be seen in this letter found in Preston Manor last year by our Museums Learning Officer, Paula Wrightson.

The letter was written by John Lane, a publisher, and sent to Charles Thomas-Stanford, one of the last owners of the manor. Thomas-Stanford had recently published a novel, The Ace of Hearts, and the letter was a covering note for a review of the book published by the New York Times. Understandably, Lane could not resist the temptation to mention his lucky escape.

Letter from John Lane to Charles Thomas-Stanford, 22 April 1912

Dear Mr Stanford,

I am sending you the last number of the New York Times which I have just received, in which you will find a review of your book and also an advertisement of it, see back.

I was pressed by Mr. Harry Widener to go on the Titanic two weeks ago. Fortunately I elected to sail later and I go on the Lusitania on Saturday next. I shall be away about five weeks, but if anything turns up with regard to your book, I have instructed my people in my absence.

With kind regards,

Yours truly,

John Lane

The Perambulator Nuisance

Brighton Gazette, 1st November 1890

In October 1890, a nursemaid named Eliza Stopher was brought before the Brighton Borough bench. Her crime? According to a report published in the Brighton Gazette, she was pushing a pram on the pavement in East Street. What’s more, when she was asked to take it off the pavement, she refused with some defiance. A police inspector who happened to be passing moved the perambulator into the street himself, but Miss Stopher, who was employed by a family living in Marine Parade, merely wheeled it back on to the pavement a little further down the road. Her punishment was a five-shilling fine or seven days’ imprisonment.

Perambulator in East Hove c1900. Image courtesy of James Gray Collection / The Regency Society

What’s interesting about this story, apart from the shocking realisation that a young woman could find herself in jail for pushing a pram on the pavement, is that it was subtitled ‘Another Prosecution’. Prams on pavements were obviously an issue towards the end of the 19^th century.

The problem was discussed at some length in an article published in The Nursing Record on 11 May 1893: ‘Magistrates have over and over again pointed out to careless drivers that the road is as much for the passenger on foot as the one on wheels,’ it declared. ‘And it is so with the pavement, which belongs as much to the nurse and children out for a walk, as to the fashionable woman out for shopping, the busy businessman, or the idle stroller. If the baby cannot walk, it is a very trifling matter that his carriage takes up the width of two children side by side.’

Brighton and Hove Herald, 9th August 1924

The writer goes on to say, however, that, ‘it is an act of thoughtless impertinence for two nursemaids to proceed side by side down a busy pavement, and especially so when they pause to look in at shop windows, and continue their onward course with their heads turned sideways to gaze on some article of finery, instead of looking in front to see where they are going.’ Clearly there was sympathy for the women, but it only went so far.

Fast-forward thirty years and, it seems, the problem had not gone away. On 9 August 1924, the Brighton & Hove Herald reported the case of three young women brought to court for blocking the pavement with their prams. ‘Prams as Obstructions. A Warning to Mothers who Gossip’ thundered the headline.

Pram parade in George Street 1920. Image courtesy of James Gray Collection / The Regency Society

This time it was not nursemaids, then, but mothers who were in the dock; the Chief Constable had decided to make an example of them because of the many complaints he had received. ‘The public must understand,’ the article states, ‘that a perambulator has no legal right at all to be on the pavement. It is a vehicle, and has no more right…than a motor-car or a horse and trap.’

The case, which was also reported in The Times, was adjourned for a month and it was agreed that, if no further offences were committed during that time, the magistrates would drop the matter. They ‘wished to appeal to people who have to take their children with them when they go shopping or walking, to try to get into single file, and not to group together and chatter as they go along.’

And to think the double-buggy hadn’t yet been invented!

Kate Elms, Brighton History Centre