When you live in Brighton and Hove, having friends or family to stay can be the perfect excuse to be a tourist in your home town.
For me and Steve, having our 16-year old nephew stop over meant a chance to rediscover places we’d not been to for a while or go along to things we’d been meaning to visit for ages.
We compiled a list of options in advance (secretly each having our preferences) and ran it past our favourite teenager.
Sadly, parkrun missed out because getting up at 8am is too early for a teenager!
So, we kickstarted the weekend with a trip to the depths of Brighton Town Hall. There lurks the Old Police Cells Museum with grisly tales of poisoned chocolates and the famous trunk murders.
Admission is free and former serving police officers volunteer to show guests around. If you are lucky, they will enthusiastically add a few quirky tales of their own.
A wander down to the Marina in the afternoon and we were soon whizzing our way across the Channel to the Rampion Offshore Wind Farm. This is a spectacular feat of engineering and, I think, quite beautiful.
It was a very calm day and there was something almost surreal about floating in the centre of 116 gently turning turbines.
The power generated will supply the equivalent of up to 350,000 homes each year. It is estimated that the project could avoid the emission of almost 600,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.
This is clean, green, renewable energy and an essential part of our battle against climate change.
Arriving on the day of the demonstrations, my nephew saw young people in Brighton and Hove leading the way in raising awareness of climate change and then one of the solutions.
To link it all up, I took him in to see the council chamber and explained that we’re setting up a new City Assembly to drive how we become a carbon-neutral city by 2030.
I’ve invited young people to come and talk about what they feel the council needs to do so they are at the heart of our thinking.
For our future engineer, the wind farm was an inspiring sight, both in terms of technical ability and as a significant contribution towards renewable technology.
We were not alone in thinking so, as a fellow passenger with his little boy remarked to us: “It gives you hope, doesn’t it?”
Councillor Nancy Platts is the Labour leader of Brighton and Hove City Council.
The most common feedback from visitors I hear is that pity the city is so shabby and that this could be a lovely city if it was cleaned up. So much decay, dereliction, junk, litter.. conservation areas that look like slums in places. Failure of the council to prevail upon private property owners to keep all private property in conservation areas in excellent condition and free of junk, litter, weeds, and decay is lamentable. It would be so simple to substantially improve the street-scape. There is a perverse ironing in the fact the BHCC will forbid someone affordably double glazing their home because of the “adverse impact on visual amenity” yet freely tolerate neglect and dereliction of whole properties. “Can do” Nancy – another one for you. This is an easy “win” – get the legislation and the posers to enforce it in place and transform this grubby, shabby city.
I totally agree with the posts on here about Brighton becoming grubby and dirty. It’s such a shame because there’s so much potential – we just need the will to sort it out. I really encourage you to write to your local councillors. I did this recently and although I did get a good response, I don’t think this is going to get resolved until we all put pressure on together. You can email your local councillor using this website: https://www.writetothem.com
Obviously Nancy missed the aggressive begging and tent city on Hove Lawns.
The pressure washer doesn’t reach that far.
Instead of spending her time writing these anodyne articles I wish she would focus her energy on cleaning up the city. Tourists are not mentioning how interesting the police museums are. Instead they are mentioning how they had to walk past ten comatose drug addicts or awake ones asking for money in East street and outside Brighton Town Hall. They are not remarking on the wind farm they are surprised that the town feels dirty and unsafe with needles everywhere. Nancy has a a lot of work to do. I wish she seemed to understand the issues that are affecting daily workers and visitors in the city and spent her time addressing them. Then perhaps people will be interested in what she has to say once she has delivered results. I’m not hopeful.
I’m a regular visitor to Brighton because of work, and the other commentators have nailed it. Brighton is grubby. Weeds. Tatty buildings. Aggressive begging. Sites and buildings seemingly permanently surrounded by Heras fencing. And so much more.
She’s been in office for a while now and we have yet to hear any actual policies. The above comments are correct. This city is tawdry and falling apart, but she has nothing to say apart from a visit to the eyesore wind farm and the police museum. How about mending roads and pavements, clamping down on dog poo, clearing out illegal travellers and all the other things that are wrong with B&H!
What does she do exactly??
I am on my way home from a visit to Brighton. I have been to the city 6 or 7 times over the past 15 years and while it has never been pristine I was shocked at the state it is currently in. It honestly looked like a war-zone. So many weeds everywhere and buildings that haven’t seen a tin of paint for about 30 years. I appreciate the social issues are harder to sort than the cosmetic ones (rolling drunk oiks at 11am, derelicts wetting themselves in the gutter etc). But even just some _basic_ civic housekeeping would help hugely. It feels like there is a great asset here which is rapidly degenerating into an utter slum.