Late Victorian seaside shelter in a woeful condition

At the bottom of Lower Rock Gardens and across Madeira Drive there is a Late Victorian seaside shelter. In its prime it would’ve been well-maintained and valued. It might not even have been thought of as a heritage asset; just a shelter to protect people from the weather and a place to rest for a while. There was, back in the day, a respect for such a structure.
Today the shelter could be easily transplanted into some Third World country’s poor shanty town. Today, here in Brighton, it houses those poor unfortunates who don’t have a home; it has become their home. A home whose windows have been replaced with found bits of cardboard. The new occupants have used cardboard to keep out the prevailing wind after the original windows were smashed or simply remove for ‘safety’ reasons. You might say that because of its current state what was a Late Victorian shelter doesn’t exist anymore.

It symbolises the problem we face today; homeless people with no safe place to live; an indecisive authority that doesn’t seem to know how to protect the heritage of our city. This might be a result of a lack of funds from central government; it is not an easy fix. Yet, we are left with a shelter that epitomises urban decline and no matter how much those who are comfortably off rave about how wonderful Brighton is; vibrant; young; a go to city, while this situation exists with the shelter and its displaced ‘residents’ then the rhetoric about how wonderful the city is simply doesn’t match the reality.