Popping To The Shops
Richard Bingham profiles one of Hove’s best-loved streets.
In the early years of this century, I used to buy my fruit and veg at the greengrocer at the top of George Street. That shop has now become a convenience store. Rather bluntly, it’s called “Wine Me Up”.
But the greengrocer is still there, relocated to a stall in front of the shop. On a summer’s day, the stallholder – I think he’s the same man that ran the shop some twenty years before – still barks his wares to passers-by. “Lovely strawberries!”
George Street is probably named after George Gallard who, in the early summer of 1852, purchased 14 acres of land hereabouts. Gorgeous George went on to develop Upper Cliftonville, comprising Hova Villas, Ventnor Villas, Blatchington Road and George Street itself. [mfn]Today, George Street remains the thin vein that connects two of Hove’s main east-west arteries – Church Road to the south and Blatchington Road to the north.
The history of George Street is drawn from an excellent article at https://hovehistory.blogspot.com/ [/mfn]
Villas and Cottages
The artisans’ houses of George Street were the smallest built in Upper Cliftonville, averaging just twenty feet by sixty feet. Unlike the houses along Ventnor Villas, say, the brickwork of George Street is white-painted, not stuccoed.
Villas were for the genteel. The poor lived in streets.
Nevertheless, it was the east side of George Street that was the first part of Upper Cliftonville to be built out. The 1861 census reveals that there were many men connected with the building industry living in George Street. Brick makers lived at numbers 2, 8, 22, 25, 30, 39, 43, 67, 73, 80 and 85. Sometimes two or three of them lived in one house.
Brickmakers and their labourers occupied the first houses because someone had to build the villas of Upper Cliftonville. At the time, George Street was nicknamed “The Barracks”. The army of construction workers were hidden from the more polite residents by a wall at the north end of George Street that extended all the way to Sackville Road.
As Jeremy Mustoe noted in these pages https://www.brighton-society.org.uk/little-known-historic-wall-revealed-in-hove/the wall – which still stands today and has subsequently been listed as an important part of Hove’s history – was built of cobbles, bungaroosh, flint, brick and mortar.
The wall was designed to make the new houses in Ventnor Villas more saleable by screening them from what Jeremy calls “the insalubrious commercial premises of George Street, full of outside privies and detritus”.
Cocktails and Canopies
Today, walking from George Street into Church Road, one wonders if if class segregration today is less visible but no less omnipresent.
The houses on Church Road are wider and taller than the cottages of George Street. Instead of two, there are three storeys and an attic floor. Instead of plain frontages, the Church Road houses are ornamented by Italinate windows with scrolled heads and consoles beneath the projecting lintels. Regency-style canopies shade generous south-facing bay windows. A fancy iron balustrade runs the length of the terrace
The New Artisans
On both George Street and Church Road, however, it didn’t take long before the burgeoning population of central Hove was served by shops inserted into the ground floor of most of the houses.
On Church Road, the shopfronts are wider and the signange more individual. Jo & Co, for example (Brunch, Dinner, Cocktails). Along George Street, however, one of the first shops you meet is BetFred. Gambling companies know where their best customers are: they choose to site their shops in poorer neighbourhoods.
A lot of big brands moved into George Street from the 1980s onwards. As well as BetFred, Holland and Barrett and WH Smith still remain. The rents and business rates went up accordingly. A small shop measuring just 5 metres by 12 metres was belaboured by a rateable value of £20,000.
Making a living proved difficult. Many small traders – like my old greengrocer – were forced out of their shops.
Recently, some shopkeepers have tried to move upmarket. Artisanal cafes are encroaching from Church Road. (Strange how the word “artisanal” has transmigrated from the making of bricks to the making of sourdough). Like these cafes, the freeholder of the British Design Shop has elected to paint the brickwork. The British Design Shop (Modern British Furniture, Open by Appointment) plumped for an arty Prussian Blue. If you close your eyes you could be somewhere in the North Laine.
There are two high street banks on George Street. Judging by its sun-bleached blue signage, the Halifax won’t be around for long. For the moment, however, it serves the ageing population who refuse to change and move their banking on line. Digital exclusion, some call it
Reinvention or social cleansing?
On George Street, the death of the high street seemed very real. Between 2012 and 2017, it was losing between five and ten businesses every single year. A local campaign by shopkeepers was dubbed “Save George Street”.
Valiantly, though, George Street battles on. There’s now a lively Facebook group with the more upbeat sobriquet of “Love George Street!!” On the wall of The Royal George is a funky mural.
There were facelifts in the 1960s and around the millennium. In 1962, it was the Queen and Prince Philip who opened the remodelled George Street. In 2001, Chris Eubank – the self-styled Lord of Brighton – did the honours. Another sign of the times.
Many shopkeepers, however, didn’t like these attempts at civic improvement. According to them, the pedestrianisation of George Street, for example, resulted in a 13% drop in trade.
The millennial improvements to street furniture included an early appearance of anti-social architecture. Allegedly, the new iron benches were deliberately designed to be too uncomfortable for anyone to lie down on. It seems the need to move on vagrants – a form of social cleansing – had always been part of the plan. No more tramps slumbering in the sunshine.
Turn the corner from Church Road into George Street and you enter a different world. The faces change. The voices are different. The clothes are less expensive. There are fewer prams, more mobility scooters. The people here are older, less affluent, more ethnically diverse.
It’s not as raffish as St James’s Street used to be. More like London Road, before the cloak of gentrification fell.
For decades now, that cloak has been rustling around George Street. Somehow, this doughty old street continues to thrive.
Ghosts
For more than a hundred years, small businesses have been the lifeblood of George Street. In the 1890s, number 37 was the chief office of Lewonski & Sons, proprietors of funeral hearses. Samuel Thomas Lewonski, an immigrant of Polish origins, was described as having a mane of black hair.
In 1908, a fire broke out in Samuel’s lock-up on nearby Shirley Street. The fire caused panic when it was realised several men were still inside the building. Three horses stabled there as well.
Men and horses were all safely rescued. But not before a large crowd had assembled. Men from the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve proved to be a great help in keeping the excited crowd in order.
For a while, however, it seemed there was going to be a riot.
