A Side Trip to Rottingdean by Tom Schoeneman

Friday March 2nd was a day of promise, weather-wise. For weeks we had had the same daily weather profile in London: high of 51, low of 46, rain and showers with—if lucky—sun breaks, and a persistent stiff wind that erased any hint of mildness that a temperature in the low 50s might promise. But on Friday, there was no rain in the forecast and the wind was promised to be a sedate 3 mph. It was time to go to the beach!

Accordingly, Mary and I set off with our visitor, Diana, to Brighton. Mary was particularly keen to go: She had grown up within a stone’s throw of salt water. Peconic Bay and Long Island Sound were a part of her soul. We caught the 10:06 train from Victoria Station, the Southern Victoria line, with stops at Clapham Junction and East Croydon near the city, and then a straight shot at high speeds past Gatwick Airport into Brighton.

We arrived just after 11 AM. Emerging from the station, we looked southwards down Queen’s Road and saw, between the buildings, a horizon line with blue above and grey below: the English Channel. After a short walk and a detour to look into a Catholic Church, we arrived at Brighton Beach. So strange after 8 weeks of concrete and roaring traffic to see a sweep of glittering ocean whispering with a mild, hypnotic surf.

There were, in fact, two human intrusions into this idyllic seascape. To our right, a broken lattice of pilings and cross-beams rose out of the surf. This was the derelict West Pier, a Victorian construction that until a few years ago still supported buildings. For a fee, you could buy the use of a hard hat and a guide and tour this ghost jetty. The locals were always arguing about the merits and demerits of restoring the thing. That argument was settled by high winds and fire: There isn’t much left of the West pier but a few bits of infrastructure poking up through the waves

Down the beach to our left was one of the main attractions of this coastal city, the Brighton Pier. We descended to the beach and started walking toward it.

I am tempted to put the word “beach” in quotation marks, but won’t: There are all kinds of beaches, after all. When most of us think of the beach, we probably think of sand. The whole of the coast in these parts does have a beach, but no sand. It is a pebble beach, or perhaps more accurately, a stone beach: The pebbles are ovoid stones about an inch long. The size of the stones makes it possible to walk on these beaches; also possible, though, is a cascade of rolling stones underfoot on any kind of slope, resulting in the usual flailing arms and desperate, staggering steps: You’re either going down or remaining spastically upright. Neither option is dignified.

Progress along the beach was aided by a walkway. In the summer, there are a series of surf shops and coffee canteens along this promenade, but in early March, most were shut up. Nevertheless, the day was mild enough to possibly imagine the coming of summer: I actually had to loosen my scarf and unzip my fleece jacket!

We ascended a ramp to the pier. This structure juts out into the ocean for a length of about 300 meters. On its surface, in the words of our guidebook, are “a thriving jumble of fish and chips joints, bingo, amusement arcades and fairground rides.” That sounds like my definition of hell, but in fact, almost every venue on the pier was closed, either for the season or until 4:30 in the afternoon, when the lights went on at the amusement park at pier’s end. The exception was the games arcade at the near end of the pier: There was a sign outside inviting all to “walk on through” to the rest of the pier. Why would anyone but a middle schooler want to stroll through an onslaught of BOOM BOOM THONKA THONKA DEEDLE DEEDLE and bad high volume pop music instead of walking outside in the mild breeze listening to the surf?

The pier was quiet: I could imagine the teeming throngs during the high season, but for now, it was a nice place for an unhurried stroll out over the ocean. The farther reaches of the pier afforded an opportunity to look back at the coastline. The center, Brighton, was like many a beach town: A concrete jumble, not the most picturesque of urban vistas. The coast that swept away on both sides, though, was an impressive array of white cliffs topped with green pastures. These are the South Downs, the same chalky precipices that are immortalized in the nostalgic English song “The White Cliffs of Dover”. Off to the right, sitting alone on a green slope rising from a cliff was a massive structure, somewhat castle-like: What on earth could that be?

After lingering on the pier, we headed inland to take a look at the Royal Pavilion, a hilariously over-the-top palace done up in onion domes and minarets in a supposedly Hindu style. The Pavilion was the party house of the Price Regent, Queen Victoria’s son, in the first half of the nineteenth century. We strolled through the grounds but declined to pay the entry fee to the Pavilion itself, despite the promise of more excesses within. After organizing a cheap lunch at La Tasca, a tapas restaurant, we toured the very small Brighton Museum, where we saw an exhibit of 20th century furniture styles (including Salvador Dali’s couch formed in the shape of Mae West’s lips), a collection of world culture artifacts, and the most extensive assemblage of English pottery and crockery that I ever hope to see. Next we toured the Lanes, a maze of shopping streets. Anyone who is interested in hand crafted jewelry could spend days looking into the windows of the shops in the Lanes. For the rest, there are antiques shops, toy stores and bistros, plus the occasional abandoned storefront that still bears a sign proclaiming it to be “proudly family owned.”

By 2:00 in the afternoon we had pretty much done everything we’d wanted to in Brighton. It was too early to return to London: Time to go off-program. But what to do?

At the train station, we had picked up a local bus schedule for a route that went east from Brighton along the coastline to a town called Newhaven. And in a promotional brochure we read of a town along the route, just outside Brighton, called Rottingdean: It was described as an “antique English village.” So we set off to do some scenery-seeing from the top of a double-decker bus.

We found the correct bus and purchased £3 return tickets to Newhaven from the helpful bus driver, who promised to let us know when we reached our stop in Rottingdean. Once we were ensconced on the top of the double-decker, we started east out of Brighton. Diana, who is our next-door neighbor in Portland, has a knack for striking up conversations with local people: She asks questions out loud, ostensibly to me or Mary. “Which way is Hove?” she wondered aloud. The lady in front of us turned around and pointed to the rear of the bus. In no time, we had a guided tour going. We passed a huge marina and shopping complex at the outskirts of Brighton: “Not very interesting,” said our guide. The mystery castle loomed from the Downs on our left: Roedean, a private school for girls. “Very expensive,” noted our informant. We found out that the trip out to Newhaven was lovely and that we could transfer there and go even further east to Eastbourne. As we approached Rottingdean, our guide pointed out our stop and led us off the bus, pausing to consult the driver about any additional fare to Eastbourne (it was £1 more). On the sidewalk, she led us to the main intersection of town and pointed out all of the main attractions up and down the road before walking off with a cheerful “Enjoy your visit!”

On the surface, Rottingdean does not seem like a “destination,” in the tourism sense of the word. It is not in any of our guidebooks. On the map, it looks as if it would be a suburb of Brighton, thus conjuring up the horrors associated with all things suburban. Nor is the town’s name what an ad agency would prefer: I can see the branding consultants advising the local council to change the town name to Everdean or Mistholme. I am linguist enough to know that the word Rottingdean probably has nothing to do with decay but I am not fluent enough in Saxon to know what it does indicate. Luckily, a local brochure put me straight. A dean is a valley. The Saxon for “people” is ingas, and the people in question were known as the Rota. So we were in the Rota people valley—which, according to the brochure, is “The perfect location . . . nestled between sea and Downs.”

Our first stop was the sea: Down a ramp to the Under Cliff Walk. One side of a paved walk hugged the white cliffs while the other gave access to the rocky beach. Looking to the east along the shore, there was a seemingly infinite series of chalk cliff outcroppings, each one slightly hazier than its nearer neighbor (for you psychology majors out there, this is a depth perception cue known as atmospheric perspective). We could have walked for miles dwarfed by the towering cliffs, but we needed time to see the town. Before turning back, we did investigate a strange aspect of the distant water-line. The tide was out, and at water’s edge, there appeared to be white foam backed up by a table of black rock. How was it, then that a dog appeared to be walking on the foam? Mary was off to investigate, skating down a pair of steep slopes in the rocky beach caused, no doubt by the actions of tide and waves. The “foam” turned out to be chalk polished to a porcelain gleam by surf and stone; the black rock was seaweed on top of the chalk that had been exposed by the retreating tide. The whole beach was a giant chalk basin filled with rocks and shells.

Back up the ramp, we moved away from the water and into town along the High Street, Rottingdean’s main drag. This was a two lane road with very narrow sidewalks and an unending line of cars. The clogged road was an incongruity, because all of the buildings along it were two-story structures of whitewashed brick and natural stone with pitched roofs. It was an antique English village: The narrow road and walkways were a result of a failure to bulldoze the quaint houses for the sake of modern transportaton.

High Street was populated by small stores and business: A cottage-like building advertising Cream Teas, a wine shop, an estate agent, a pub called Ye Olde Black Horse, a post office. There was nary a KFC, MacDonalds or Sainsbury’s Superstore in sight.

Further into town, High Street gave way to The Green, a loop that surrounded the Kipling Gardens. It is worth quoting at length from the town’s promotional brochure to get a sense of Rottingdeanian attitudes and recent history:

"When The Elms, former residence of Rudyard Kipling, came on the market in the 1980s, it was proposed that a large part of the garden would be sold off to a housing development which was wholly inappropriate. When planning permission was refused the Preservation Society bought the land and transformed it from a derelict and overgrown wilderness into a most beautiful garden with a number of enchanting sections. It was later presented to the, then, Brighton Borough Council for all to enjoy in perpetuity."

A pretty accurate description, I think. The two acres did indeed contain a number of “enchanting sections” separated by high walls built of fist-sized rocks and connected by walks through formal gardens and past a croquet lawn. These walks curved around and passed through arches in the walls; almost invariably, they led to a dead end. The Elms itself was a handsome two-story house with tall chimneys at either end of the roof. The brochure noted that it was open seven days a week (“No ball games, radios, or dogs permitted”) but our informant on the bus told us the house was privately owned and not available for tourism. Whatever the case, we left Kipling alone and proceeded further along The Green.

At one point, we encountered a sign on a drive that led to something called Hog Plat. The sign also promised a livery and access to the nature preserve. When Mary saw the word “livery,” there was no stopping her. Sure enough, around a bend we found stacked bales of hay next to a fence being nibbled by four horses. Four very small, pettable horses. (I believe the technical term is “ponies.”) Beyond the ponies, the drive ascended past a crazy quilt of community gardens and suddenly became steep. We carefully climbed the mixture of chalk and dirt and emerged onto the nature preserve: A thick carpet of grass, broken only by widely scattered clumps of daffodils and a big black windmill. We were on the Downs west of town. (Down, by the way, comes from dun, the Saxon word for hill.) We turned to look behind us and discovered that Rottingdean certainly is a dean. From our vista we saw the roofs of the town nestled in a valley, flanked by green hilltop pastures. We stood at the crest of the western hilltop and looked across to the eastern meadows, where I could see tiny figures of horses and white cotton puffs that were grazing sheep.

We made one other stop along the Green at St. Margaret’s parish church. Compared to the churches I have been visiting—St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminister Abbey, King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, Canterbury Cathedral—St. Margaret’s seemed to be a small squat matron among the nobility. The church was reached by a path through a surrounding graveyard. The front door was open: Inside, there were pews and stained glass windows and not a single soul besides ourselves. It was refreshing to see a working church, one that was really not a tourist venue but open to all and any nonetheless.

We never made it to Newhaven or Eastbourne. Our time in Rottingdean was short and swift. It had already gone 4:00 PM when we queued for the bus back to Brighton. The sky had clouded and the air cooled: Rain was coming and would arrive during the bus ride back. How typically English. The weather report had been so promising that we had decided to leave our umbrellas behind. There were no complaints, though. We had seen a glimpse of spring for most of the day, smelled the salt air and listened to waves lapping the shore. Even better, we had stumbled into one of those unplanned discoveries that make traveling worthwhile. The Rottingdean promotional brochure had used the right word: enchanting. Damp and delighted, we headed back to London.