The Leisure Society would seem to have appeared fully formed from nowhere. They spring out of the Wilkommen Collective, a Brighton based consortium which also includes Sons of Noel and Adrian , Shoreline and many others. Like a baroque style UK version of Elephant 6 only with added busking skills.
posted by RegMcF on Mar 17, 2009 - 4 comments

Obitfilter: Anita Roddick (1942-2007). Anita Roddick, who founded the Body Shop in Brighton's North Laine in 1976, has died of a stroke at St. Richard's hospital in Chichester. The shop, in Kensington Gardens, has long since closed - it's now an optician - but stories about it are still recounted. Although Body Shop is still based in nearby Littlehampton, the controlling interest was sold last year to L'Oreal for the tidy sum of $1.3bn, allowing Ms Roddick to concentrate on her campaigning work.
posted by athenian on Sep 10, 2007 - 31 comments

London to Brighton in Two Minutes (2006) [HI Apple Quicktime, LO Adobe Flash] preceeded by London to Brighton in Three-and-a-Half Minutes (1983) [RealMedia, context] preceeded by London to Brighton in Four Minutes (1953) [RealMedia, context]
posted by riotgrrl69 on Oct 1, 2006 - 21 comments

Two girls, three wheels, 10,000 miles travelled: their epic overland adventure from Bangkok to Brighton comes to a successful end. Previously discussed here. The two girls (women, really) and their pink tuk tuk arrived home in Brighton on September 3rd. Many were skeptical that they would be able to make it; at least one poster seemed to be putting down a monetary wager against their success. Perhaps now is the time to stand by that bet and donate some money to the charity they are raising money for? People interested in the details of their journey should check out their blog; more than just a log of their daily activities, they add some interesting details regarding the culture and history of some of the places they visited. They aren't the first to have made a ridiculously long journey in a tuk tuk; a german couple drove around Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe last year (although there were apparently some ferries involved). Tuk tuk appreciation appears to be wide-spread in England; a "motorised rickshaw service" recently started up with compressed natural gas vehicles.
posted by giantfist on Sep 5, 2006 - 2 comments

Two girls, three wheels, 10,000 miles: an epic overland adventure from Bangkok to Brighton. Two women are about to embark on a very long and very uncomfortable voyage: driving a "tuk tuk" from Thailand to Britain to raise £50,000 for the mental health charity Mind.
posted by soiled cowboy on May 16, 2006 - 22 comments

All I have to do is change my name to Peyton, motivate my girlfriend to marry me and have a baby, and hey presto! young Peyton will receive a six-figure scholarship to Brighton College in England, explains the BBC because the college can't fulfil the bequest by former pupil Derek Wakehurst Peyton. Brighton looks a nice place so roll up all Peytons, the college principal is spreading "the net wider to the United States, Australia and beyond." Second thoughts ... maybe simpler for me simply to motivate her to change her name ...
posted by Schroder on Mar 6, 2006 - 11 comments

What do Norman Cook (AKA Fat Boy Slim), Lord (Richard) Attenborough, Aubrey Beardsley, Lord (Laurence) Olivier, Sir Winston Churchill, Magnus Volk, Dame Anna Neagle, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Rowland Hill and Annie Nightingale, have in common?

They've all had a bus named after them [full list here] in the city of Brighton & Hove on the south coast of England. In Jamaica the buses are named a little more irreverently but this whole naming tradition doesn't seem to be as popular as naming trains with the late Joe Strummer one of the latest in a long line. Pix of the Stummer train here. [Scroll down a bit.]

Anyone live in a place where they name their buses? Or other inanimate objects?
posted by i_cola on Mar 18, 2005 - 24 comments

The Brighton Daddy Longlegs Railway ran offshore along the beach at Brighton, UK, at the turn of the 20th century. Designed by Magnus Volk, it ran on 24 feet high stilts, over the sea, and required a trained sea captain to operate it. For a few years, it was quite the tourist attraction. The rest of Volk's Electric Railway is still in operation.
posted by carter on Mar 4, 2005 - 3 comments

Brighton West Pier is on fire. Could this be the 'final end' for this historic UK landmark?
posted by i_cola on Mar 28, 2003 - 28 comments

Weird cycle lanes of Brighton (and Hove, actually). 'This website grew out of an article...claiming that some cycle lane up north was the shortest in Britain. What! I thought, we have many many much shorter lanes!!' Not so much a competition, more an amusing photolog of some of the more ridiculous attempts at creating cycle lanes in Brighton, UK...are they this bad in other cities around the world?
posted by i_cola on Feb 14, 2003 - 19 comments