The following planning permissions were granted on Friday 27^th January:

 1. Listed building consent demolition of the Bristol Gate piers:

2. Listed building consent- demolition of hospital chapel.

 3. Full planning

 Demolition of existing hospital buildings located to the North of Eastern Road and to the south of the Children’s hospital building and Thomas Kemp Tower. (including the Barry Building)

Addition of helicopter landing pad and associated trauma lift on top of Thomas Kemp Tower:

 Erection of new hospital buildings incorporating Stage 1

 2 floors of underground parking (405 spaces) with new access from Bristol Gate and associated highway works:

 Cycle parking, external amenity spaces, including roof gardens and landscaping:

NB: The development is in 2 stages.

Stage 1 is the new development to be connected with the Thomas Kemp Tower.

Stage 2 is the re development of the Barry Building Block.

 The demolition is planned to start in the autumn of 2013. The period of the development is likely take 10 years.

 Planning permission has to be obtained for the location of a Consolidation Centre and the access routes to and from the Centre to the hospital during the course of the development.

The photographs accompanying these talks are not currently available -so they have to be imagined in the interim.

TALK 1: “Thomas Read Kemp, M.P., Preacher and Gentleman Developer”

Dr. Sue Berry                 St. George’s Church, Kemp Town       25^th September 2010

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, the first trick of the act is not to fall over any of the wiring.  I think I’ve managed that bit.

We’re going to be looking at Kemp in two ways.  I’m going to look at his development into a business man, his social background and some of the other things he got up to and then Mike at the front here is going to look particularly at Kemp Town.  We decided to split the two.  We felt that that would work better.

Now he comes from a family on the make, on the rise, his father was MP for Lewes, his father was also a dealer in wool and he marries a member of the Read family from the Kent borders and they’re graziers so it is a prosperous family with ambitions.  The parallel to this type of family are the many wealthier families of an earlier generation in Wiltshire and round there who made their income out of  wool and similar activities. 

The Kemps were very lucky.  They were well connected in this area and through that inherited land, particularly from the Friend family who owned a lot of land in Brighton.  So that’s how they got their paws on that.  They also inherited Lewes Castle:  The good news is you’ve inherited a castle.  The bad news is it is a ruined one.  By the time they inherited it it wasn’t in a very good condition but they also inherited land around the castle as well and one might like to think that the connection between the aspiration to be an MP and the inheritance of this land to add to what they already owned in Lewes linked together quite well.

PIC 1. Thomas Read Kemp is, at heart, in many ways a Lewes man. That’s where his political base is; that’s where he does what all good Georgians did, which is to get the electorate to vote for him with the usual drunken bribery that went on.  So that gives you a bit of background. PIC2

Thomas and Ann have great aspirations for their son and he is sent off for a good education.   Thomas is sent to school in London, where goes to Westminster School, then he goes on to Cambridge.  So this is a gentleman’s education.  Westminster School then was a school many other landowners sent their children to.  He was probably a little bit older than another well-known schoolboy at Westminster which is Thomas Pelham of Stanmer Park who didn’t enjoy it very much and always beseeched that he could go home to Stanmer every holiday. 

The family clearly had it in mind that he was going to marry well at the end of this because they put a lot of resources into this education. From Westminster off he goes to Cambridge and there he does, in a way, a general degree with Classics, etc. in it.  I’d have thought he probably did Theology but I have been put right by Mike, that he couldn’t have done.   And having done that the big question is, what do you do next with your young man?  He is not yet ready to inherit so what do you do with him after that?  So you send him to London and he studies law.  So this is a very typical background for a young gentleman of the period.   And then, after that,- this is beginning to sound very Jane Austenish isn’t it, yes ? -  the next thing you need is a good marriage.  You do, you need a good marriage and it appears that, probably at Cambridge, he encountered the Barings, the bankers, and in due course he marries Frances Baring, one of the daughters.  So he marries into a banking family.  He is not unique in this area doing that.  The Gages of Firle one of the daughters married a Simion, he  was in banking and I can think of two or three others where you have that sort of link which puts you in the interesting position that you have land in Brighton, you have a young man with a gentry lifestyle because they buy Herstmonceaux Place for the newlyweds to live in, right up by Herstmonceaux Castle.  So you’ve got everything going there.  But this family doesn’t have a political income and so he’s got to have some other form of income.  So the next thing they have to think about is where are the income streams going to come from to sustain the lifestyle.  Frances has a good settlement and this is the beginning of the thinking about development.

Now if you go to Lewes and you know the Castle you probably know Barbican House which is nearby where the Museum of the Sussex Archaeological Society is.  That’s the area of land that they had.  PIC 3. This is Coneyburgh to which Thomas and Ann moved out, having felt that it was time to start a gentry lifestyle.  Coneyburgh is up at Barcombe.  It is now demolished.  PIC 4 *This particular one is demolished.   Interestingly like many people who go to these houses, they rent.  He doesn’t buy he rents.  It was much more common in this period than you might imagine.  Some people do it because they are not sure where they want to live.  Others do it because they want the lifestyle but they don’t want the responsibilities and if you can rent a house, garden and 40 acres for  £124 certainly in modern money that would be very tempting, wouldn’t it?   That’s the sort of rental they were paying. The house was probably towards the end of its life because it was demolished in 1816.  The next one then caught fire so it probably wasn’t a good place to build a country house.

So gentry lifestyle is sort of breaking Thomas in, PIC 5  then off to Westminster and at Westminster he is given an education. Now people like me with terrible concentration imagine being tutored, one class, two classes, three classes, four classes,* just imagine being taught like that!  He then goes off and PIC 6 this is the accommodation at Westminster -. thank you to Mike for the illustrations -  a bit basic shall we say?  You can see why the kids implored to come home for the holidays can’t you?   No privacy, no real comforts. It was not unusual to lose your son and heir to mysterious disease whilst at school.  Now you see that you know why. 

He then went off, as I said, to learn law and he stayed in this rather classy building by Holland The Albany.  It is still there. And he had a really enjoyable time, one would think, in London and he then has this question of what to do when he inherits his land. PIC 7* Now this looks a little bit like knitting here but this is the old open fields system, the arable area here, the five Laines.  This is Black Rock Down and those of you who came walking this morning walked all over that.  Over here you’ve got East Laine, Queens Park is about there and Montpelier is over here in that area and the London Road development runs up here, that Kemp gets involved in.   But when they inherited the land a lot of the arable is in strips with everybody else’s in this area and Thomas Senior starts to enclose by agreement and gets cracking with turning some of West Laine here into freehold fields and that enables Thomas Read Kemp to get on with building. 

They also do some exchanges over here on this side.  Now the other thing that Thomas does, Thomas Senior, is to build one or two lodging houses.  PIC 8 There it is in glorious colour and you can see how complicated the land ownership was and you can see over here the beginning of enclosed fields which explains places like Bedford Square and Regency Square which you all know on that side of town.  PIC 9 And this is, I’m not going to bore you with this but I just want to make one point….  the holdings in Brighton were held in something called a yardland and yardlands gave you arable land in those fields and also an entitlement to pasture animals on the surrounding pastoral area.  These people all owned yardlands  in the 1780s and in 1792.  The main point I want to make here is that the Kemp family, first of all Thomas and then Thomas Read, dominated the land holdings and just to make it nice and difficult historically  they were held by different manors, PIC 10 one, two, three, four manors – an absolute nightmare.

Thomas Kemp knew he had to get more holdings in order to increase his grasp of land and he bought some of them from Thomas Western of Preston Manor to try to increase that holding and this enabled Thomas Read, as we shall see, to get PIC 10 all of this enclosure organised all around there and down here and helps to explain the development we are now going to explore

So Thomas father lays the foundations at a time when the town is developing as a resort.  Remember that Brighton was a flourishing seaside resort from the 1750s.  I get quite murderous when I see copy written by marketing departments describing it as a fishing village that was turned into a seaside resort when the Prince of Wales arrived.   Would a young man want to build a great big house next to a fishing village?

So it is a seaside resort to which the Prince of Wales comes and fortuitously, because he wants to come and stay he decides to use Thomas Kemp’s house and Thomas Kemp’s house is the basis of the Royal Pavilion and amongst the things that they did was sea-bathe on the coast and use the spa PIC12  at  Wick?  ….. and she’s just skulking away from the spa, beautifully dressed and looking as though she has been up to something but she’ s been to the spa.

PIC 13 Now this is the house over at Herstmonceaux which is designed, this side, by Wyatt, a well-known architect of the period who would have worked on the Royal Pavilion had he not died.  He was going to be one of the architects for the Royal Pavilion and this is the building they lived in from 1807 onwards. At the same time they had a London house. Thomas more or less inherits his father’s post as MP, that’s what I mean about bribery and corruption in Lewes. When Dad dies dear old Thomas more or less takes over and he has this house in London.

PIC 14 Here are the Barings into which they married.  This is another family on the up. They developed as Merchant Bankers as we all know but they began the business  in Exeter and went on from there  and then, of course, become  well-known and titled but at a later stage.  PIC 15 This is where he starts working, his Barbican House, the Castle, in which he had a chapel and this PIC 16 is the view along the High Street at the beginnings of Thomas’s ideas. That’s where Thomas Read met the Wilds, Amon and Henry, it is very confusing, you can’t always tell who did which and just to remind you that in Lewes on Mantel House PIC 17 you start to see the sorts of decorations that these people did.  Bear in mind that builders very often designed in this period.  We hear an awful lot about architects but far less about the very important local and regional builder architects, who if you asked them to run up a chapel, ran you up a chapel, run you up a house, yes sure we’ll do that, shops?, yes,  a brewery, they built the brewery for the Tamplins, a classical style brewery which was later on replaced.

Now Thomas Read knows he’s got something very significant.  He’s got part of the lordship of a manor which means that when he decides he is going to try organising everybody into enclosing land he can enfranchise it and make it freehold.and he set about doing that. PIC18 Sooner or later the             lifestyle of these little chaps on the Downs of Brighton was going to come to an end because housing was much more profitable.

PIC 19. In 1822 – this map is produced from a  Street Directory by Baxter  very fortuitously – and  here you see where he starts to develop   over in Montpelier, and he also starts to develop down the London Road and this is just before he starts over here,  we know that from the dates of Deeds, and he puts the Temple over here, which we will look at in a minute and his long-suffering sister also builds a Villa here and one or two other worthies that Kemp knew.  This was intended to be a Villa development.  He had a thing about villas.  He put villas up on the London Road, some of which are still there, and he wanted villas in Queens Park.  He thinks that a great idea.  Meanwhile he goes off and has a slightly, one could say, “funny” phase like lots of wealthy men did.  Yes, that’s something you can afford to do isn’t it?…. have a funny moment?  Envy! envy!  He decides that he is going to follow the Evangelist set that Harriet Baring, who became better known as Harriet Warr, was a leader of and becomes the Reverend Thomas Read along with the Reverend George Baring PIC20  and he starts to preach at his uncle’s chapel  in St. James’s Street and he starts to preach in Lewes in his chapel he has built in Lewes   By all accounts not a very good preacher, but there we go, he thought he’d have a go  and Uncle Nathaniel doesn’t seem to be very keen on this and so young Thomas Read goes off and builds his own chapel  in Ship Street.

The chapel in Lewes Castle goes in down by the Barbican and this is the view of the whole area before he civilises it a bit more. PIC 21  There’s what he built, the Wilds do it for him.  Not the prettiest of buildings is it?…with this great, sort of, edifice. This is probably  a very poor drawing but notice   the portico, see the detail there.  This was up and running with a heated floor in 1816.  The Reverend George Bering does the main celebratory opening service and unfortunately Thomas Read gets bored with it, maybe the congregation was getting bored with him because he sells it on to Solicitor Faithful, who in turn sells it on to Anderson who refaces it.  PIC22 Now this is interesting, take a look up there, take a look across here so it looks as though this facade was brought forward a bit but they still leave this on top.  It’s still there.  Do you know Fabrica (?), the flint fronted church there? That is Thomas Clarke’s refacing

Meanwhile he’s still got a London house.  He’s still renting and he moves around in London and he has good experience of large estates.  He knows very well the development at Regent’s Park and he knows about Belgravia where he has this place put up which is the Spanish Embassy now and looks nothing like this and this was designed by Kendal so we start to see the London links coming through.  PIC 23 There it is, that’s the original design – nice size house.  PIC 24 There’s the outside, there’s the inside.  As I say, the Spanish Embassy has considerably altered it between the wars.

Now he still keeps this and why does he keep this and why does he spend resources over  in Lewes? Because Brighton doesn’t have an MP.  It doesn’t have one until the 1830s.  So bear in mind that he is sort of developing links in the two towns all the time. PIC 25 I rather like this – this sandpit look.

Now Brighton he knows by the 1810s is in need of large houses.  If you think of the Georgian houses in Brighton built in the 1750s onwards you will notice that most of them are tall, narrow, thin houses.  You need proper entertainment palaces and Regency Square in 1818 is a start in that way.  That’s being developed by a Londoner and also from that you get the development of Kemp Town and Brunswick, big, substantial houses.  And those of you who saw the interiors of the two houses this morning will get the sense that they are designed to impress. PIC 26 Still seabathing and you can see this motley area  isn’t really what you want if you are used to the great designs of London houses.

PIC 27 So he starts over here and he puts this in, the Dome, as it became sometimes known as, and more familiarly, the Temple.  Different versions of it show different sort of images of how it was finished – done by the Wilds and he also encourages villas in the surrounding area.  We know that Frances and eight children move in here in 1818.  It’s an awful lot of kids – that is why you probably want a big house.  PIC28 This is the mysterious staircase inside. Apparently that is where the main staircase originally was and this is later.  Food for thought!  A very strange house!  It’s no surprise it has a very strange inside is it then?   And amongst the best known is Lord Fauntleroy’s house.  He was a banker, topically Vince Cable will be very pleased to hear that he was actually hung for his banking activities.  Probably cheer him up enormously.

By the 1820s Kemp knows the Prince of Wales, he is a superb horseman, he hunts, he competes as a horseman, he is a Mason he is involved in various movements such as the Reform movement.  He is pro-Reform – up to a point.  He is pro-Reform even though he recognises he might lose control of his seat. And these links are very well when he starts to get involved with these projects in the 1820s  He is both an investor in the Chain Pier PIC 29? and also with the Lord of the Manor of Brighton.  The manor of Brighton gives access to the foreshore without which it couldn’t have been built.  He knows it is going to give a good berth to the steam ferries that are important to Brighton because they go to Dieppe from 1815 onwards.

He gives land for St. Peter’s Church, PIC30?with spire as hoped for by Barry, but it wasn’t built and he gives land with the other freeholders of the pasture and open spaces, all of whom had agreed with him to enclose.  He becomes the Treasurer for this church and, unfortunately, when they run into trouble over money he can’t find the account book.  Now along with his other freeholders, post enclosure of all of this area, they start to lay out roads and walls.  This doesn’t go down very well with some Brighton people who are sort of Regency dog walkers and assume they can wander where they want, so to speak, and take their children to play.  There are complaints about the number of changes that are going on.  But Kemp presses on and he gets on with three projects:  Ireland’s Gardens,  Brighton Park, and this.   PIC31 This is in Commercial Garden which is put right up here above St. Peter’s Church.  There it is, known as Ireland’s Gardens after the manager. Ireland was a bit of a pain.  Kemp put in most of the capital for the landscaping.  Ireland was terribly absent-minded when it came to paying up the rent and eventually they sent bailiffs in.  This is a Wilds’ development, here Hanover Crescent which would have had this wonderful view of the gardens over there.  There is St. Peter’s Church to give you your bearings.PIC32  Brighton Park here, now it is Queen’s Park,   laid  out from the start with the intention of having villas, Kemp again puts in the landscaping but eventually this was bought by Attree and Attree continues the villa idea but it never ever seems to work.

Now he then gets on with this which Mike’s going to talk about so I’m going to avoid it.  All of the same sort of period.  He puts this church here, PIC 33 this is St. George’s by  Busby  with this wonderful Greek look about it.  It cost £11,000 and it acts as a landmark.  As you come down Eastern Road down through  there.  This is a reminder that it is all Kemp land.  The interior was with rented pews and up on the top there -  the galleries.   The back of it had a very big pulpit.  This wasn’t here.  This was much later.  It was a preaching house so he put into here a very good preacher to ensure that it ran well and brought in income and Queen Adelaide came here.  He gave land for the hospital, this is by Barry, open competition, and became one of the people on the Board.  He meanwhile decides he doesn’t want to do preaching anymore.  He goes off to Arundel and becomes MP and he acquires this house called Dale Park just to the West of Arundel.  This is now no longer with us.  He tires of this – he gets about a bit doesn’t he? -  and he decides that he is going to sell up and he is going to go back to Lewes and he fights at  Lewes and gets in.

Interestingly it is a banker who buys the house and the banker’s name is Cubitt who, of course, Kemp already knows. PIC34 Meanwhile, while Kemp is doing these various things, he has a good lawyer, wonderfully named Mr. Faithful, and he has Budgen who does a lot of his surveying work and then he has Mr. Harris as his later steward.  They not only manage the selling and development here between them  but, I suspect, Faithful is the person who negotiates all his enclosure work.

PIC35 Just to put this up.  If you look there is no sign of Eastern Road and he has to buy up all these poor? pieces

All these long narrow strips otherwise he doesn’t get it through and he also develops in the area of the Church and has to buy those he doesn’t own here.  It’s a long job and particularly when they start to hear that you are in the business of poor pieces the price goes up.  So it made a lot of sense to build on his own freehold land.

He remarries in 1832 some years as you can see after the death of his first wife.  He marries Frances Harvey who was Frances Shakely Kemp eventually and he announced he was going abroad for the sake of his health and they took their son and one daughter who was thought  not to be very well and off they go on a sort of Grand Tour. They go down to Italy and come back to Paris.  Bear in mind that there can’t be too many problems. Fanny Kemp is still in the Belgrave Square House, that is  one of his daughters, in 1839 and the general sense is from the correspondence that has survived  that they are enjoying themselves and they are living comfortably.  There is no sign of poverty and she is a wealthy lady in her own right.

Now what happens here?  Mike and I differ here.  It is always fun to have a different view.  Thomas Read Kemp has got the development well under way, mid 1820s, but Brighton like lots of other towns becomes overbuilt and a recession starts which gets quite a grip and he knows it gets quite a grip and he gets involved in the railway company.  He is a very far sighted man and he is hoping later on to be able to sell land to them because they are obviously going to come through the north end of the parish to have a railway station.

Off he goes abroad and he has unsettled debts and this is where the story of the outlawing comes from. If people don’t settle debts what you can do is to declare them an “outlaw” in this period.  Sounds a bit much.  Sometimes even nowadays creditors must be sorely tempted when people won’t pay up.  And there are wonderful stories of these notices being put  up on the church door.  The records and the National Archives show that they didn’t know these bills were being looked for and these declarations of outlawing are rescinded and everything is supposedly sorted out.

He is in difficulties in terms of cash flow but he does have plenty of land.   In the 1830s and early 1840s the town has a recession.  It is difficult to sell land – that is his problem.  It is very difficult to sell the land and it becomes difficult to sell property.  Property slows down. It is remarkably like the recession  that we’ve come through where everybody goes “ooooh” and doesn’t want to spend money and the banks take a deep breath and start to wonder whether they need to call things in. It has a lot of characteristics of the current one.

However, bear this in mind, when he dies his second wife inherits over four hundred acres is that a poor man?   It is not a poor man.  It is a man that might be  having  difficulty with cash flow but he is certainly a man with a lot of assets, the very assets that he is setting out to develop.

She is very interesting.  She decides that she is going to call in some of the cash and sort out some of his affairs and she seems to be one of the people behind the sales of land in the l840s.  By the early 1850s the town is flourishing and a lot of his projects are being to be developed much more effectively and  Montpelier becomes a very interesting development. Some more villas are being  built up the London Road.

If it weren’t for him the big projects that are so much of the Brighton history now would never have been built.   If he hadn’t done that enclosuring, if he hadn’t taken the risks he had, hadn’t had the rather idiosyncratic ideas about religion that he had for a bit as well,   many of the things that are so interesting in this city would not have happened. 

He is very intriguing as a person in his own right and he was clearly prepared to take huge risks and out of huge risks comes that legacy.

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TALK 2: “Thomas Read Kemp – Evolution of a Developer”

Michael Osborne. Owner of 23 Sussex Square. Economist.

I should just explain that I am very much the amateur of this line up so I hope you will bear with me.  I’ll try my best.

Now my problem is I have to try to explain how this man Thomas Read Kemp came to build the Kemp Town Estate that some of us have walked round this morning.

The man that we have inherited from history could not possibly have built the Kemp Town Estate.  The man that we do inherit is this spendthrift playboy, he has very little business acumen.  That is until very recently with the work that has been done by Sue,  But unfortunately this view of him is very much in the ether.  Those of you who read the evening Argus last night and saw the blurb for our talk today will, yet again, see that this idiot was pursued by creditors as he ran from the country in 1837.  Nothing, absolutely nothing could be further from the truth.

Now the Kemps have a major family problem.  It is actually quite a common problem at this time in the nineteenth century. They are asset rich and relatively cash poor.

You can see this if we move to our next slide. 

This is a list of all the property which had to be sold after the death of Thomas’s father, Thomas Kemp.   It was arranged that his brother Nathaniel  and  Mr. Whitfield, who were trustees under the Will would sell the property because when Thomas  dies there is not  enough cash available to pay off the debts that were outstanding at the end of his career. This is the family that our man Thomas Read Kemp is born into.

In order to get out of this the family decide that they are going to give their son a proper education.  He is a gentleman, he is going to get the education of a professional.  So, as Sue has explained, most importantly he is sent off to Cambridge.  The key thing about the Theology point is that, because of  Anthony Dale and the work that was done since then, we all assume that this guy studied Theology.  What the devil is a theologian doing going into the business world?  He didn’t study Theology, he studied the Humanities.  The Humanities at that time, as they were thought to be taught at the university of Cambridge, were very much a framework of thought to give a guy an idea of how he should think about issues.  Quite important for this man because he is trying to break the mould, to build a new business platform, as we would say today, for his family and that’s how he developed   his education and then, as Sue said, he went off and studied law – critical for a property developer

The biggest issue even today is the nightmare of dealing with the legal side and trying to get the legalities right before you buy into something or start developing something.  He went into the Inner Temple and by spending a period of time, he didn’t become a barrister but he was there.  Obviously he went to the dinners and so forth and he picked up a number of ideas about how he should operate as a property developer.

Next slide

I am using this slide again [used already by Sue] because I want to emphasise how important this marriage was.  This again is Sir Francis Baring Bart.  This guy comes from exactly the same social background as our man.  His father was a  woolstapler in Exeter.  Thomas’s father was a woolstapler in Lewes.   They were not from different social classes.  This man was a self-made man.  He built the largest bank the world had ever seen during the Napoleonic wars. This guy was the wealthiest commercial entity in the City of London at the beginning of the nineteenth century.  According to   de Topville  during the latter part of the Napoleonic wars this bank was the sixth great power after England, France, Austria, Prussia and Russia.  You can see this is a pretty significant family.

Kemp marries Baring’s favourite daughter, Frances named after him.  Would this man have allowed his favourite daughter to marry a complete idiot?  I don’t think so. Would this young man from Lewes via Cambridge have been able to hoodwink this guy?  I don’t think so.   This guy actually was quite impressed with young Thomas and he agreed to give him and his favourite daughter a £20,000 contribution towards the marriage settlement.  That is significant.  The Barings become terribly important, not as a bank, for Thomas but as  individuals.  It is the individuals within the family that take out the mortgages because, remember, merchant banks at this time are very much like our hedge funds of today.  They are interested in short term investments, very high risk but very very very high reward.  They corner the tallow market.  You know the market for candles?   They corner it.  They make a killing.  When I was reading about this this summer, of course, I was reading about the chocolate market being cornered.  What changes?

Next slide

While Thomas is in London his father dies, as Sue has explained, and he takes over as MP for Lewes.  He enters the Houses of Parliament in 1811.  This is a critical date for Thomas because it is in 1811 when a chap called John Nash presents his report to parliament on the redevelopment of Marylebone Park. The leases were just falling in.  Marylebone Park is to the North of London then as it had actually been developed.  This is the west end at the bottom and this is this vast tract of land. The Crown Estate,  as we call it today, wanted to develop it and they wanted to grow houses rather than sheep and cattle and so forth.  This original scheme had 600 houses on it and I suspect that when our young Thomas, sitting there at the age of 28, saw this he said to himself    “ Good God!  Eureka!  I’ve found it.  I know what to do. This is how I get my family out of the problem.”  

Fine. He then comes back and he drifts off and he goes into this religious bit but, as Sue has explained, religion is about money.  It is about making money.  Remember that when you… I don’t see any clerical collars here…. but when you wear a clerical collar you can get in anywhere.  No door is closed to you whatever your background and by wearing the clerical collar himself and George, George, of course, was from the Baring family but George was a failed opium trader so this was who his partner in the new religion was and they set up. They were trying to attract the young rich who were coming to Brighton for the Season to get them into the church.  When you read about the church in the local guide books they extol the virtues of this wonderful piece of architecture, of the latest mastic that had been used to stucco on the front of the building.   Now mastic wasn’t used by John Nash until he did the roofs on the Pavilion in 1819.  This was 1815.  He built a pulpit which, again, they raved about   It had 100 individual pieces of timber.  It was the finest pulpit you could have seen.  This is a young developer on his first development.  Design is of the essence, getting it right, getting your public to understand how important you can be in designing what they want to live in.

Next slide

So he comes back to Brighton and Sue has shown this print.  This is a very important document because this is the first time that he really tried to develop on a large scale in Brighton.  He makes three fundamental mistakes.  This land is owned by three people, Thomas Attree, Miguel and himself.  He doesn’t get rid of the other partners. He tries to do a deal with them so he has to compromise and he has to agree that he will limit the amount of money he will put into the development.  So he landscapes the park, yes?  Then he rents it to this guy, Mr. Anderson who is noted at the bottom, and they try to get a rent of £2000 a year, which is absolutely phenomenal, – but a young property developer – they are always a little over-ambitious! 

He then makes the other fundamental mistake – he doesn’t build anything in there.  He just lays it out and this is the plan that you can go and pick up to show you where your villas are. The fundamental mistake is that if you can’t see what is going to be built you don’t know what your villa is going to look like.  Every developer known to man nowadays shoves in a show flat.  Why?…  because the purchasers don’t understand what they are going to buy.  He learned from this that that was a mistake.    The third mistake is that there is no means of access to this site.   He hadn’t access from the coast road because he hadn’t bought out the other owners of the pool pieces.   So three fundamental mistakes.  He certainly learned from that.

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We now move back again to the Terrier   map.  The reason why I am showing you the Terrier Map is that everything green belongs to Kemp.  He owns two-thirds of all the land in that area but a third unfortunately is owned by the other people, but to develop in any of the areas where you see the coloured strips he has to buy the people out.  The Brighton Park situation has just shown him  that is impossible.   The land to the right is Black Rock Down and his father – the one good thing that his father did in this area was that when the Duke of Dorset died he bought out the remaining acreage from his wife in 1808.  So all of that area which there seems to be split between two people is now owned by Kemp.  It is obvious where he was going to build.  People have criticised him because he built a mile outside of Brighton but if you were going to build a new town where would you build?  Obviously he took the example of Marylebone Park.  It was built on the extremity and it had to be a large space.

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This now is a map of the Tenantry Down.  This covers 630 acres.  Again you have got a big, big problem here: Kemp and six other people own this land and all around Brighton and Kemp says “No to hell with it – we’ve got to get rid of these other guys.  Let’s agree I’ll do a land swap with you. Kemp ends up with 400acres.  This is the biggest property deal this city has ever seen.  Nobody has done a land transaction since.   That was done in 1822 and Kemp ends up with a massive area which you’ll see later his wife sells for substantial sums of money and you know what he pays for it?  Zero, precisely zero.   First rule of property development:  pay the lowest price you can possibly get for the land because you can do nothing about your building costs, you can do nothing about the end price but you can do everything to screw down the guy who is selling the land, which is what he did here.

We now move to Regent’s Park.   We’re at about 1827 this is the completed park.  We know, from the building lease, the Kemp’s house – that he entered into a building lease with Thomas Cubitt and with the Marquis of Westminster in 1825.  The address he gives in 1825 is Park Crescent.  Park Crescent is the curvy bit at the bottom.  The big gap is actually Portland Place.  It is still there today.  The new road is now the Marylebone Road and on the other side you’ve got Park Square.  This was finished in 1822. Kemp comes back, as Sue has said, in 1823 to London because he is now the MP for Arundel.  I suspect this is where he rented a house.  This is where the kernel of the idea is for the layout of Kemp Town.   But it doesn’t work does it?  Because the Crescent is split by this massive road that comes up from Portland Place and the Crescent is split off from the Square by the large road that we now know as Marylebone Road.

So he has a Vitruvian moment    If I can try and do this.  If you  take the chest bit and then the upper arms you’ve got the  Square, take the lower arms you’ve got the curve,. take the hands you’ve got the two Terraces.  Vitruvius! you’ve got it!  Exactly in line with the proportions of the body!.  That is how he designed Kemp Town.  That is how it feels so comfortable, that is how it works in a much better form than the initial idea that he picked up in Regent’s Park. 

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So he has got the layout and that is a picture of it in Ackerman which is in the mid 1820s and if we can switch to the other picture* ..

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He lives at the house No. 4  looking straight across the Square.  And it is gated.

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So he has got the spatial layout now he has to get the idea of what is the overall design of the facades,  This is the first time that a neo-Palladian facade, a palace facade, is used to hide the fact that there are individual houses in the block.  The aristocracy, the super-rich of the time, didn’t want people to think they were living in some sort of terrace arrangement.  This is how it was done, of course in Bath.  This is a north elevation of Queen’s Square.  It was built by John Wood Senior in the 1730s.  I think it is a remarkable piece of architecture.  I have always loved it and I am sure that those of you who have visited Bath as I have know it as well as I do.

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The first example of it in London is in Bedford Square. To me this really doesn’t work as well.  This is the late 1770s through to the early 1880s but again you have got the palace facade but even the Duke of Bedford found trouble in getting the individual builders, because they  were  built as individual plots to line up their roof lines and to get a proper palace facade.

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There are obvious other examples in Regent’s Park but they are contemporaneous with what is going on here.  This is the north elevation of Sussex Square.  What I’ve done here is to ask a colleague of mine, David Scocroft, to go back and look at some late photographs in the 19th century which is obviously  much closer to what was there actually in the first place, to take a very close inspection of the buildings that are there, to remove the roof additions and the rest of it. And this is what we have.  I think that is a quite remarkable piece of architecture actually.  It is a neo-Palladian palace facade.  You have the central block breaking forward in a three and one symbolism, again the matrix which has been referred to earlier, you have the two end blocks here which form the pavilion, you have the balusters which attempt to hide the attic storey, you have the railings going through, you have the porticos, all of which are in the Doric order, you have the pillasters all of which are in the Corinthian order.  This is straight out of Palladia.  What a pity it is not there now!  Anyhow that is another issue.  Very interesting but who was the architect?

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This is Eaton Square.  Eaton Square is developed by the Cubitts.  This drawing was produced by Thomas and Lewis Cubitt from a book that was published by Britton and Pugin.  Pugin the same guy who did all of the Nash drawings in the for the Pavilion.  We know, it says down in the left hand corner that the architect is actually the two Cubitts.  It is of exactly the same form look at the central block where the breakfront occurs, look at the pavilion, look at the fenestration, look at the treatment of the porches and the treatment of the attic storey.  Now you could argue that Eaton Square was a copy of Sussex Square but you would be pushing your luck and I wouldn’t dream of doing that for one moment.  But either Sussex Square and Eaton Square were a copy one of the other…well, hang on a moment!… Sussex Square is built…. we know the original leases were let at the beginning of 1824.  Eaton Square isn’t built until 1828.  So it has to be the same architect it seems to me.

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These are the railings that are there today.  I apologise for the photograph – I was trying to avoid the security cameras.  You can see exactly the same railings,as you saw this morning when we walked around.  No.14 Eaton Square.  The northern  elevation.  The original facade is brick.  This is another issue.  A lot of people argue that the facades in Sussex Square should be stucco painted white. Nonsense!. They were originally built as brick as indeed they were in this part of Eaton Square. 

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This is the door, this is the front door exactly the same door that was originally used in Eaton Square and, indeed, it was first used in Grosvenor Crescent, based on the bronze doors of the Pantheon in Rome. This is from a book that was published in France at the end of the 17^th century and for the doors that remain and actually, thank God, most of them do on the Kemp Town Estate, this is what they should look like.  Again they are identical, again the influence of the Cubitts.

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This is a very important document in many, many senses.  This is the original layout plan for the Kemp Town Estate and you can see there are 105 plots.  It goes from number one right the way through to 105.  This shows the original layout and I think it is fascinating because it answers questions like..  Was there a No 14 Chichester Terrace which was then combined with No. 1 Lewes Crescent?         According to this story… No. There was only one building there No. One Lewes Crescent.   105 plots because  at the top the two plots 53 and  54 and combined to give you No. 25 and Chichester House is off this and as Dale said it was never intended to be part of the original estate and that is absolutely true but it was built at the same time but it was built just outside.

This is dated June 1824.  This is the only document in existence by Charles Augustine Busby. There is no other document relating to Kemp Town. Every other development he was involved in, he was very much a developer as well as an architect he kept all the drawings,  he was a very precious architect and very very sensitive about his drawings.  Why, if he is the architect of the Kemp Town Estate is this the only document we have got. Or what he actually did on the Kemp Town Estate was what a surveyor would have done for the grand estates in London.  This is a surveyor’s drawing.  This is not an architect’s drawing.  The other key thing is that it is June 1824

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Now this is the one that everyone knows.  This is October 1824.  This is what they call in the business today as they did then “A developer’s puff”.  This says to you “Look, if you don’t get in to one of those front buildings now look what we are going to do.  When we get the rest of this up the price is going through the stratosphere so you should come in and buy now.”  This was produced in October 1824. The drawing I’ve just shown you which is the layout drawing which is the drawing you are going to build to was produced in June 1824.  Well that’s what they intended to build. That’s what they wanted you to understand they were going to build.  You read, and I think it is from Anthony Dale of course there are 250 houses on that site and because Kemp ran out of money he wasn’t able to finish it. I’m terribly sorry but Kemp had no intention whatsoever of building anything like that at that time.  If he’d sold everything there was a possibility he’d go on to develop further but at the time he was building the Kemp Town Estate this was not in his stratosphere.  But this was exhibited in 1825 at the Royal Academy in London for all the fashionables to see how wonderful this development was going to be in Brighton.

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This is a Busby drawing.  This is of the Brunswick Town development.  For me architecturally it doesn’t work because it doesn’t solve the key spatial problem with a Square of how do you get out without destroying one of the facades of the square if you shoot straight through the square as you go out the back.  For me that doesn’t work.  The elegant way in which the architecture worked with Kemp solved the problem, that you sneak in through  the sides of the square.

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This is a drawing in the hand of Charles Augustine Busby. The street’s over there.  It is called Portland Place.  Frankly that is a very poor piece of architectural drawing.  The detailing is not very fine.  If you go over and look at what was built you will see that it didn’t translate into a very handsome set of buildings and I just think that this guy, at this period, wasn’t quite up to what he was expected to be up to and that Kemp Town is very much a West End of London development.  It is not the sort of development that Busby had been working on.

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This is a very interesting document again. This is a Deed that was entered into by Thomas Kemp and Mr. Wilkes and it is to do with the building of the mews that we all looked at this morning which is on the southern side of Eastern Road just past the newspaper kiosk.  And the reason why I am showing you is that it shows the extraordinary detail that Kemp insisted upon for every element of this estate.  This is just a mews but, by God, it has got to look correct.  It has got to grace what would grace a fine Georgian house anywhere in the UK countryside.  He was not having second rate architecture even for where the horses and carriages were going to be parked.

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Now what I’ve done here is to annotate.  I’m sorry.  My colleague had left for holiday by then and so it is me with a pen.  I’ve annotated how the various sites were sold as we go through time.  So we’re here now in January 1824.  He begins to do what most landowners did at the time.  He initially lets the building plots on long term leases.  So on the right hand side where you have the eastern part of the northern section of Sussex Square he lets those nine plots to James Ingledrew.  He then lets the seven plots down the bottom in Lewes Crescent to him as well.  This is all in January 1824.  And the thirteen plots at the back of Sussex Square, to be turned into twelve houses he lets to a chap called Thomas Wyburn.  They are all let on 99 year leases.  The back block is let for £40 pounds a year on 99 year leases and the other elements are let for £30.  In June he lets the western side of Sussex Square. 

Everything is fine.  Off we go.  We’ve got these guys, they will build the building, Kemp will eventually get his rent in and this is the way you develop land.  Trouble.  As we go into 1825 Ingledrew gets into trouble with his suppliers.  There is an agreement he has to enter into with the suppliers as to how he is going  to pay them off and the agreement basically is that he will have to transfer the leases to them.  The other problem is that he has borrowed substantial sums of money  £3000 odd from Kemp to carry out the building works so Kemp gets involved as well.  So the sixteen houses that Mr. Ingledrew has at the beginning of 1825, it is April 1825, eleven have to go to a chap with an extraordinary name called Lemiah Wimble who is very big in Lewes. He is a timber merchant and he is, as I am sure Sue can explain far better than me, a very big figure there.

Mr. Wyburn then gets into trouble at the beginning of 1826 and he has to buy back from him the thirteen plots at the rear of the Terrace.  I don’t know the price.  The trouble is we can’t as yet find the documents and this may be a point at which I can give a little plug.  Most of this stuff comes from going back to the original documents.  We are blessed with somewhere called the East Sussex County Record Office where they have the most extraordinary records. They have a fabulous staff who have given me and, I know Sue for a far longer period than me, a fantastic amount of help.  We really do need to keep them supplied with our documents to keep that place going, particularly in this cuts period.  None of this would be possible without them as indeed the people at Suffolk and indeed the people at the Westminster City.  They are all incredibly helpful in this sort of work.

If you live in a house on the Kemp Town Estate and you know of Deeds which relate to the period from the early 1820s to 1850.  We’re not interested in current Deeds, price is nothing.  We just want up to 1850.  I know that our Chairman, Paul, would be fascinated by having a word with you to see if we can get copies of them.

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So he has to buy back these plots. This is 1828.  Remember his press:   Nothing is selling this is a disaster.  This is June 1828 and out of the 105 plots he has sold 52.  Yes, he has sold 52 plots.  He starts selling in 1826.  You may have noticed in the newspapers the Candy and Candy development at 1, Knightsbridge.  Do you remember in the spring of 2008 they sold about 40 of the 80 flats which average about £10.5 million each and then they stopped. They stopped because the market went away.  We’ll come on to the market in a minute. This guy managed to sell half the development in two years   Not bad going.  The blue which I don’t know whether you can see, I can’t see,  ~At the top there you’ve got 21 and 22 which were his home,  That’s where he lived.  He lived in both those houses.  His sister lived at 23 and then his sister-in-law with the Reverend Soper, Harriet, lived in No 25 and they put the two together and then things slithered down there.  There is a very nasty man in this story.  His name is called Henry Baring and that’s the house he buys later.  But at that time it is owned by Cubitt and we might come back to that.

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These are all the properties owned by Thomas Cubitt.  He buys a total of 26 carcasses.  He then develops those carcasses and he finishes them off and down at the bottom in Chichester Terrace he buys eleven plots.  This is the one point where Kemp made a mistake.  He should not have sold those eleven plots to Thomas Cubitt because Thomas Cubitt didn’t build anything in Kemp’s lifetime.  It was the only bit that wasn’t built upon and he thought he was really safe by going to the biggest builder in the United Kingdom, unlimited resources, this guy was building everywhere from Osborne House right the way through to Bloomsbury, through to the whole of Belgravia but he didn’t build that particular part of the estate because there wasn’t the demand for it.  That’s exactly where Cubitt is so we know all the individual houses.

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This a print of 1837.  This is the year when Kemp leaves.  It has become pretty fashionable hasn’t it? This was his achievement before he left, the fashionables were all around him.

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Right, how are these houses built?  Pretty cheaply and pretty quickly.  There are three principal materials: bungleroosh,  timber and brick.  And that’s it.  The bungleroosh forms the main structure of the walls. The brick is used internally to make up the piers within which the bungleroosh is poured. You see the timber, obviously for the structure of the floors and studwork.  The facades have brick, have expensive brick because it is facing brick and therefore we know it was never intended to stucco because you wouldn’t have used the facing brick if you were going to stucco.  The roof is slate and the windows would have been glazed. That is it.  It probably took about nine months to construct.  They are very solid though.  I have spent the last three years taking one apart and putting it back together again and I can also say that there is only one that has ever fallen down and that was the one that caught fire.  You can’t that at the other end of town.

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This is a typical layout. This is the layout of Mr Thomas Read Kemp himself of his own principal family house, No 22 .   You see in the basement you have got the housekeeper’s room, next to the housekeeper’s room you have got the wine cellar, then you have got the servants’ hall, a larder, the kitchen, the scullery, outside privy and then you have got the butler’s pantry and the butler’s room well away from the wine cellar and then the other extraordinary thing and a number of the early house plans have it – the knife room.   I know it wasn’t too long after Peterloo but obviously people were a bit nervous about letting the servants have access to the knives.  Because that is the only explanation. They were locked up.

You then go up to the ground floor.  You have got this magnificent dining room, the parlour at the back and then at the rear of Kemp’s house he built a tower block.  You have got the morning room and then you go up in that and you have various bedrooms for the children and then you have got this spectacular drawing room.  His house was 10ft deeper than any other house in that terrace.  Because he was going to have some serious space and then there is that wonderful story written by Monsieur Le Garde published in 1834 of a dinner party there in October 1827.

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This is Busby, Busby the developer.  This is a sketch of a proposal for the area that is now covered by Adelaide Crescent and what it shows you is that he has drawn up the layout but Busby’s key question is “How much?”   So there you have him going through working out what the relative costs would be and then scoring on values. My interest is that he thinks the principal houses on this site will cost him £700 to £800 to build.  Those are the same size as the houses in Sussex Square and the rest of the Kemp Town Estate.  That is what it would cost you to put up, not to finish the house, but just to put up the carcase.  It was pretty cheap.

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The materials for developing the estate came from all over the place.  This was the North Laine area where we all wander on a Saturday afternoon to do our shopping. This is what it looked like in the early 1840s.  It wouldn’t have changed much from the 1830s.  You’ve got the chimneys for the foundries  and as Sue pointed out to me, there was a candle works there.  All the  industrial workshops are in that area, and, thank God, the buildings have been preserved.  Over on the left hand side you have Regent Foundry which was on the North Laine.  That is where our railings come from.

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This is a view of the timber yard at Lewes.  Now this to me is extraordinary because it tells me how primitive things were.  So the timber was dropped off here as it came up the river from Newhaven and then it had to be got across to Brighton. Certain timbers and certain stones were loaded on the beach but they also came over the Downs.  This man who built 105 houses . this was the sort of technology he had to deal with.

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Right, the recession.  My background is in economics so I’m sorry I like figures but I will be really brief. I’ve put this in figures.  It is not in charts.  You get into the 1820s and Armageddon breaks loose. This was the worst period of deflation, yes I did use that word DEFLATION, in the first half of the 19^th century.  It kicks in in 1826 after the extraordinary boom of 1825 where you got an increase in the price level of 17.4%  Then you get a continuous drop -.5.5, -6.5,- 2.9,-1, -2.6.  You get this blip up which we call today a “dead cat bouncer” .  We’ll ignore that.  We then go to 1830.  Off we go again. 1832 down we go.  You know how much money the United States government, you know how much every government in Europe,  has chucked at the economic system in the last two years to prevent inflation going anywhere near zero, let alone this, this was economic Armageddon.  This is what this guy was up against.  You can see it translating into the housing market from brick production in London, which comes from the tax records because you had to pay tax on the bricks.  You can see the total collapse of brick production from 1826.  But hang on a minute…. while all this was going on the man, who we are told continuously in the literature, knew nothing about business managed to sell 52 houses.  I think he knew quite a bit about business.

Do you know something?  Any fool can make money in a boom it takes someone with business expertise to survive a recession let alone a depression.

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This is the plot in London that Kemp buys from Mr. Cubitt. It is huge.  You can see that it is very similar to the original Holland plot for the first version of the Royal Pavilion, not identical but it is similar, this was on a grand scale.

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This is the original drawing from Britton and Pugin.  It is very TRK.  Why is it very  TRK?  The design is exquisite.  It is perfect.  This is his showcase for London.

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This is the floorplan,, we have seen that.

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This is the view across to the east which is the eastern elevation of Belgrave Square.  Now Britton and Pugin contain four drawings for Belgravia.  One is Eaton Square,   two is Belgrave Square, three and four are Kemp’s house and the floor plan of his house.  Has this guy arrived?  This was THE publication on the edifices of London.

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This is the sixth Duke of Devonshire. He was a confirmed bachelor.  As we know from this morning he occupied No. 1 Lewes Crescent.  This is Mr. Super-rich.  When he arrives Kemp has really struck gold.  This is you in your modern retail development and you have just lined up Marks and Spencers and because of this you are about to line up Waitrose. This guy was one of the wealthiest aristocrats in the country.  A number of us have visited Chatsworth.  We can’t see it anymore but Devonshire House was the centre of political life in London.

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There’s his mother,on the left hand side,  Georgiana, the fifth Duchess of Devonshire.  Georgiana of gambling fame.  We have all heard about or seen the movie.  The other side is Lady Elizabeth Foster, the third person in the ménage a trois.  We won’t go into that now but she became obviously the second wife of the fifth Duke.  She is critical to us, absolutely critical because she is the sister of the Marquis of Bristol. The Duke of Devonshire moves in in January 1829 and in March 1829 the most fabulous client that Kemp ever had arrives and he buys from him Nos 18,19 and 20 Sussex Square in carcase form.  He pays him £1500 per house.  It has cost Kemp to build it because the land was nothing. £700 to £800. So Kemp is making £700 to £800 per sale of a carcase. Reverend Scutt at the other end of town is selling his plots for £330 down in Brunswick.  This guy is making 100% more.  He knew nothing of business!!   The Marquis of Bristol is obviously a leading figure and a very wealthy man.  He is the one who finished off Ickworth.  He is the one who rebuilt 6, St. James’s Square.

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This is a list of furniture that he bought from Banting and French.  They supplied the furniture to George IV for Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. They also supplied all the furniture for the east wing of Ickworth and they supplied all the furniture for his house in Brighton.  He actually spent more on the house in Brighton than he did on the east wind of Ickworth.  Fascinating for us – he had eleven beds for his servants.  There were a lot servants in there.

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This is a list of wages, the six monthly wages for his servants.  They were both in and out.  You can see that there were a lot of them.  The men got nearly three times what the women were paid at the time

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He was a big spender in the town.  This is a list of all the bills I have found in the files where he is clearly spending all over the place.  Hanningtons is big.  Rock Street he goes down and gets some soda and indeed some salad oil.  Over here he sends out to the Bristol Hotel, I’m sorry about the quality of that, for a dozen port.  He must just have been sending out.  I can’t imagine his port came from there.

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Now this is vital. This is the auction that takes place in January 1842.  If I could just have a couple of minutes on this because this is so important for evolving what happened to this guy.  This was not forced by his creditors.  This was Kemp trying to clean up his affairs at the end of his life. His two sons refused to take over the business.  George was trained as a solicitor but wanted to go off with a girl to India. His son Phillip who he put through Eton and indeed went to his own college at Cambridge also went off to India.  There are some wonderful letters from him.  So he had no option but to sell his estate.  This estate was valued at £150,000. There were 590 acres in there, there were 11 mansions, ten in the Kemp Town Estate, one was the Temple.  He didn’t include his two houses in Kemp Town, 21 and 22. People have always said but this figure is exaggerated – £150,000 – but hang on a minute: the Wick estate which contained 150 acres was sold for £60,000.  We can go into that in questions. So I don’t think this is unreasonable at all.  If this figure is anywhere near accurate in today’s prices that is £10.5 million because you multiply up by a factor of 70. We can talk about pricing issues if you like.  This is the sort of assets this guy had in 1842 two years before he died.

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This is a map associated with that auction catalogue.  You can see that most of the acreage is to do with Tenantry Down bought for precisely zero when he did the land deal with his other landowners back  in 1822.

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This is a letter.  This is a very important letter sent by Thomas Baring to Kemp in Paris. The key figure is up there £6,975. in his solicitor’s account which his solicitor was failing to pay to him.   He had £6,975 multiplied by this factor of 70 you have got £490,000.  Not bad when you are sitting in Paris!

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Clearly he was not living in poverty.  Where was he living?  Well, you can go back these days and we found out No 64 Rue Faubourg de St Honore.  Oh my God!  It is just down the road from the Elysee Palace and it is just across the street from the Embassy of Grand Butan and from that fabulous ambassadorial house that Fatty Soames made so popular in the 1960s.  Living in poverty?  His body was taken from here and tossed into a pauper’s grave?  Please, if you meet another journalist who wants to write that please tell them don’t be so silly and naive.

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This was the legacy to Victorian Britain.  There we are Kemp Town the jewel in the crown of Victorian Brighton.  That is what he left.  That aerial shot is of  1846.  He died in 1844

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This is as it looks like today looking in from the sea,.  This is his legacy: the largest and most impressive of marine development, I would argue anywhere in the world.   It amounts today to 500,000    square feet.  In today’s market it is worth about £270million.  It is, of course, comparable with the King Alfred site and with the Brunswick site in the Marina. There is, of course, one fundamental difference between this site and their two sites.  Those two sites, despite trying for 15 years cannot raise the funding to get them built.  They will not be built in the foreseeable future and, perhaps, the real irony that would have brought a wry smile to the man who knew “nothing ofbusiness” the bank that pulled the plug on the King Alfred site was, of course,  their parent company the Baring Bank.  

Thank you very much indeed.

TALK 3: “Lessons from the past – Kemp Development and Architectural Design Today”

Professor Stephen Adutt.       Consultant Architect, former Head of Architecture, Brighton University.

Good afternoon 

This part of the session will try to do three things.  I’ll try to set the main Kemp developments into the briefest architectural context.  Secondly I think all of us through some images which I’ll kind of  wash over you, we’ll do a walk along the Marine Drive and through to the originally named Kemp Town.  Thirdly we can ask ourselves what happens after Kemp?  What lessons can we learn from this kind of development today?  Can aspects of this typology of architectural form, illuminate the way we build today?

We begin, as Michael did, in  Regency London. The date is 1818 Kemp would have been about 29 years old and the Marylebone Park Estate, later called Regents Park is being built by John Nash. The whole development in a classical revivalist style has been informed by the formal Italianate Palladian style which Michael talked about from the 16^th century.  The style which in itself was, of course,  a revival with modifications, sources being of buildings in Greece and Rome.

So we have here on the east side a simple classical architecture and on the west side, Michael showed you the drawings the same,  and when we come to Regency Park Terrace  we get this coolest of curves, detailed only on the columned ground floor, plain classical first and  second floor with a corniced third floor with a parapet.

Shortly afterwards in Bath, actually slightly earlier 1767- l774 John Wood the younger was designing and was building the great Crescent, again Michael had drawings: the rusticated ground floor, the powerful two floors of Ionic columns, the parapet and the recessed roof – very powerful, grand scale.

Seaside towns were beginning to vie with the spas and following from Bath and in parallel to Regents Park two seaside squares were beginning to be built at Brighton.  Three architects were involved, we’ve heard of them all Amon Wilds Senior, Amon Henry  Wilds,his son, and John Busby their partner.  The first man lived to be 71,  the second to be 73, and Busby died at the age of 46.  All were local men, none famous like Nash and sometimes it is difficult to attribute the particular work .to each of them, as you have already discovered from our previous speakers.  But we try to tell from the      design idiosyncrasies of each which architect and builder designed what.

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Regency Square was followed by Brunswick Square – Charles Busby – and here we have much more exuberance within the whole, great variety of form and detail and the terraces face the sea completing the square.  Meanwhile on the east side of the Steine the East Cliff retaining wall had been completed in 1827 so the cliff was no longer crumbling and Marine Parade, here at high level, and Madeira Drive, at the lower level, were established.  And so now could begin, over some 25 years, what was perhaps the longest, it is one and a half miles long, stretch of seaside facade-scape from a single architectural period in England.   It was to lead to what Anthony Dale called at its east end “one of the finest estates and of the largest proportions also in England.”

When buildings are stretched in parallel to the seafront you can see that not very many dwellings can actually look at the sea.  However as soon as you have indentations from the parallel line with the sea we get many more dwellings able to look, albeit diagonally, out at the sea and   it’s that principle which applies to us here on the Marine Parade frontage.

What I’d like us to do now…. here you can see the indentations endlessly, there is very little straight line parallel to the sea architecture….. so .what I’d like us to do now…  we are going to take a walk along that frontage.

We’ve missed Royal Crescent which had been built earlier, 1799, architect unknown, for the  West Indian developer, Jamie Otto, and our walk begins here at  Marine Square, 1824, for solicitor Thomas Attree.  A lot of variety, a somewhat intimate square, some of your friends may like living here.  Portland Place was built at about the same time, 1824, attributed to Busby, of course St. George’s Church, also at the same time, also Busby in the distance.  We think it is Busby because the detailing followed what happened later here at the east end of Brighton in that he has these very powerful two storey applied pilasters with Corinthian capitals sitting on a rusticated ground floor  and, as you will see in a minute, when  you look down the street – what he does is he builds a high building….  he builds in groups of three… he builds a high building with the applied pilasters, then two dwellings which are plainer next to the high building and then he begins his trio again: another high building, two plain buildings, one two, one two and he does that all the way down Portland Place.

In Belgrave Place we get back on the seafront  variation – a beautiful small curve, so that the two faces look towards the setting sun, towards the west, and we get a simpler first, second and third floor sitting on porticos with  Ionic capitals.

We now reach Belgrave and it is very tight, very axial, but it is again a very powerful scale which when we, again, begin to  look further eastwards is going to be continued in an unstretched line all the way to the horizon.

Percival and Clarendon Terraces follow next.  Percival is, perhaps, slightly grander.  It is interesting because here, although the buildings are parallel to the sea, the series of ten undulating bow fronts enable the occupants easily to look east and west.

That leads us to Number One of Chichester Terrace.  Which begins the great development of Kemp Town proper.  This Number One or Chichester House is fascinating because it has again, we think it is a Busby, it has got his design flair in that we have an asymetrical composition, we have giant two storey Corinthian pilasters, sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs, – a great variety within the one house. 

Looking further along the Terrace we can begin to see the ground floor porches with their Ionic capitals surmounted by these marvellous tent roofed verandahs.  I think Paul you live in one of them. There’s one of the porches, fluted columns.

If we move towards the east end of the Terrace we are beginning now to see the junction between the Terrace and the beginning of the Crescent.  You can see the half round quadrant which turns the corner giving us the change of direction which leads to the west side of the Crescent.  The buildings curve, they climb the Crescent and they then follow this sub-division of two one, two one, two one buildings: the applied pilasters, the plain applied pilasters, the two plain houses, the applied pilasters, two  plain houses and so on.  The heights here are generally five storey, although there’s a six here where we get a basement, the  rusticated ground floor, brickwork behind it but stuccoed, the two floors of pilastered work, cornice, another floor, parapet. 

As we curve round we get the anticipation of what’s going to happen around the corner and we see for the first time the west side of Sussex Square – very long – unfortunately, I think, truncated by Eastern Road but there it is. 

As we jump across Eastern Road we see the flank wall of the north end of the Square and now with the north wall of the Square we begin to see some of the brickwork which Michael referred to, the facing brickwork behind the stucco.  Apparently some of the covenants  weren’t enforced so some people left brickwork.

If we look into the corner of the Square we do realise that it wasn’t all perfectly laid out.     The setting out didn’t allow that column head to work in the left hand corner so it was a kind of three quarter column head.

 But we move on past the great man’s house, there it is, and we look at the centre of the Square itself.  Michael  had a drawing of this – very powerful, totally different in composition from anything else in Kemp Town  because it is on a compositional axis of the whole lot.  There it is – a very powerful set-up. 

Back into the further corner – again the high and the low developments.  We turn southwards in the evening sun.  We see the beautiful Ionic capitals and we move further south, still the Square.  We are about to turn a corner again at the final curve, the east curve of Sussex Square with a mixture of porticos, some single, some double, this may now be one property, someone may be able to tell us and we reach the corner of the curve and we are on the final leg of the walk and we see the beginnings of Arundel Terrace which is reckoned by everyone as the most lavishly designed in the whole development.  It is totally symmetrical with thirteen houses.  This central  dwelling with its only tripartite free-standing columns which, it is thought, that Wilds and Busby and whoever else was involved, they wanted this kind of terrace to be also at Chichester but it never was because 25 years later the money ran out.  But it was this kind of development that it was hoped would form the two arms facing the sea.

Now this will interest you,  I tried to draw the scale of the footprints of some of the stuff we have been talking about.    You haven’t yet seen this little thing, I am going to show you that, which is the Barbican Crescent but the other three Crescents you have seen.  There’s Bath in yellow, there’s Regents Park, and yes truly the same scale, beneath the Park there is our development with the Square behind it and the two arms.  We did this study from Ordnance Survey maps and it is clear it ties up with what Michael and Sue have said, that this was the grandest scale of development.

Perhaps if we can now leave the memory of all this – this painting perhaps 1870, the photograph of maybe 1890 Pevsner used to say this is so big you can that you can never see all the sides of the square but here, in fact before Henry Phillips’ gardens grew you could see them.  Maybe Pevsner couldn’t see them because by that time the vegetation had grown.  Here is this lovely lady with her parasol walking in about 1904 on the esplanades against the sea.

Michael has reminded us that everyone before Kemp, during Kemp, and perhaps for 200 years after Kemp liked to live in the equivalent of a palace.  This is actually Schonbrunn about 1760, an Austrian architect Fischer von Erlach.  Look at the proportions!  The proportions are about, what we’ve been looking at in Kemp Town.  We have rusticated ground floor, two major floors with applied pilasters, cornice,  parapet and a recessed roof.  That is it.  Once Classicism wasn’t being used so much in the 20^th century, nevertheless, other perhaps poorer people, not the middle class or the upper middle classes, that we’ve been talking about before, wanted to live in these powerful overall buildings. 

This is Socialist workers’ housing in Vienna at about 1930.  Their designers were, perhaps, giving them the fortress to live in and so the individuals were subsumed by the overall as were those who lived in palaces.  Later architects who weren’t using Classicism tried to do the same.  This is Rob Krier, a Luxemburg architect who was trying to raise the order of things for ordinary people.  This is an estate near Vienna called  ——–strasse  at about 1980 and you can see, in trying to do without Classicism, what we’ve been looking at just now.  It becomes a bit like Noddyland if it’s not done right and other architects were trying to do the same.

This is Ricardo Bofill a Spanish architect, trying to design almost his own orders and giving people a kind of overpowering Fascistic architecture. How about that!  That is really Fascistic!….to live in!    Well, people were prepared to do that in order to live in something bigger than themselves.

Of course, here in dear Brighton we have Marine Gate 1937 – 39 architects Winfrey Simpson and Guthrie following Thirties’ Modernism living in something bigger than themselves.  One of my colleagues who is sitting in the audience here is going to live in one of these but no-one will know if he is on the third floor or fifth floor – they are the same.  But he is happy to do that because he is living within in a greater whole than his single flat.  

Corbusier was trying to kind of follow the trend.  Here he is trying to persuade us to live in slab blocks.  This is Unite d’Habitation in Marseille 1947- 52 sort of thing.  People enjoyed living in it. 

Monumentalism does work sometimes.  Here we are in the Barbican.  I wanted to show you Frobisher Court which is, kind of, somewhere up there in the Barbican. There it is up there  – another Crescent which, I suppose as an architect, I think is stunning.  Those people who don’t like brutalist Modernism, of course, don’t think it is stunning but it is interesting that you can’t buy a flat in the Barbican easily because everyone likes living in it.  That’s interesting isn’t it?

And so, the last question – what now?  Our world is very, very different.  People want individuality, and yet we know that we are in a world where populations are growing, populations are on the move, there’ll be greater and greater density in our cities, people will have to live closer and closer together if we are to keep any of the countryside that is left.  What lessons can Kemp and his kind of developments give us in that situation?  Well, he has given us one lesson:  he built densely, very densely even in fields and that we are going to have to do.

I am ending by showing you the work of one modern architectural group.  They are a Dutch firm and they are trying to do several things to help dense developments  become all right, likeable, liked by all of us.  Here is a development, that is not a plan that is an elevation.  Buildings, great buildings that have great holes in them. This is a vertical development of  what Basil Spence did on the ground at  Falmer really, he put holes in Falmer House and so the idea is that you are still in touch with Nature even though you live in a megalith.   You may not like that.

Another possibility is to apply much more colour.  So that even if all the floors in a high building are much the same  colour coding gives you identity.  You may not like that either.

The same firm in Amsterdam is building these artificial islands with water running between them, obviously and what’s happening here is that a powerful idea of residential strip development is then handed over  not to one firm of architects designers but to many architects and many designers so that any single dwelling in this long run, there’s one of them, can be designed to be  different – same plan as that, but different designers and that gives the variety, the diversity which most people today would crave.

In England there are other architects, these are called Urban Splash, who are trying to do the same thing.  This is not built, it is a project for Manchester and it is these kinds of ideas which are on drawing boards now.

But in the meantime we’re still living in 200 year old dwellings, very comfortably, there are no carriages at the doors but we like living in them because we can still walk out of our communal front door in the evening and look at this great space, dense architecture connected to  planting and if we walk a bit further we can look at the sunset.

Thank you.

The Day was followed by a concert, consisting of the following programme.

THOMAS KEMP’S MUSICAL SOIREE

I am writing to inform you about the community consultation that we are holding for our Rampion Offshore Wind Farm draft proposals.  The consultation starts this Monday 13th February and continues until Sunday 6th May, which means that the local community have a full 12 weeks to respond.

I attach a copy of our latest Newsletter which provides an overview of the consultation and includes an events listing of the public exhibitions which we are holding in 12 locations across Sussex.   Some are being held in coastal towns and others in the vicinity of the proposed underground onshore cable route.

Further details are available on our Rampion webpages at www.eon-uk.com/rampion.  From Monday morning, you will be able to find the Community Consultation Document which provides all the details about our proposals, including photomontages, maps and plans, the potential impacts and benefits of the project.  There is also a consultation questionnaire for providing feedback to the consultation, or of course you can write to us or email us with your comments.  Our Statement of Community Consultation has been published this week in four local newspapers and is also on the website, providing details of 37 public venues across Sussex where hard copies of the consultation documents can be found.

As key individuals and organisations representing a wider community interest group, we hope you’ll be able to help us raise awareness of our draft proposals and the community consultation to the wider community.  We have promoted and advertised the consultation widely, but we want to do all we can to raise awareness and attract people to the public exhibitions. The intention is to show our plans, answer questions about the project and receive comments to help shape our proposals before submitting our development consent application later in the year.

I hope you have time to visit one of the public exhibitions and I look forward to seeing you there.

Many thanks,

Chris Tomlinson

Development Manager

Rampion Offshore

E.ON Climate & Renewables

01273 603 721

07815 141 008

(BRUNSWICK)  DEVELOPMENT

There was an article in the Argus on 27^th January 2012 in which it was indicated that the 1^st phase of the outer Brighton Marina harbour development might start by the end of the year. This is the development on the Spending Beach and West Quay for which planning permission was granted in 2006. The permission includes the 40 storey ‘Roaring Forties’ tower, an architecturally striking building which is thought to be influential in the granting of the permission but  which is timetabled to be in the last phase of the development and which many people think will be impossible to build.

Andrew Goodall claimed in the article that “We have got a live planning application but within that we are moving some of the car parking around”.  We understand the application to amend the planning permission is rather more to it than that and will include:

removal of the proposed harbour offices;

removal of yacht club;

removal of lift for residents in the north core;

removal of an emergency staircase;

removal of dedicated loading bay;

more retail space (given by the release of space from harbour offices and yacht club).

This is not yet certain, and Brunswick have not specified where the Harbour Office and Yacht Cub will eventually end up, which must raise suspicions that, like the children’s playground to be built as part of the Seattle Hotel development, these will never arrive.  It is also possible the emergency parking for the lifeboat men might be included in the moving of the RNLI parking area from ground level to basement.

Kemp Town Society  has established from the Planning Officer that while plans have been submitted for attachment, these relate to the existing application.  She understands that a new application relating to parking is imminent.   This will be a separate application and require the usual consultation and procedures.  We will continue to watch the planning register for its appearance.

KTS QUIZ NIGHT    SUNDAY MARCH 4TH at St George’s Church Crypt

A quiz night has been organised for Sunday March 4th at St George’s Church Crypt

The cost is £11.00 per head – 6.30 for 7.00 p.m. start. A glass of wine is included in the price and Clare Stone will again provide us with a platter of finger food at around 8.0 p.m.

We are limited to 64 people and already many are interested so please apply for tickets as soon as possible. If you are making up a table of eight, please collect the cheques and submit them with the names of the members participating.

All cheques should be made out to THE  KEMP TOWN SOCIETY and sent to Pam Meek at Flat 3. 24 Lewes Crescent, Brighton BN2 1GB. tel.673135 or Marie Freeman 2.Chichester Place Brighton BN2 1FE. tel 621760. Tickets are not available on the evening.

Mike and Barbara Luper are running the quiz and ofcourse we are delighted that they have agreed to give us another splendid evening of fun.

Name………………………………………………………. Address………………………………………………………………..

…………………………………………………………………Telephone ………………………….email…………………………

List your names here if you are making up a table

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SUNDAY 25TH MARCH……………..SUPPER IN THE DOG. cancelled owing to lack of support

SUNDAY 29TH APRIL ………………. SUPPER IN THE DOG.cancelled owing to lack of support

  We are preparing once again to celebrate the Annual Garden Party of The Kemp Town Society, however in this special year we are proposing to invite you to a Diamond Jubilee Summer Party on Saturday June 2nd  in the North Garden which will have all the features you know and love, with lots of surprise additions. We are suggesting that everyone dresses up this year in RED WHITE BLUE and BLING ! At least all or some of these ! There will be a prize for the most stunning outfit.

As usual we are wanting volunteers to help with Festive Food, Cakes and Ideas. Please call Vanessa 01273 699690 if you would like to be involved.

The following clip reached us today :

Laing O’Rourke is to close down Explore Living, its housebuilding division, for at least two years, until it sees significant improvement in the housing market.

The division will build out all existing projects, but then mothball its land bank of 1,000 plots until there is a sustained recovery. Most staff will be retained,with only a handful of redundancies expected, but chairman Paul Healey and managing director Karl Pickering are to leave.

A spokesman for Laing O’Rourke said: “All future phases on these sites, plus development sites owned by Explore Living where construction work has not started, will be paused. Work will not recommence until consumer confidence returns to the UK housing market, and greater certainty exists regarding the sales prospects for these developments. We expect this period of inactivity to extend for a minimum of two years as the government’s austerity measures and the scarcity of mortgage lending continue to suppress housing demand.”

“Longer term, the group remains confident around the strength of the current development portfolio, with sites located in desirable areas across the south east, which we consider to have potential to grow in value as the housing market recovers. As projects complete on their current phases of work, Explore Living employees will be transferred onto other projects elsewhere within the group where it is feasible for them to do so. However, an unfortunate consequence will be that a small number of redundancies will result from this decision, although we will seek to minimise the impact on affected individuals to the greatest extent possible,” the spokesman added.

BLACK ROCK DEVELOPMENT

At the CAG meeting today Rob Fraser, Head of planning gave a detailed report on the present situation.

He advised that Brighton International Arena Ltd now have funding for the planning stage. He said that considerable progress had been made in the back ground.

The proposed development would be an Ice rink. The outer appearance of the Ice rink would be substantially unchanged but there were changes made to the proposed interior.

He mentioned 140 car parking spaces within the development.

He did not know when a planning application would be submitted. He thought that the time table would be mid summer but there would be a consultation, where our Input would be given.

The City Council would support the development of the site as an Ice Rink in principle.

It is not surprising then that, where we live, has raised its importance. In simple terms, greater value in ”being at home” and becoming more aware of the neighbourhood in which we live and share our lives is also inevitable, if you do not go out as much, or travel as much.

The Society has raised its game in this simple area by encouraging its members and guests to attend meals at local restaurants in the spirit of Community. Other activities to bind the members together continue, not least with our well attended Garden Party, breaking all records.

The Kemp Town Society has always kept a diligent eye on our distinctive surroundings, as it seeks to help those living within its boundaries to value its highly prized architectural merits.

We have been engaged in attending the Royal Sussex Hospital’s development plan and others in the area. Our voice, along with others attending the public meetings has positively contributed to improvements to the proposed plan. Putting such a large regional hospital in such a restricted site in the long term seems counter-productive, but we are in no position to fight on that scale. The influx of more staff will increase the demand for accommodation and other services in the area, so it will have economic benefits undoubtedly. Where the money will come from to build the new tower and “Barry building”, remains to be seen. I personally am sad at the loss of the old Barry facade, disconnecting the modern structure from its surroundings and historical architectural reference. Rampant modernism in architecture – undoubtedly supported by functional necessities – still believes it has no obligation to the “setting” into which the new interacts.

Our overriding task last year has been to prepare for the restoration of the railings. This eventful year is to implement the work.

We will be announcing the amendment from our Charitable identity and number to that defined as a ”charitable corporation limited by guarantee”. We will be changing our rather endearing charitable number to another. It means little except to modernise to a more advanced structure, which in particular benefits your Society Trustees losing their personal financial liability from the affairs of the Society. This liability becomes more sensitive when handling contracted payments in excess of £200,000 for the railings project. We await the Charity Commissions consent to the re-registration application.

The selection of materials and the trades to do the work is the current work at hand. Kemp Town Enclosures Ltd has appointed a Surveyor, Frankhams, to commence the tendering process and to manage the project on behalf of themselves and our Society. There will be a follow up report soon with actual financial costs  as well as an invitation for the community to participate in the funding of this project before the works are commenced. This is a true example of the community in action, led by the two organisations which are entrusted to preserve and enhance the listed Estate.

The programme of events for the coming year will be posted in due course. We will be hampered by two of our committee members being detained by unanticipated matters to reduce their energies over the immediate months, but we will seek to overcome this added challenge to our operations.

I wish you all a more positive New Year!

Paul

Paul Phillips

Chairman.

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