Bury my heart in Seven Dials
Life is a constant desire to make sense of the insensible . To know Brighton is to know you can never really know it - but you can feel it . And that ’ s exactly what David Andrews thought
1976 . Ground Zero . My first year at university , and my first encounter with Brighton ’ s Seven Dials .
Reader , it was a dump . Not even a glamorous dump . I ’ d come from an edgy part of north London , but areas in Brighton in the mid 70 ’ s were pretty tasty , as they used to say in The Sweeney .
The site of The Cow ( nee The Tin Drum ) was a Spa ‘ supermarket ’. But really , you took your life in your own hands passing over the threshold . Who knew who or what lay within . What you could be sure about was being hustled by a gauntlet of junkies on the way out . As this was way before The Walking Dead , there was no shuffling , snarling zombie precedent on which to assess the level of danger , but you could be pretty sure that things may well end badly if you did not hand over at the very least a fag .
Nonetheless a lack of other options meant this was a regular gauntlet to be run . The chi chi wine shops and innumerable coffee joints which pepper the area now were long pre-dated by some horrible greasy spoons and a smattering of shops so run down it was difficult to determine whether or not they actually sold anything or were in fact fronts for other nefarious operations . There was for example a faded antique shop opposite The Flour Pot which , in my head , was clearly an elaborate facade for a hive of criminal activity .
The area was also well known as a red light stop off for punters hopping off the London Victoria trains . A short , gasping march up Gloucester Road and they were in streetwalker nirvana .
One of my early rental flats in the area was always popular with friends coming down from London . It may have been seedy , but it was seedy and central . And if you were stumbling out of the Zodiac club on West Street at 4am partially deafened by Dexys Midnight Runners ’ blasting you insensible , then the relatively brief sway to to Seven Dials was a Godsend .
An old actor buddy of mine , Sean Wood , came down from London for a knees up one icy cold winter ’ s night , and the familiar three in the morning lock-in at The Good Companions saw us in high spirits .
Being a relative lightweight I passed out pretty much as soon as I stumbled upstairs to bed , but unbeknown to me , my old mate Sean had sensibly decided to remove all his clothes and clean his teeth before hitting the sack .
All fine , except , fatally , he turned right rather than left out of the spare downstairs bedroom , and the door he opened thinking he was nipping into the bathroom was in fact the front door onto Dyke Road . Too late , realising his error , as he turned with horror to scramble back into the warmth , the door had slammed firmly shut .
A stark naked , highly inebriated actor went into full Fred Flintstone mode with increasing panic . It was after all by now 4am on a particularly freezing . February night . And I was out for the count .
It would have been easier to wake the dead , and ( when he finally did manage to speak to me again ), Sean reported several kerb-crawling drivers slowing to offer him alternative accommodation for what was left of the night .
As I breezily said when he finally managed to wake me ( by screaming through the letter box for 45 minutes ), the wandering tribes of the Kalahari would have regarded a single night under a fixed roof protected from the elements as a ridiculous luxury . And anyway , these were the days of the metaphorical short , sharp shock . Sean wasn ’ t quite so philosophical about it .
Once described as a town in search of a fight , Brighton has always had its rough underbelly . While the current levels of gentrification belie its impossibly hard heritage , if you dig deep enough you ’ ll be able to flush out whispering echoes of what over the centuries has made the town so … so different .
Of course we all know of the romantic associations of writers like Greene and the perpetually soused Patrick Hamilton , with other greats such as Malcolm Lowry rarely far from a piss up and a punch up in some Regency bar or other . But Brighton has always been about an inherent otherness . It ’ s indefinable .
As Proust said , you have to live it and you have to feel it . For we measure our lives in encounters , in off-grid relationships and a constant desire to make sense of the insensible . And to know Brighton is to know you can never really know it . But you can feel it .