Save Our Starlings!

Flocking starlings are one of the most stunning sights in the natural world. And their free ariel display has been a feature of Brighton seafront for many years. 

But now their numbers are in decline and the spectacle around the shell of the West Pier is now smaller and less frequent than in years gone by.

While Brighton Bloody Council continues to entertain speculators’ dreams of observation towers, twisted skyscrapers and outsized ferris wheels along our seafront, they seem oblivious to the dwindling of a true natural wonder in our town.

My friend Lisa who runs a café in town suggested that we should do more to encourage them back. This could be done by replacing some of the wood that burnt down a decade ago in a mysterious fire on the West Pier. Once thousands of starlings roosted on the derelict pier’s wooden structures.  Now only a steel skeleton of the pier remains – hardly a comfortable perch.

Installing perching beams would entail work on a dangerous structure, but need not be prohibitively expensive. It would not need to be safe for human visitors.

The West Pier Trust, which owns the wrecked pier, has given up on redeveloping it. Lottery funds evaporated, developers went bust, etc… But it makes sense to leave it be.  We have one serviceable tourist pier already.  The end-of-the-pier shows it was once home to are ancient history.

Instead, the trust wants to build a 150-metre high observation tower at the pier’s entrance. It’s as if someone looked at Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower and said lazily, “me too”.

Observation towers presuppose there is something remarkable to observe.  In Portsmouth, it’s the ships.  Up a Brighton tower, tourists could look out to sea - and see the horizon a little lower down than before; alternatively, they could do a 180 and look at Brighton itself, although that’s better done from any of the South Downs behind the town. It’s a town surrounded by hills – you don’t need to climb a spire to see it.

You don’t need an observation tower to watch starlings paint the sky either, but at least it would give tourists something incredible to gaze at from their raised glass bubble.

What I propose is that we investigate making minimal alterations to the West Pier to encourage the starlings back.  This is going to be a tough sell in Brighton, which has never quite got over its reputation as a town that’s helping police with their enquiries in a kiss-me-quick hat.

But let’s be optimistic. The property bubble is well and truly over, so all those extra luxury flats aren’t going to happen now.

We have elected the country’s first Green MP, Caroline Lucas.  It’s time we lived up to our new image by doing something for wildlife.

Incidentally, some fascinating research on birds’ flocking behaviour can be found here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3323488/Study-of-starling-formations-points-way-for-swarming-robots.html

Vandals

It looks like a dinosaur devouring a building. The hydraulic crane’s steel jaws are pecking away at the vast former nurses’ residence in the hospital behind our road. Its sharp, angular outline has dominated the view up the hill for decades; soon there will be a toothy gap between the houses.  Since the plan was announced a few years back, I have imagined a wrecking ball or dynamite. This slow grazing by steel diplodocus has me baffled.  My neighbour, whose father used to be a demolition man, says she used to help him salvage bricks as buildings were slowly dismantled. Are bricks now so cheap that we don’t recycle them?

The site will become a car park. The planned development of blocks of flats has been put on ice as the property mania subsides, and housing association grants are slashed.

Still the destruction goes ahead. My neighbour has a theory as to why. Some of the local kids have been breaking into this semi-derelict ex-warehouse of angels. Letting fireworks off, that sort of thing. It is so labyrinthine that the police can never find the culprits when they arrive. The graffiti they have left on the walls of a fifth floor flat is now visible as the building’s secret insides are laid bare. I never knew this world existed until now.

They won’t touch the main hospital because it is listed. A former workhouse, it was also a hospital for  Indian soldiers who fought for the British in the fields of France during WW1. At least, they sent the lower castes to the workhouse. The wounded officers were billeted in the Pavilion. It has the same angles as the nurses block, but they will never mechanically devour a building with a clock tower.

I will miss the Victorian monstrosity that was the nurses’ home, however. If you looked towards moonrise and Jupiter, it had a ghostly presence in the east. I always thought I saw lights on, human life, but these were tricks, echoes.

It was part of that feeling that you were on the edge of civilisation – where the rows of houses suddenly ended with fields that just go on. I’m romanticising a little here. Brighton racecourse buffers the countryside. But the badgers and the foxes don’t seem to mind that too much. I hope they aren’t spooked by the prehistoric roar of modernity, modernising.

24 Our Party People

Of course it’s all coloured by the fact that I am falling hopelessly in love with someone, but last night’s reggae party at my neighbour’s house was the best yet for me. Proper sound systems, decks, curry and homemade cocktails in the kitchen….

So this is a few words in praise of my Bloody Brighton, the one with its roots in the anarchist bookshops and cafes of the 80s, the hippy diaspora and the working class local politics of the estates.

“You actually know all your neighbours!” one girl exclaims to me. Most of my neighbours are with me on the dance floor, along with many others drawn in through friendships and the new social media networks.

 This is Emma’s house. The other side is Amy, who also hosts great parties, American Amy, who lives in a caravan in the first Amy’s drive and Tallulah from the same end of the close. Its crammed with writers, thinkers, community activists, and the kind of party lovers I used to know from the Section 47 raves in London. My kind of people.

“I live in Notting Hill,” the girl continues. “No-one knows anyone. At night it’s dead – all private clubs.”

A few years ago, some Sunday filth-sheet did an expose of this estate, trying desperately to make it sound like a cross between Beruit and LA Watts. “Yeh, you gotta carry a blade round here for protection,” some hoody sniffs to the encouraging scratch of the journalist’s pen. Total bullshit of course. We had a few problems with bored youf a few years back. People here got organised and something got done. We have a community centre and youth activities now.  The rather aggressive lad with learning difficulties who used to kick a ball up and down the street all day now has a job on the bins. He looks proper made up, I’m told.

In Notting Hill the solution would be to lock them out.

Actually, that’s unfair. This kind of community spirit, part bohemian, part working class self help, exists in abundance across London. I saw it in Camden when I used to write about that area. Follow the basslines into the house parties, the dimly lit community halls, the surreal protests and the sheer joy of being alive and not thinking that life is happening elsewhere, behind a locked gate.

Once a piece of city has become a place of commerce, that use will continue forever, the interest being sold from one corporation to another. Children won’t play there again.

Take Lewes Road community garden – oh, someone just did. They think we need another one of these:

When next door we have these

And down the road is a massive

Brighton Bloody Council seem to think its OK for the supermarkets to play Death Match by Discounts there because it was once a petrol station. In the meantime, a weed thrust itself up through the cement for a bit.

There’s nothing we superannuated hippies love more than a derelict square of concrete upon which to sit with our buggies among the flowerpots and people in ridiculous trousers.

Give it back to the people and I might even wander in one day.

Fame

Spent the weekend away from BB. In St Stephen’s Park, Dublin, there is a bust of a hero of the 1916 Easter rising, Constance Markiewicz. Her revolutionary act was to shoot a postman who refused to surrender his bike to them, and then order the digging of trenches in the park – the road being too hard for that sort of thing. Her fellow rebels, now entrenched and primed for burial, were easily picked off by gunmen in the nearby buildings.

O’Connell Street

is home to more heroes. Trade Unionist Jim Larkin seems a worthier cause. His stirring words are inscribed on the plinth.  “The great appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise”.  Jim’s statue towers above us, though we don’t kneel. Rarely has a man’s words been so undermined by his monument.

Further down is a towering steel needle, which replaced a replica of Nelson’s Column that was blown up by the IRA. I can sympathise with that one. “But they replaced it with a monument to nothing,” says my Irish friend.

Nothing seems to be an appropriate god given the state of the Irish economy. Like everyone else, they’ve spent the past 15 years treating themselves to frappucinos and the rest of it while their banks and politicians have been a little more extravagant. Ireland’s huge bank and property bail-out is being touted as the latest iceberg ahead of the good ship Euro.

The only statues that go up in England these days are of well-loved comedians in seaside towns. We have Max Miller here in Brighton. Morecambe has Eric. No-one will be blowing them up any time soon.

Heading back south of the river, we pass a street vendor. It is Pat Ingoldsby, former Irish children’s TV presenter, newspaper columnist and poet - except he can’t get a publisher these days, so he sells his books in person. He reads us poems he wrote today in a notebook. I laugh at one of his titles:

A poem about trainee hard men from posh upper middle class families who put on phony Dublin working class accents and pray that they won’t meet their sister while they are out with their mates because if she speaks to him in the way that the family usually speaks his cover will be blown.

The pub is adorned with photos of Beckett, Kavanagh, Joyce, etc. Some of them drank here once. Pat Ingoldsby strolls in with his shopping trolley of books and sips a Guinness in the corner. “When he’s gone, they’ll have t-shirts with him on too,” says my friend.

Bloody Brighton

There are 15 people in the bus queue, including a man wearing ridiculous trousers. No one is surprised. Welcome to Brighton.


I have worn some ridiculous trousers in my time, sometimes more by accident than by design; other times, as with these jeans, I have no excuse.

This guy’s are a harlequin check. Combined with his tight black hoodie it might be the uniform of some go-ahead bakers. It might not be his fault.

 I live on a council estate at the edge of what we are now supposed to call a city. Around the time of the world cup the local boys hung the flag of St George from every lamppost. The self-styled City council took them down again. Shinning up lampposts is a health and safety risk. I’m past surprise at this sort of red-rag-to-a-bull approach to public safety. The next day more flags are bought, more lampposts shinned or stepladdered.

I return from holiday to find every local lamppost – except ours – braying for England. I hope I’m not suspected of taking England’s glory down. Julie next door tells me it blew down and there are plans to replace it.

Christine wants to know my feelings about the flags and I express my approval. “Spoken like a true born Englishman,” she grins and pumps my hand. She’s pissed. Christine has never had a job. Her front door is open all summer long.

She is “not being funny”, but apparently its all down to the fact that some “Paki” family complained, although “they’re allowed to celebrate whatever they want.”

I try to tell her she’s got the wrong end of the stick, but it’s futile. This stick has two wrong ends.


 The council then become rather lax on health and safety and leave the flags alone, at least until the Germans knock us out the tournament and they begin the slow decline into tattered hopes.

 Christine is right about one thing, though – it’s not funny. Earlier this year a Bengali family had their window smashed by young men. Their children go to school with mine, play with mine. They have to live in a street where other people smash their windows.

I have taken to wearing an England t-shirt. It’s not the flag of St George or the 3 lions of national disappointment. It shows a red rose: the flower of Lancaster or New Labour – English history or more hopes dashed? I prefer to think of it as Blake’s rose, an invisible worm gnawing its heart out.