Academic Geoffrey Mead’s walking tour of London Road starts at St Peter’s Church, itself testimony to the city’s enjoyment of celebrating ambition over planning – we are told, as we wait for the last few stragglers to arrive. Fortunately Mead’s walking tour is laid out with significantly more organisation than the architecture.
Look up above the discount shop fronts and international cuisine cafes to the period features and there’s a past Mead conjures of pre-train station magazine press-worthy front gardens and grand architecture, restructured only when the introduction of trams dictated straight roads. Mead’s historical geography is meticulous and his evident passion for the subject draws out a fascination from his audience.
Moving from one point of interest to another in a circuit of twittens and marketplaces – past and present – there’s a plethora of details at hand from the history of the trees on The Level, (the oldest being gifts from a benevolent past noble), to a row of cottages with the colour of their front doors marking them as baggsied for church widows over 100 years ago.
There’s a weaving between the wealthy frontages and the poorer architecture tucked behind them – physically and historically – resulting in an anthropological map emerging and overlaying itself neatly on top of the current landscape, privileged and less-so in close and casual proximity. Industry rising and falling, past vibrancy handed over to the new guard.
It’s only 90 minutes but Mead’s tour transports us to another world in that hour and a half, leaving delightful factual titbits that had me examining flint walls and looking up at cornices with a new wonder.
Meet Outside St Peter’s Church, Friday-Sunday throughout Brighton Fringe run, 5pm
https://www.brightonfringe.org/events/geoffrey-meads-london-road-tour
