There’s not one thing I don’t love about the street in Hove where I live, with the sea at one end and the restaurant quarter at the other; if I had to fetishise a non-sentient thing, like those women who ‘marry’ rollercoasters, I’d be kinky for my street. (‘Avenue’, rather.) One of the lovely things about it is that I can see a section of Hove Lawns from my balcony – the manicured green spaces which differentiate our seafront from Brighton’s in one of many ways. (We smell nice, for a start.) Even better, I can hear Hove Lawns, which was always pleasant for me but – now I’m a cripple – keeps me connected to the beat of the neighbourhood I adore.
Recently they hosted a 12-hour tribute band festival and a Soul 2 Soul show in the same weekend – that was fun. But the sound I love to hear from the Lawns more than any other is that of teenagers taking their messy ease, which a few hundred school-leavers do there towards the end of June every year to celebrate the conclusion of exams.
Not everyone feels this way. You’d think that it might be crochety old folk (like me – an OAP next month) who object to teenagers having a moderately rambunctious time on the Lawns, but it was in fact the People’s Republic of Brighton & Hove Council who allowed the cops to go in last week and lurk purposefully – as indeed they had in previous years. Our local paper, the Argus, reported ominously:
Ahead of the event, Sussex Police said it had deployed additional resources to patrol the area following a recent rise in youth disorder, including multiple reports of violence during large unsupervised meet-ups. A spokesperson for Sussex Police has since confirmed that a 16-year-old girl was arrested for being drunk and disorderly, later being de-arrested after being taken home to parents. Officers also supported a number of teenagers who appeared to be intoxicated and in a vulnerable state.
Considering the police’s failure to protect girls from the late 1980s onwards – when the danger came from groups of adult men from certain privileged minority groups – it seems a bit rich that they now rush to ‘support’ teenagers drinking with their friends. Really, what is the beef with kids getting drunk and getting off with each other? We’re forever hearing about the loneliness and anxiety epidemics sweeping this teenage cohort. Then when they get out of their bedrooms and off their computers, it’s treated as some sort of public order moral panic. It’s not just outside my window that it’s happening; last month in Cornwall, according to Cornwall Live:
Police have announced a crackdown on teenage parties taking place on a beach in St Austell after reports of anti-social behaviour and disorder. There will be targeted patrols by police and site security along the beaches and surrounding area. Site security officers will check bags of young people entering the site, if suspected of being under 18 years old, and any alcohol found will be confiscated. There will also be communication with secondary schools to identify information leading up to these gatherings. Information was also shared at the meeting of a number of parents being seen by security staff in the car park supplying young people with alcohol. The police have called on parents to ‘act responsibly’.
When French parents give their pre-teen children alcohol, it’s bum-sucked by the liberal establishment as being in some way the height of civilised behaviour; back in Blighty, slipping a bottle of strawberry cider to a 16-year-old son or daughter is irresponsible.
You should see the state of most of our public spaces after Pride weekend
Here, as in Cornwall, the kids are repeatedly accused of lethal-level littering, leaving the Lawns besmirched with discarded alcohol bottles and pesky vapes – but once again the two-tier policing angle rears its ugly, hypocritical head. You should see the state of most of our public spaces after Pride weekend, when you could keep Sodom, Gomorrah and Babylon going for a year with the amount of drugs and sex aids left lying around. Whole neighbourhoods are annexed and it becomes near impossible to cross the city in a car due to the number of partying pedestrians raving in the roads. But no one would ever dream of telling the precious QWERTY-folx not to make a nuisance of themselves; no, when they leave garbage all over the show, it’s joyous.
This city has also been notorious for the laughable state of its alleged ‘refuse collection’ over the decades, most recently leading to a report in the Argus which noted rubbish left uncollected for six weeks, much to the delight of the local rat population. This is due to the long-standing inefficiency of various grandstanding, virtue-signalling councils, who prefer to spend our tax on ridiculous spectacles like the i360 tower – which earlier this year was discounted more than £50 million so the clowns could sell it. But perhaps the most laughable duplicity can be seen in the way that Hove Lawns is repeatedly mired in the eyesore convoys of mobile homes belonging to travellers; in a city where parking is only slightly less difficult than teleporting, the freedom given to these repeat visitors is remarkable. A spokesman for the council chuckled indulgently last year: ‘We are aware of the unauthorised encampment on Hove Lawns and our traveller liaison team will be visiting the site alongside Sussex Police.’ I wouldn’t put it past them to have handed every last traveller a goody-bag – when of course what they should have done was run them out of town and restored the Lawns to those who pay for their upkeep.
Brighton & Hove City Council website tells us that ‘Hove Lawns were used for promenading by the fashionable set into the 20th century. The West Brighton Estate Lawns were originally for private use by those living to the north. Hove Council took over their maintenance in 1948, when they became accessible to the public.’ Now Hove Council is long gone, swallowed by an ever-peckish Brighton. Kids whose parents pay ever-increasing council tax can’t let off steam in public parks without being bothered by the filth; travellers who don’t pay a penny can do what they like in them. Much as I love this city – not just my street – when it comes to examples of Broken Britain, I’ve got a whopper right on my doorstep.
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