The Prince of Wales was 21 when he first turned up in Brighton on 7 September 1783. He’d come to see his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, who was staying at Grove House on the Steine. Back then Brighton was a modest little town that people were only starting to visit for the sea air. The prince loved it. He was back the following summer and the one after that, and by 1787 the architect Henry Holland had turned a farmhouse on the Steine into his Marine Pavilion. John Nash added the domes and minarets between 1815 and 1822, and Brighton has been in the business of having a good time ever since.
Before the Pavilion became the centre of local society, Brighton’s evenings belonged to its assembly rooms. In 1767 the Old Ship hired Robert Golden to build a new suite to compete with the rooms at the Castle Inn. Alongside a ballroom ninety feet long, with galleries for musicians and spectators, he designed a card room under a vaulted, decorated plaster ceiling. By 1780 the Old Ship was holding card evenings every Tuesday and Saturday. Whist and piquet were the respectable end of things, while faro and the dice game hazard were where real money changed hands. Georgian high society had a well-earned reputation for losing it.
The fun spilled outdoors too. In the summer of 1783 the Duke of Cumberland and a group of leading townspeople organised the first public races on Whitehawk Hill, although horses had been raced in Brighton since before 1713. Then came the piers. The first, the Chain Pier, went up in 1823. The Palace Pier followed on 20 May 1899, although on paper it was the Brighton Marine Palace and Pier. Its domed winter garden later became the Palace of Fun arcade, and the rattle of coins in the machines has been part of a Brighton day out for generations.
That appetite for a flutter never really went away. It just moved off the seafront and onto our phones. These days the nearest thing to a Tuesday card evening at the Old Ship is probably a few hands at an online casino played from the sofa rather than under a plaster ceiling. Georgian players had it rather wilder. Faro and hazard were technically outlawed at the time, yet the fashionable set played them anyway and a whole fortune could go in a single night.
Where Brighton’s Playful Past Still Shows
The Royal Pavilion is the obvious place to start. Nash’s Banqueting Room and Music Room are every bit as theatrical now as when George IV entertained there. He last stayed in 1827, and Queen Victoria never took to the place, so in 1850 the town bought it for £53,000. The grounds are next in line for some attention, with the Royal Pavilion Garden restoration now backed by more than £1.4 million in extra funding and the main works expected to begin in November 2026.
The Old Ship on King’s Road is Brighton’s oldest hotel. In 1671 it was bought by Nicholas Tettersell, the captain whose boat carried Charles II to France in 1651. Its 1767 assembly rooms are Grade II* listed, and Historic England’s official list entry describes the original first-floor assembly room, now called the Regency Room, right down to its Adam-style fireplace and decorated arched ceiling. You can still stand in a space those Georgian card players knew.
Up on Whitehawk Hill, about a mile from the seafront, Brighton Racecourse still hosts flat racing from April to October. It’s an unusual track. Instead of a full circuit there’s a left-handed horseshoe, so the horses drop downhill into the home straight and then have to climb all the way to the winning post. The busiest days come with the three-day festival in early August.
Last stop, the Palace Pier. The Chain Pier is long gone and the West Pier is now just a skeleton of ironwork out in the sea, so this is the one Brighton pier you can still walk along. Its theatre, which opened in 1901, has also disappeared, replaced by more arcade space and fairground rides. Around the turn of the millennium the pier was rebranded simply as Brighton Pier, a name most locals ignored, and the “Palace” came back in 2016. Look out for the two kiosks with fish-scale roofs either side of the Palace of Fun. They were first put up at the entrance to the old Chain Pier in 1872, and most people walk straight past them on the way to the rides.
Same Town, New Tables
The prince came to Brighton to enjoy himself away from the eyes of the court in London, and nearly two and a half centuries later that is still more or less the town’s pitch. The games have changed and the rules have finally caught up, but the instinct is the same one that filled the Old Ship’s card room on a Tuesday night in 1780. Whatever your version of it, Brighton has always been happy to deal you in.
