Brighton by Fairy Lights

The highlight for me on any shopping trip to Brighton is a visit to Lush, but as they have branches in many other places I guess the place I should highlight is the North Laine. You'll see why when you read the report. I would also like to put in a good word for Paris Texas, a restaurant that I think may become a favourite, and the exceptionally wonderful Adastral Hotel.

Quick Tips:

Brighton is only an hour away from London by train. You can get there as easily as you can go to many of the attractions in London's suburbs. It is also just south of Gatwick, so if you come into London through Gatwick why not spend a day or two in Brighton at the start or end of your trip.

Best Way To Get Around:

Everything I describe here is pretty much in walking distance. Getting to and from Hove is a bit of a hike - maybe half an hour - but there is a regular bus service.

Whenever I visit the Brighton area I always stay in the same hotel. It is a small, family-run establishment close to the sea front in Hove. I first stayed there while convalescing from a fairly major operation and the staff were so nice to me I have gone back again at every opportunity. It being a fairly small place, you quickly get to know everyone and as I am now a regular I get greeted warmly whenever I go back. However, the hospitable treatment is by no means reserved for the likes of me, as a quick look through the guest book will show. Visitors from all over the world have found themselves delighted with the atmosphere.

The hotel has been converted from two large semi-detached houses. This being Britain, some of the rooms are quite small and there are stairs to climb. However, all of the rooms have at least a shower and some of the family rooms are quite spacious. The price I have quoted is for a single room with shower. There are TVs in every room and the hotel has a subscription to the basic Sky service, which means that they have a rather better TV service than most supposedly posh British hotels. Also, unlike most British hotels, they do not put a massive mark-up on telephone bills.

There is a small dining room and bar that serves breakfast and evening meals. The staff are also happy to make sandwiches, etc. during the day if guests need them. As is traditional in the UK, breakfast is included in the room charge. I have done a separate entry on eating at the hotel.

The original owners of the hotel, Tony and Val, can still be seen around quite a bit (often in overalls helping with the decorating). However, they are now easing their way into a well deserved retirement and the day-to-day operations have been taken over by two of the staff, Bobby and Molly. They are all wonderful people. Please be nice to them, and tell them that I sent you.

Finally, should you happen to discover the Californian flag flying outside the hotel, this is my fault. Tony had taken to flying the Danish flag as one of his daughters now lives there. It was causing quite a bit of amusement, as few people knew which country it belonged to. I asked him if he would like to confuse people even more, and as a result I ended up bringing back the flag of the Republic of California on my next trip to San Francisco. Goodness only knows what the taxi drivers tell people it is.

One of the things I like least about British hotels is that you are forced to pay for breakfast. In most cases this means a pile of grilled mush dripping in fat and a couple of slices of toasted cardboard. Thankfully the breakfast at the Adastral Hotel is much better than that. It is, after all, quite often my only cooked meal of the day when I'm staying there.

The traditional English fry-up is delightfully free of grease. There's plenty of meat on the bacon and in the sausages. It is freshly cooked rather than left on hot plates as happens in most higher-priced hotels. And the toast is made from real bread. However, if that isn't to your fancy, I can warmly recommend the mackerel. It is a lot less bony, and I think rather more flavoursome, than the traditional kippers. It being of the family of oily fishes, it is also full of lots of beneficial oils. Healthy food in an English hotel breakfast: amazing.

The hotel will also do an evening meal on request (though not always at weekends, please check). This costs around £14 plus any drinks from the bar. The food is not restaurant-posh - it is generally traditional British dishes cooked well rather than the traditional cooked badly. What is more there is always plenty of it - far more than I could ever eat, and I'm not exactly shy and retiring when it comes to food. If I ate both their breakfast and their evening meal I could get very fat very quickly. This is the sort of value-for-money dining that you do not expect to find in a hotel.

I have eaten at Zamdani quite a lot. I confess that this is mainly because it is the nearest restaurant to my hotel, but if the food wasn't good I would not keep going back. Britain is, of course, famous for its Indian restaurants. There are some very good ones around. Sadly far too many of them still look like they were designed to serve gangs of drunken louts who have just fallen out of a pub. The décor is sparse and tackily ethnic, and the menu consists of a choice of meats in a choice of sauces that have different degrees of fire but all the same high grease content.

Zamdani, I am pleased to say, is not like that. It is clean and tastefully decorated. The menu is varied, and shows every sign that the chef knows a bit about Indian cuisine rather than just how to make things cheap and spicy. It is not top quality Indian food, but for the price you would not expect that. As I said, I have eaten there many times, and I have never had a bad meal. You can't complain about that.

Brighton is a seaside town and therefore, when one goes there, one does expect to eat fish. However, it is not a fishing port, and the English Channel is hardly teeming with life these days. If you want seriously good fish you should go to New Orleans, or Hobart. If you want the best fish that Brighton has to offer you should go to English's.

English's is one of those places that appears delightfully unspoiled by the modern world. It proclaims that it is family run since 1945, that it is a contractor to the Admiralty, and that it is the south's leading seafood restaurant and oyster bar. It is, of course, seriously famous around these parts.

Then there is that word "oyster". How many oyster bars are there in Britain these days. There was a time when the humble oyster was a favourite delicacy of Londoners of all social strata. Not any more for, like the Walrus and the Carpenter, we have eaten every one, and they are now sadly expensive. I haven't yet managed to do English's for an oyster lunch, but I will get round to it soon, promise.

What I have done is take a business colleague there for lunch. We had a set three-course meal, with wine and coffee, for under £20 each. For a famous restaurant, that was pretty impressive. And of course the food was very good. How good? Well, I'm not a gourmet chef; I'm not in a position to make judgements at that level. However, what I will say is that while I was having my lunch I spotted Judi Dench walk in. Now I think it fair to assume that award-winning actresses can afford to eat pretty much wherever they want. And if Dame Judi chooses to eat at English's, well she must think it is pretty good too, so I'm not alone in my opinion.

Note that the price quoted is for the set lunch. Dinner will be quite a bit more.

Many of my visits to Brighton have involved being a guest lecturer in training courses (about competitive electricity markets, which I am sure you don't want to know). Part of the course generally involves taking the delegates out for a group meal somewhere posh. The location that the course organisers have chosen is Havana in Duke Street.

As restaurants go, I have to say that Havana is a bit gloomy. The décor is all dark wood and low lighting, brightened only by pure white tablecloths. It is very stylish, but perhaps not the best place to show off a beautiful frock because your companions won't get a good look at it.

However, I am happy to say that the gloom is not a cunning ploy to disguise the food. Every meal I had had at Havana has been very tasty and exquisitely prepared. It is one of those places where you get consommé instead of soup and jus instead of sauce and it is all delicious and it all looks like the under-chefs spent half an hour arranging in on the plate before serving it. The wine list is excellent too. Yes, it will be a bit expensive, and the portions will be fashionably small, but you can see and taste what you are paying for. It is even better when you are not paying.

Finding a decent tex-mex style restaurant in the UK is by no means easy. There are now branches of Chilis, but individual restaurants tend to be a bit restrained. I suspect that it is hard for them to find the right ingredients, and I'm sure that, despite the British love for Indian food, the spice level in Mexican gets toned down.

Paris Texas is unfortunately placed, about half way between the centres of Brighton and Hove. It is a bit far from my hotel to go of an evening, and a bit far from all of the various night-spots for drop-in traffic. However, it looks good, and on the couple of occasions I have dropped in for lunch the food has been excellent.

On this particular trip I had the pasta in a cream, garlic, mushroom and chorizo sauce. This is a simple and easy way of spicing up a standard pasta dish, and something that I may well try myself. I have also had the nachos, which were wonderful. I was quite surprised by this and sat down to try to work out why they were so much better than what I was used to in the US. The answer, of course, is in the cheese. Instead of the usual insipid orange soap that you get in America the chef had used sharp Cheddar for bite and Red Leicester for flavour. It worked very well.

This is definitely a place to come back to, preferably for an evening meal. I'm itching to try to try the blacked steak and the ribs.

The price quoted is for the set lunch plus beer. Dinner is more expensive.

I have put this entry in as a warning. I went to Los Amigos one night with a business colleague and his partner. The food was OK, through not spectacular. However, just as we were finishing our meal, the staff turned the music up to maximum and tried to persuade all of their clients to sing along and dance. Sadly there was one table - apparently an office party - where everyone was so drunk that they did as they were bidden. It really was quite unpleasant, and we got out of there as fast as we could.

I have no objection to restaurants providing entertainment, as long as there is a clear warning outside that this will happen. But a restaurant that encourages a bunch of drunken diners to ruin the evening for all of its other customers is beyond the pale. I will never go back there, and unless you happen to be very drunk at the time I suggest you give it a very wide berth.

Brighton has the usual collection of standard high street shops, most of which can be found in the Churchill Square shopping mall. However, I am not there to buy things that I could get in any large town in Britain, I am there to look for things that are different and unusual. Brighton is one of the best places in Britain to do this.

From Churchill Square (which any bus or cab can find for you) walk east past the Clock Tower into North Street. Just before you reach the Royal Pavilion and Hannington's department store there is a small turning on the right into House Lane. Go down here, and you will find yourself in a maze of twisty alleyways, all alike in that they are filled with small specialist shops.

Because The Lanes are now a tourist attraction, most of the establishments there are pretty up market. The favoured options for merchandise are jewellery, antiques and designer clothes. These places have some absolutely wonderful stuff, but sadly much of it is also very expensive. However, there area few unusual and more affordable places such as the hand-made pasta shop and the herbalist's. Personally I find the area more of a place to browse and dream than to actually part with money, but who says you have to buy anything to enjoy shopping?

Another excellent feature of The Lanes is that the area is crammed with coffee shops, the more pleasant type of pub, and restaurants. If your feet are tired after a long day's browsing, there is no shortage of options for a pleasant lunch.

Almost opposite the entrance to The Lanes is Bond Street. This leads you north into Gardner Street and Kensington Gardens, collectively known as the North Laine. If the exclusive, expensive establishments of The Lanes are not to your taste (or your wallet) then try here instead. This is where you find the alternative shops, the strange places, and the shops selling things that you did not realise existed. If you cannot find that "something different" in North Laine then you are really not trying.

To start with, North Laine is where the serious clubbers buy their clothes. Brighton is a major night club destination and it is almost impossible to get a hotel room in the area over the weekend in the summer. You want something really outré to wear? North Laine is the place to get it. I particularly like Tuff Tarts, an establishment that you can find in the arcade at the south end of Kensington Gardens. They do all the sort of stuff that comic books back in the 60's assumed that people would be wearing in the 21st Century, with lots of rubber spikes for added attitude. Wild.

If clubbing is not your scene (and let's be honest, I'm way too old to be dancing all night and way to average-shaped to fit into most of it) there are plenty of other options. Need a bonsai tree, a vinyl record, something mystical and New Age, an exotic cheese, jewellery for a Goth, Japanese comics, herbal substances that are not yet illegal? This is the place to find it. There are so many different shops in North Laine that it is hard to characterise the place except to say that it is, most definitely, different. I could browse all day. This is shopping heaven.

Dearest Santa,

This year I have decided to be a very good girl. I'm not going to do the usual and ask you for plane tickets to exotic places, nor a new laptop computer, nor heaps of books. Really Santa, my requirements are very simple indeed. I just want you to dispatch a few elves to one store and buy me a nice selection of their wares. One of everything would do very nicely.

is not hard to find. They have branches in major cities throughout the world (though strangely not in the USA). I'm enclosing a photo of their Brighton store to help you out. As you can see, they have rented space in Hannington's department store, and they are right by the East Street taxi rank. What is more, if the elves are having any trouble at all, just tell them to use their noses. I can guarantee that there is no shop in Brighton that has such a wonderful aroma.

I might add that I'm being very good in the type of present I'm asking for. Lush doesn't sell expensive cosmetics. The closest they come to make-up is lip balm. No, what I'm asking for is bath salts, shower gel, deodorant, shampoo, face packs, even good old-fashioned soap. What is more, it is all hand made and, because most Lush products are solid rather than liquid, they don't need to cram them full of yucky preservatives. I shall be clean, fragrant, and good for the environment too.

In any case Santa, how can you, a gentleman who has spent his (rather long) life bringing smiles to the faces of the young and young-at-heart, possibly resist a company that sells products with silly names such as Ceridwen's Cauldron, Flying Saucers, and Blue Skies & Fluffy White Clouds (and that's just the bath salts).

In case the economic conditions in Lapland are not good this year I should point out that my favourite Lush product is the shower gel called Skinny Dip which has this fabulous aroma of coconut and while chocolate. I don't know if it gets me any cleaner, but I smell divine afterwards. I am also a big fan of their bath bombs because it is such fun watching them fizz away and release their aroma as the bath fills.

One last word of advice: you should probably make sure you send only male elves on the shopping expedition. They will whinge mightily about the smell for weeks afterward, but they will get over it. If you send girl elves they might apply for jobs in the shop and never come back.

Thanking you in advance,

Cheryl

I can hardly conclude a tale of holiday shopping without mention of chocolate. Fortunately Brighton happens to have one or two seriously good chocolate shops, and the easiest to find is . It is in Duke Street, close to Churchill Square and opposite the Havana restaurant that is also featured in this guide.

Montezuma's is an outlet for a small Sussex-based company specialising in handmade high quality chocolates. Founders Helen and Simon Pattison have set out not only to make the finest chocolate in the world, but to salve our consciences while doing do. Their cocoa beans are sourced from plantations in the Dominican Republic all of which use sustainable farming methods and are certified as organic producers. The chocolate bears a Soil Association logo. In addition the factory has stringent recycling standards and any odds and ends generated in production are donated to local charities. You have to like these guys.

Of course the quality of the chocolate is not dependent on the politics of the makers, no matter how good it might make us feel. The important point is that it is carefully made with plenty of cocoa solids and no cheating with vegetable fat. Once again Montezuma's scores highly. I confess that I am a chocolate addict, not a connoisseur, so I'm not best placed to judge, but it tasted pretty wonderful to me.

As well as blocks of chocolate (plain, milk or white) and a hot chocolate mix, Montezuma's also sells a wide range of truffles. These are truly divine. I can particularly recommend the Dizzy Fizzy, made with while chocolate, champagne and orange brandy. Totally luxurious, and just the thing for a decadent holiday season.

The area that most people know as Brighton is actually two towns that have grown together. The west-most part of the conurbation is known as Hove, and its residents get a bit upset if you refer to it as Brighton. Should you make this mistake you may well be corrected with a brusque, "Hove, actually". Traditionally this is said in a plumy Home Counties accent so that it comes out sounding like "Hove, ektulay".

While the two towns do have their own distinct identities and histories, they now have a common local government, the town council. In Britain places cannot just call themselves cities, no matter how big or important they are. They have to have been granted that right by Royal charter. As part of the Millennium celebrations, Britain ran a competition to create three new cities. Towns from all over the country competed for the honour, and one of the winners was Brighton & Hove. From 2001, therefore, the area can proudly call itself a city, but local residents will probably still squabble about whether it is Brighton, Hove or the conurbation that has that honour.