Episode 1: Brighton’s Housing Tree

For my final thesis at the University of Sussex, I produced a three-part audio docuseries exploring Brighton’s housing landscape. Its history, its present pressures, and its uncertain future.

Brighton’s housing crisis is often framed as a modern emergency, composed by spiralling rents, long waiting lists, stalled legislation. But the story begins much earlier, woven into the city’s land, its early industries, and the political decisions.

In the opening chapter of Brighton’s Housing Tree, we walk back through those origins, showing how today’s pressures are the product of centuries of choices.

“In a city wedged between the sea and the South Downs, land here has always been in short supply,”

That squeeze is now acute: more than 7,000 households sit on the Housing Register, nearly 2,000 are in temporary accommodation, and rents have almost doubled in ten years. National no-fault evictions rose 38 percent in 2023, yet promised protections such as the Renters’ Rights Bill remain suspended in political limbo.

These statistics, however, are only the surface. To understand the crisis, we must turn back to foundations—back to 1783, when the Prince Regent arrived and Brighton reshaped itself into a fashionable coastal retreat. Grand seafront terraces rose for the wealthy, but hidden just behind them, a different Brighton took root.

“Those households required servicing,” explains Dr Helen Walker, Senior Lecturer in Town Planning at the University of Brighton. “So behind them grew a range of different housing… for the maidservants and the men who either worked for those households, or once the railway arrived in 1840 worked in the engine houses. We built railway engines in Brighton.”

The railway transformed everything. Industries clustered around it, and working-class districts expanded rapidly. Areas that would later be cleared as “slums,” making way for the council estates that defined the 20th century: Moulsecoomb, Whitehawk, and others. These estates offered amenities like gardens and indoor toilets, but their peripheral location meant many residents felt isolated from the city they served.

As Brighton grew, so did its population. David Fisher, trustee of the Regency Society, highlights the explosion: “The population of Brighton, between 1871 and 1901 had expanded by 45 percent. In Hove, it had expanded by 345 percent because there were a lot of new buildings, particularly after the railway arrived.”

Post-war Britain responded to this growth with ambition. The Conservative government elected in 1951 promised to build 300,000 homes a year, and did. By the late 1960s, more people rented socially than privately for the first time in UK history. It seemed the era of housing insecurity was ending.

Then came the 1980s.

Margaret Thatcher’s Housing Act introduced Right to Buy, a policy that would permanently reshape Brighton’s housing landscape. Alan Cook, co-author of 100 Years of Council Housing in Brighton and Hove, recalls: “They could buy their houses and they could buy them relatively cheaply… probably getting something like a 30 percent discount.” O

ver time, those homes became private assets passed down generations, while councils were left unable to replace the stock they lost.

“You’ve got communities now where you got split between those who have money and those who don’t,” Cook reflects.

Fisher warns that the policy didn’t just change ownership, it changed the quality of what remained: the most desirable homes were sold off, leaving councils with aging blocks that suffered from decades of underinvestment.

Layered on top of these political shifts is Brighton’s geography.

Development economist Simon Maxwell puts it simply: “We’re constrained by the sea on one side and by the [South] Downs on the other… and so what happens then? Either the demand disappears somewhere else or the price goes up.”

Even some constraints were intentional. As Walker notes, in the 1930s, Brighton purchased land north of the city “to be held in perpetuity,” land now part of the South Downs National Park. It preserved nature, but limited future housing.

By the end of this first chapter, one truth becomes undeniable: Brighton’s crisis is not just about supply or regulation. It is the product of centuries of decisions that have shaped who gets to live here, and at what cost.