My job seems to involve visiting a lot of universities at the moment – this week it was the University of Sussex at Brighton. The journey to Brighton from Malvern is an absolute pig – I’m not happy to drive that far at the moment, and there is no easy route by rail. The quickest way is in fact to start off by going in entirely the wrong direction, and catch a train to Birmingham, then change to a fast train to London, cross London on the tube to Victoria, and then get a Southern Train to Brighton. Three problems with that – 1. It’s very expensive, 2. It would involve crossing London in the rush hour, which I hate doing, and 3. Southern Trains is in absolute chaos at the moment, with industrial action and an emergency timetable (for which read hundreds of trains cancelled, and the remainder horribly overcrowded).
I did some digging around on-line, and found that a much cheaper, and not that much slower route was to go from Malvern to Reading, change there for the stopping service to Gatwick Airport avoiding central London, and then change again for Brighton. This had the advantage of only the last half hour from Gatwick to Brighton being on a Southern Train service, so overcrowding would be much less of an issue. And I wouldn’t have to cross London which was a bonus. I went to Malvern station late last week to buy my train ticket, and was explaining to the chap at the ticket office what I wanted. I heard a voice behind me in the ticket queue say “Hello Gillian. I see you’ve not changed. Still know your own mind and explain it clearly as always!” It was a chap who used to work for me seven years ago, and apparently well remembers me giving him some clear directions……..
The trains were such that, whichever route I’d taken, I’d have had to catch a stupid o’clock train from Malvern to get to my meeting on time if I’d travelled the same day. So I travelled down the afternoon before, which was much more civilised. That had the further advantage that I had two hours free in Brighton the next morning before my meeting at the University. I’ve not been to Brighton for about 30 years – I have a vague recollection of going to a conference there when I was a student – so I wasn’t sure what I’d find to do for a couple of hours. But just five minutes walk from my hotel I found the Brighton Pavilion, which was an interesting (if horribly bad taste) way to spend a morning.
Brighton Pavilion
It was built on the orders of George IV when he was Prince Regent, and really is a triumph of money over good taste. On the outside it looks vaguely Indian, whereas the inside is over-the-top Chinoiserie. Or at least a nineteenth-century Englishman’s view of China, with Egyptian additions and lashings of gold leaf. Queen Victoria couldn’t stand it, and sold it to Brighton Council soon after she came to the throne. It narrowly escaped demolition, was used as a hospital for Indian troops in World War I, and has been under almost continuous renovation ever since. It’s certainly a very interesting building, and gives one a very good idea of just how lavish George IV was with his money – it’s absolutely no wonder he was usually deep in debt!
