North Laine

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Looking east down Trafalgar Street, the northern boundary of the North Laine area.

The North Laine area is a small open-air shopping area in Brighton, part of the southern British city of Brighton and Hove. The area rests immediately adjacent to the Royal Pavilion.

A "laine" is an Anglo-Saxon legal term for a kind of land holding. The space that is now North Laine was once occupied by five open farming plots of a type that seem to have been generally unchanged in style since the Middle Ages. By the 1800s, the farming plots (which had been for centuries subdivided into hides and furlongs) were encircled by major municipal roads for Brighton. With building developments across Brighton beginning to encroach upon the fields, the tracks that had divided the individual hide plots were normalized into streets, and the area was soon appropriated as a new settlement and market area. John Furner planted a market garden in the plots, and by 1840 a rail hub had been set up on the northern border of North Laine, Brighton railway station.

Looking north along the new Jubilee Street towards North Road.

During the reigns of George IV, William IV and through the first quarter of the reign of Victoria, despite the grandeur of their Royal Pavilion, the North Laine section was known mostly for its squalor, abysmal living conditions and the many slaughterhouses in North Laine. By the 1860s, the city began to clean up the area, knocking down old tenement houses (population density in one slum neighborhood, Orange Row in the Pimlico slum district, was in the neighbourhood of 130 people to 17 houses) to replace them with more modern streets. These slums produced what is, arguably, North Laine's most famous resident, Tom Sayers, a popular British heavyweight boxing champion of the middle Victorian Era. He was born in the Pimlico slum area and trained in North Laine. At his death in 1865, 10,000 people attended his funeral at Highgate.

Today the North Laine is a bohemian shopping area popular both with locals and tourists, well served with cafés, bars and entertainment venues including theatres. There is a high turnover of boutique-style shops. The City Council has recently redeveloped a notorious gap site, constructing a new library and public square.