North Laine

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Looking east down Gloucester Road.

The North Laine is a number of streets forming an open-air shopping zone in Brighton, part of the southern British city of Brighton and Hove. It is 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.

The Saturday market on Upper Gardner Street.

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 high concentration of slaughterhouses. 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 approximately 130 people to 17 houses) to replace them with more modern streets. A famous resident at this time was 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.