Churchill Square
A near neighbour of the Regency Square area, the Churchill Square shopping centre here seen during redevelopment. In the far distance sited on top of Race Hill, Brighton racecourse is seen. This featured strongly in Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock".Regency and Russell Squares are also seen in the film.
Churchill Square during redevelopment
Where Churchill Square now stands was once a warren of streets, houses, shops, a dozen or so pubs and small businesses, sixteen acres in all, running south from Western Road. The businesses included a brewery, a meat market and small garages and boarding houses. Many of the houses were slums, with lavatories and cold taps in the back yard, damp walls and infestations of bugs. But the people living there said there was a strong community spirit, crime was unknown, and everybody was neighbourly.
Aerial photograph of Churchill Square during its redevelopment
There had been plans since the 1930s to demolish the area as part of slum clearance, but the war and then post-war austerity delayed them. Finally in the early 1960s a scheme was prepared which involved an ambitious redevelopment of the whole area down to the sea front. It originally included demolishing the Grand Hotel, but the hotel successfully appealed. It also included the building of three tower blocks - one 350 feet high. But this was found to be uneconomic and in the end only one, Chartwell Court in Russell Square, went up. Churchill Square, named after the wartime prime minister, was formally opened in 1968, with two supermarkets and 61 shops. It was not long before disillusion set in. It was in the open and by the 1980s was being described by the Evening Argus as "a windy, litter-strewn maze of paved areas, narrow stairways and gloomy car parks." One by one, the shops closed - the biggest blow was the closing of a large Tesco store in 1992 - and the square became increasingly deserted and gloomy. Various schemes were put forward to regenerate it but they foundered through lack of money. Finally Standard Life Assurance bought the leasehold interest from the original developers, Taylor Woodrow, and the freehold of the land from Brighton Council and set about a complete reconstruction. This involved demolishing a large part of the original development, cost £90 million and took from January 1996 to September 1998. The new Churchill Square is a covered shopping mall with 85 shops, nine cafes and restaurants, a crèche and public toilets. There are 1,600 secure car parking spaces and another 500 nearby.
The above has been taken from "Churchill Square revisited: A lost Brighton community" by Society member Andrew Walker.