North Laine
Coordinates: 50°49′35″N 0°08′21″W / 50.82639°N 0.13917°W
North Laine is a shopping and residential district of Brighton, on the English south coast. Once a slum area, its many pubs, cafés, theatres and museums now make it seen as Brighton's bohemian and cultural quarter.
"Laine" is a Sussex dialect term for an open tract of land at the base of the Downs, which itself is derived from an Anglo-Saxon legal term for a kind of land holding.
The space surrounding Brighton was once occupied by five of these "laines", open farming plots of a type that seem to have been generally unchanged in style since the Middle Ages, one of which was North Laine. By the 19th century, 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.
During the reigns of George IV and William IV and through the first quarter of the reign of Queen 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. One resident of note was George Herbert Volk, second son of railway engineer Magnus Volk, who worked in a small workshop at 86 Gloucester Road in the years 1910-1912. This building is now home to Silicon Beach Training. By the 1860s, the city began to clean up the area, knocking down old tenement houses (population density in one slum neighbourhood, 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, London.
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