Hove

**Hove**
	Hove
	Hove Hove shown within East Sussex
Population	91,900
OS grid reference	TQ285055
Unitary authority	Brighton and Hove
Ceremonial county	East Sussex
Region	South East
Country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	HOVE
Postcode district	BN3, BN52
Dialling code	01273
Police	Sussex
Fire	East Sussex
Ambulance	South East Coast
EU Parliament	South East England
UK Parliament	Hove
	List of places UK England East Sussex

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Hove /ˈhoʊv/ is a town on the south coast of England, immediately to the west of its larger neighbour Brighton, with which it forms the unitary authority Brighton and Hove. It forms a single conurbation together with Brighton and some smaller towns and villages running along the coast. As part of local government reform Brighton and Hove were merged to form the borough of Brighton and Hove in 1997. In 2000 the conjoined towns officially attained city status.

Hove is bordered by Brighton to the east and Portslade-by-Sea in the west, the distance between the boundaries being some 2.25 miles (3.75 kilometres).

History and development

Pre-Roman evidence

During mid 19th-century building work near Palmeira Square, workmen levelled a substantial burial mound. A prominent feature of the landscape since 1200 BC, this 20 feet (6.1 m)-high tumulus yielded – among other treasures – the Hove amber cup. Made of translucent red Baltic Amber and approximately the same size as a regular china tea cup, the artefact can be seen in the Hove Museum and Art Gallery.

Domesday Book

There are entries for Brighton and Portslade (Bristelmestune and Porteslage) and small downland settlements like Hangleton (Hangetone), but nothing for the location of Hove itself.

Second millennium AD

Hove is an ancient coastal settlement with St Andrew's Church being established in the 12th century. Hove remained insignificant for centuries, consisting of just a single street some 250m from the church, which by the 16th century was recorded as being in ruins. Hangleton Manor is a well-preserved 16th-century flint manor building. It is believed to have been built c. 1540 for Richard Bel(l)ingham, twice High Sheriff of Sussex, whose initials are carved into a fireplace, and whose coat of arms adorns a period plaster ceiling. The Manor is currently serving as a pub-restaurant and is surrounded by the 20th-century Hangleton housing estate.

In 1723 a traveller, antiquary John Warburton, wrote ‘I passed through a ruinous village called Hove which the sea is daily eating up and is in a fair way of being quite deserted; but the church being quite large and a good distance from the shore may perhaps escape.’^[2] Despite this, The Ship Inn had been built at the seaward end of the street, around 1702.

In 1724 Daniel Defoe wrote, in reference to the south coast "I do not find they have any foreign commerce, except it be what we call smuggling and roguing; which I may say, is the reigning commerce of all this part of the English coast, from the mouth of the Thames to the Land's End in Cornwall."^[3]

Regency and Victorian developments

The census of 1801 recorded only 101 residents. By 1821, the year the Prince Regent was crowned George IV, Hove was still a small village but the population had risen to 312.^[4] The dwellings were still clustered on either side of Hove Street, surrounded by an otherwise empty landscape of open farmland. This isolated location was ideal for smuggling and there was considerable illicit activity. Hove smugglers became notorious, with contraband often being stored in the now partially repaired St. Andrew's Church. Tradition has it that The Ship Inn was a favourite rendezvous for the smugglers, and in 1794 soldiers were billeted there. In 1818 there was a pitched battle on Hove beach between revenue men and smugglers, from which the latter emerged as the victors. As part of the concerted drive by Parliament to combat smuggling, a coastguard station was opened at the southern end of Hove Street in 1831, next to The Ship Inn.

Also at the bottom of Hove Street was the bull-ring. At a bull-bait in 1810 the bull escaped, scattering spectators before being recaptured and dragged back to the ring. This was the last bull-bait to take place in Hove.

The fertile coastal plain west of the Brighton boundary had significant deposits of brickearth and by c.1770 a brickfield had been established on the site of what would become Brunswick Square. Later, other brickfields were established further west, remaining until displaced by housing development.

In the years following the Coronation of 1821 the Brunswick estate of large Regency houses boasting a theatre, riding schools and their own police was developed on the seafront near the boundary with Brighton. Although within Hove parish the residents of these elegant houses studiously avoided the name of the impoverished village a mile to the west as an address. Straggling development along the coast loosely connected the estate to fashionable Brighton, so that name was used instead.

Dating from 1822, the Brighton to Shoreham turnpike crossed the north of Hove parish along the route of the present Old Shoreham Road.

The Brighton General Gas Light Company was formed in 1825. Although production of coal gas was notorious for the smell it produced, the company acquired land in the fields between Hove Street and St. Andrew's Church, and in 1832 built a gasworks on a two acre site. The process required substantial tonnage of coal, delivered by horse-drawn cart on the unmade tracks in the vicinity, and removal of by-products including coke, coal tar, sulphur and ammonia. This industrial site with a tall chimney and two gasometers next to the churchyard was a considerable intrusion on the populace of Hove, but not for still-distant and rapidly-growing Brighton, the main centre of consumption. By being situated in Hove it had also avoided the duty of £1 per 8 tons levied on coal by the Brighton Town Act of 1773. A gasworks built east of Brighton in 1819, and therefore similarly exempt, was supplied by sailing brigs grounding at high tide, the crew tipping the coal down chutes into horse-drawn carts then re-floating on the next tide. This method would also have been used at Hove until the arrival of the railway in 1840. By 1861 the site had doubled in size and there were now five gasometers, ranging in size from small to large. Due to spiralling demand a large new works was opened in Shoreham Harbour at Portslade-by-Sea in 1871, and by 1885 all gas manufacture in Brighton and Hove had been transferred there. The Hove site, in a by now primarily residential area, was then used for storage only.

By 1831 the development of the eastern end of the parish had increased the population to 1,360 ^[4] but this brought few economic benefits to Hove village itself, with the historian Thomas Horsfield describing it in 1835 as 'a mean and insignificant assemblage of huts'.

St Andrew's Church was reconstructed and enlarged to its present form in 1836, to the design of the architect George Basevi (1794–1845), and features prominently in the background of paintings of the period.

The flat coastal plain had sporting uses too. From 1848 to 1871 England's oldest county club, Sussex County Cricket Club, used the Royal Brunswick Ground in Hove, situated roughly on the site of present-day Third and Fourth Avenues. In 1872 the club moved to the present County Cricket Ground, Hove.

Two further large estates were developed between Hove village and Brunswick, and both avoided using the name Hove: Cliftonville was designed, laid out and initially developed under Frederick Banister from the late 1840s;^[5] and West Brighton Estate in the 1870s.

West of Brunswick, the seafront of West Brighton Estate forms the end of a series of avenues, in numerical order beginning with First Avenue, mostly composed of fine Victorian villas built as another well-integrated housing scheme featuring mews for artisans and service buildings. Grand Avenue, The Drive, and the numbered avenues were developed through the 1870s and 1880s, with many of the buildings constructed by William Willett.

Hove's wide boulevards contrast with the bustle of Brighton, although many of the grand Regency and Victorian mansions have been converted into flats. Marlborough Court was once the residence of the Duchess of Marlborough, aunt of Winston Churchill. The Irish nationalist leader and Home Rule MP Charles Stewart Parnell used to visit his lover, the already married Kitty O'Shea at the house she rented in 1883 in Medina Villas, Hove. In the subsequent divorce action the cook alleged that Captain O’Shea returned home unexpectedly and Parnell beat a hasty retreat by climbing over the balcony and down a rope ladder.^[6]

The Hove Club, a private members' club located at 28 Fourth Avenue, was founded in 1882.^[7]^[8]

Regency and Victorian developments

The census of 1801 recorded only 101 residents. By 1821, the year George IV was crowned, Hove was still a small village but the population had risen to 312.^[4] The dwellings were still clustered on either side of Hove Street, surrounded by an otherwise empty landscape of open farmland. This isolated location was ideal for smuggling and there was considerable illicit activity. Hove smugglers became notorious, with contraband often being stored in the now partially repaired St. Andrew's Church. Tradition has it that The Ship Inn was a favourite rendezvous for the smugglers, and in 1794 soldiers were billeted there. In 1818 there was a pitched battle on Hove beach between revenue men and smugglers, from which the latter emerged as the victors. As part of the concerted drive by Parliament to combat smuggling, a coastguard station was opened at the southern end of Hove Street in 1831, next to The Ship Inn.