Sea Haze

Brighton’s seafront has always been a theater of the absurd, where else would you find a lobster crossing your path during a seaside stroll? The city’s fishing heritage runs deep: Brighton was once Sussex’s most important fishing town, though the fleet has dwindled to a fraction of its former size, and today’s remaining catches are more modest. These days you’re more likely to spot crustaceans in restaurant windows than scuttling along the promenade. Still, there’s something cinematically perfect about the moment a lobster appears in an unexpected frame, turning an ordinary walk into something that feels orchestrated by fate and a French film score.

Four out of five Brighton men once made their living from the sea, a fleet that ranged as far as Yarmouth and Scarborough chasing herring and mackerel. Fashion did what storms and shipwrecks couldn’t: Regency aristocrats banned the fishermen from drying nets on the Steine, Victorian day-trippers drove up seafront prices, and the railway brought in cheaper fish from the North Sea. What’s left today fits inside a handful of Victorian arches, more museum than industry, tended by volunteers and a single working boat. The lobster that occasionally wanders across the promenade, then, isn’t really a relic of that fishing past so much as an escapee from somebody’s kitchen, still managing, against all odds, to look like it wandered in from a better-funded film.