The picture is adapted from a Help the Aged appeal note. Charity Shops taking clothing, toys and bric a brac are listed in Yellow Pages
or Thomson Directory. Brighton & Hove's Help The Aged shops are at 15 Queens Parade Hangleton and 21c Station Road Portslade.
You may remember that in 1665 much of the lower town of Brighton was destroyed by the sea, making it very difficult for the town's fishermen to continue their trade. As a result, the town became very poor.
However, in 1703 a great storm washed away most of the lower town. The cliffs and lower town were situated towards the end of the more recent construction, Palace Pier.
By 1722, Brighton had become so poor that money was collected in churches throughout Britain to raise funds to strengthen Brighton's sea defences through the construction of two groynes (wooden supports on the seashore). At this time, we did not have the National lottery or European Community money, which is now needed to save the West Pier. However, sometimes the life of a single person such as William Shakespeare or Bill Gates can regenerate whole communities.
The last big storm in Brighton, referred to as the "1987 hurricane", knocked down telephone boxes and uprooted thousands of trees throughout the south of England. The force of the wind, knocked one of the onion-shaped domes of the Royal Pavilion palace through the roof into the music room, which had only just been restored to its former glory following a fire bomb attack in 1975.
The seafront in Brighton can become very windy in autumn and winter. The first new shopping centre, Churchill Square, built in the mid to late 1960s, allowed for too many corridors where the wind could make shopping very unpleasant.
New Churchill Square, a wholly indoor shopping centre, built 30 years later in the late 1990s for the insurance company Standard Life, offers far more comfortable shopping facilities. The installation of a modern security system, including large numbers of Closed Circuit Television cameras, acts as an effective deterrent to shop-lifting, though the shops pay high rates for these facilities. These new shopping centres have been criticized for their part in creating clone towns and cities. However, Brighton & Hove remains a Shopper's Paradise with many areas such as the Lanes (Central Brighton) the North Laine (N Central Brighton), Kemp town (E Brighton), London Road Shopping Centre with its Open Market (N Brighton), Lewes Road (N E Brighton) and George Street (Hove) where there are many small individual shops that are not part of giant chains.