Brighton's Best Things To Do Right Now
Brighton has always had opinions about itself. The city knows it's brilliant, and mostly it's right. But the experiences that stick — the ones locals actually return to — tend to be the ones that earn it. Here's where to spend your time.
Up High and Out to Sea
There's a moment aboard the Brighton i360 — roughly 100 metres up, cocktail in hand, the whole of the Sussex coastline laid out beneath you — where Brighton stops feeling like a place you're visiting and starts feeling like something you genuinely understand. The glass pod is slow and deliberate, which is exactly right. You're not rushing past the view; you're sitting inside it. Go at dusk when the light does what it does over the Channel and the Downs turn amber behind the city. The bar is properly stocked, too. This isn't a theme park ride with a gift shop. It's one of the better ways to spend an evening in the south of England.
Down at the waterfront, the Brighton Palace Pier is doing what it's done since 1899 — rides, noise, candyfloss, the works — but the thing locals actually come back for is simpler than that. Grab a deckchair on the south side, face out to sea, and do nothing for an hour. The pier earns its keep on a weekday afternoon when the crowds thin out and it's just you, the gulls, and a decent view of the West Pier ruins in the middle distance.
Brighton's Stranger Side
The Brighton West Pier burned down in 2003 and hasn't gone away since. What's left — the blackened skeleton standing in the water — is arguably more compelling than the original ever was. Starlings murmurate above it at dusk in winter in numbers that genuinely stop people on the promenade. There's nothing to buy, nowhere to queue. It's just there, being atmospheric and slightly melancholy, which suits Brighton perfectly.
For something more deliberately unusual, the Old Police Cells Museum in the basement of the Town Hall is the kind of place you tell people about afterwards and they don't quite believe you. Victorian prison cells, genuine Sussex Police memorabilia, and guided tours run by people who actually know what they're talking about. It's specific and strange and completely free of the usual heritage-site polish. Worth every minute.
While you're in the mood for things that sit outside the usual tourist circuit, Banksy's 'Kissing Coppers' is still there on the side of a pub on St James's Street — a reproduction now, but the image that genuinely put Brighton on the global street art map. It's worth going to see it in context, on foot, as part of a wander through Kemptown rather than as a destination in itself.
Get Out of the City
The National Trust's Devil's Dyke is twenty minutes from the centre by car and feels like another county entirely. The V-shaped valley is the kind of landscape that makes you realise how close proper open countryside sits to the seafront. Go on a clear morning — the views from the top stretch from the Weald to the coast — and take the longer walking trails rather than the obvious loop. There are good pubs nearby for afterwards. This is where Brightonians go when they need to remember the city is surrounded by something worth leaving it for.
Closer in, Preston Manor is quietly one of the best afternoons in the city. The Georgian exterior gives nothing away — inside, the twenty Edwardian-dressed rooms feel genuinely inhabited rather than curated, which is rarer than it should be. The walled garden is the reason to go in spring. Take your time with it.
A Note on the Royal Pavilion
Yes, you should go. The Royal Pavilion is as outlandish in person as in photographs — George IV's Asian-influenced fantasy palace in the middle of a south coast seaside town is exactly as absurd as it sounds, and that's the point. The restored interior rooms are genuinely worth the ticket price. But the Royal Pavilion Gardens surrounding it are free, well-kept, and a good place to sit on a Tuesday morning when the city is going about its business around you.
This is a fraction of what Brighton has going for it. The full guide — covering restaurants, bars, independents and everything in between — is at ourlocals.co.uk/brighton. We update it regularly, and the recommendations come from people who actually live here.
