Prestonville, Brighton
The area is characterised by middle-class and upper-middle-class housing in various styles, small-scale commercial development and long eastward views across the city.
Brighton and Hove City Council describe the area as a "pre-1914 residential inner suburb whose street pattern, architecture and character have been well preserved", giving a "strong sense of place".
"High-quality" Victorian buildings can be found amongst the housing, and two residential streets consist of a homogeneous "railway suburb" built by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway to rehouse people displaced from around Brighton station when the company extended its goods yard.
[1] Prestonville covers a sloping ridge of land on the western side of the valley through which London Road and the Brighton Main Line run.
Long views eastwards and southeastwards across the city can be obtained from many streets in the area, particularly in the northern section.
[8] Prestonville's development contributed to an increase in population in Preston parish from 756 at the time of the 1841 census to 2,470 30 years later.
Thomas senior himself farmed a field in the southeast corner of present-day Prestonville, and another by the Old Shoreham Road–Dyke Road junction was owned by Sir Isaac Goldsmid, 1st Baronet.
North of the road was an area of farmland on the west side of the Wellesbourne valley, cut off by the Brighton Main Line from Preston village, the church and the manor house.
The land belonged to New England Farm, established in the 1810s south of Old Shoreham Road (therefore in the parish of Brighton), and an abattoir had been proposed to be sited there.
York Grove, built on the site of the New England Farm buildings, predated these streets by about five years.
[12] (The main farmhouse, built before 1820 in a Classical style with a prominent Doric-columned porch, was retained and is numbered as 26 York Grove.
[3] The 1871 census shows that many of the early residents of Prestonville were railway workers based at Brighton station or the nearby Brighton railway works; other occupations included schoolteachers, managers, a tax inspector, a retired admiral, a bookseller and a draper's assistant.
In 1898, the LBSCR received permission to compulsorily purchase 171 houses and demolish them to allow Brighton station goods yard to be expanded.
They were of good quality and were larger than the terraced houses they replaced, but as a rehousing scheme the development failed because very few of the displaced people actually moved there.
An example was the former Hove Villa, built in 1840 on Old Shoreham Road but in institutional use from 1899 (first as a psychiatric hospital, then as a private school).
[3] At the time of the United Kingdom Census 2001, Prestonville's population was estimated at 5,616 and a housing density of 56 dwellings per hectare was calculated.
Its Gothic Revival church hall on Exeter Street dates from 1884 and retains its original red-brick exterior.
[37][38] (Bleak House itself was demolished c. 1939; flats called Elm Court and Fairways occupy the site.
Prominent four-centred arches surround the doorway and the windows, and above the first floor runs a parapet with battlements and a frieze.
Russell in 1913, extended in 1934–35 by John Leopold Denman, and made DDA-compliant in 2005 with some "adroitly, boldly handled" access ramps designed by Nick Evans Architects.
It is a Neo-Georgian/Queen Anne-style complex with extensive red brickwork and wings joined to a central section by a series of staircases lit by round windows), and occupies a prominent corner site.
It retains its original iron gates with the emblems of Hove and Brighton Boroughs and East and West Sussex.
[46] The railway line runs at a much lower level below the ridge and forms the eastern boundary of the Prestonville area.
[2] Car ownership in Prestonville is lower than the city average,[31] and the proportion of people who walk to work is 22%.
Links to the east across the railway line are poor: other than the bridge at the south end of the area, there is the Dyke Road Drive overbridge near the centre and a narrow tunnel towards the north.
[5] Sculptor and artist Eric Gill was born at 32 Hamilton Road in 1882 and spent his childhood nearby at 53 Highcroft Villas.
