Round Hill, Brighton
[5] The London Road viaduct, a distinctive, sweeping piece of railway architecture, forms the northern boundary of the area and "a literal gateway" between outer and inner suburbia.
[2] All of these buildings have been listed by English Heritage for their architectural and historical importance, and the core of Round Hill, around Roundhill Crescent, is one of 34 conservation areas in the city.
Round Hill's steep slopes and road layout encouraged the introduction of another feature which gives the area its character: the "cat's-creep" staircase.
Past features of Round Hill include a windmill, which took advantage of the windy conditions on the 223-foot (68 m) hilltop until 1913; 19th-century laundries, which sought the same advantage; early 19th-century pleasure gardens, now occupied by the houses of Park Crescent; the landmark Cox's Pill Factory, demolished in the 1980s; glasshouses and smallholdings, some of which survived until after the Second World War despite being surrounded by houses; and the Kemp Town branch line, a passenger and freight railway which cut through the area and had a short-lived station serving Round Hill.
[8][9] The large, round-topped hill which gave the suburb its name stands between the two main valleys along which the original routes into and out of Brighton developed (the present London and Lewes Roads).
[11][12] To the northeast, the South Downs can be seen; long views of the English Channel are possible to the south, beyond the city centre and St Peter's Church; to the southeast, Elm Grove, Race Hill and Brighton General Hospital can be seen on high ground beyond the Lewes Road valley; and to the west, Preston Park (the city's oldest and largest public park)[13] can be seen.
[11][12] Crescent and Wakefield Roads have long southward views towards the city centre,[12] as do the small blocks of flats which replaced some large villas in the middle of the suburb.
Also known as the Royal Pleasure Gardens,[1] this venture by James Ireland was intended to be a profitable speculation, attracting the increasing number of visitors and short-term residents who had doubled Brighton's population in the previous decade.
[24] Ireland, a rich businessman with interests in drapery and undertaking, bought a 10-acre (4 ha) site from Thomas Read Kemp in 1822 and opened the gardens on 1 May 1823.
[36][37] In 1854, the Diocese of Chichester selected an area of open land on the west side of Ditchling Road as the site of their Training College for Anglican Schoolmistresses, which had outgrown its premises in Black Lion Street in the old town.
Arthur Wagner bought the northern part of the former Pleasure Gardens—still open land in 1860—and stipulated that houses costing no more than £120 should be built for Brighton's working-class population.
[57] Named Lennox Place,[57] it was planned at the same time as the nearby Mayo, D'Aubigny and Wakefield Roads, and was meant to be a proper street with houses.
[58] With its sunny, breezy slopes, wide open spaces and distance from the polluted town centre, Round Hill was ideally placed for the development of 19th-century laundries.
[64] Wartime government contracts augmented production for their regular customers, and the business thrived; it only moved away from the Lewes Road site in 1979 because expansion and modernisation were required.
Dr Boyle rented the house at Roundhill Crescent, moved the dispensary there and added a 12-bed hospital for the treatment of what were then termed "nervous disorders".
A smallpox epidemic broke out in Brighton in late December 1950; the family of the first sufferer were regular users of the Tivoli Laundry on Crescent Road, and many employees were infected by the soiled linen.
[70] The closure of Cox's Pill Factory, the Kemp Town branch line and the nearby Vogue cinema in the 1970s and early 1980s prompted large-scale redevelopment.
[38][83] The flint and brick building, set below the level of Ditchling Road and on its west side, was in the Early English Gothic Revival style and was meant to have a tower; only a stub was ever built.
[38][84] Congregations declined, and the church was demolished in 1983; flats called St Saviour's Court and a rear archway in Vere Road recall its existence.
[87] Designed in 1893 by Lainson and Son and built by the Garrett building firm, it is a red-brick octagonal structure in the Queen Anne style, with a tiled turreted roof and corbel-topped piers at each corner, a pedimented entrance and arched windows set below recessed panels.
[5][87] The burial ground is surrounded by walls, stucco-faced gate piers and wrought iron fences which are listed separately at Grade II.
[9] The Grade II-listed[89] knapped flint Gothic Revival structure, designed by William and Edward Habershon, was built in 1854 on open land at the northern boundary of Brighton Borough as the Diocese of Chichester's training college for Anglican schoolmistresses.
[90] Standing next to each other at Preston Circus, at the northwest edge of the suburb, are the Duke of York's Picture House and Brighton's main fire station.
[91][92] The fire station, designed in a "restrained Modernist" style by Graeme Highet in 1938, curves round the road and features carved motifs by Joseph Cribb.
Routes 26, 46 and 50, which serve Hollingbury and Hollingdean northbound and Brighton city centre, Hove and Southwick southbound, run via Ditchling Road.
[69] Named after the Vogue—latterly a pornographic cinema—it was built in 1983–84 on the site of the former Lewes Road viaduct, Cox's Pill Factory and surrounding buildings in connection with a Sainsbury's supermarket development.
[109] This area includes all the Grade II-listed houses of Roundhill Crescent (described by Brighton and Hove City Council as "the most important architecturally"),[23] two pubs (including the Tudor Revival-style New Vic, built in the 1920s and representing a late addition to the mostly late 19th-century streetscape),[12] and four paired semi-detached villas on Ditchling Road which were some of the earliest houses in the area—they date from about 1850.
The houses, which on the northwest side of the road are not a continuous terrace and which date from the 1860s to the 1880s,[20] vary in height and the extent of their architectural detailing; canted bay windows and original cast-iron balconies feature prominently.
[43] Characteristic of Brighton but almost unknown elsewhere, this consisted of random assortments of materials such as low-quality brick, cobbles, flints, pebbles, rubble, wood and sand, set in hydraulic lime and shuttered.
Elsewhere, granite kerbstones, stone-dressed gutters and road crossing points laid with limestone and brick remain from the 19th-century development of the area, and some cast-iron lamp-posts have survived.
