Thomas Lainson

Lainson's design was in the Italianate style,[7] popular at the time because of the fashionable influence of Queen Victoria's Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

)[10] In about 1870 he built another terrace of Italianate houses nearby on Sillwood Road, adjoining Charles Busby's Western Cottages of nearly 50 years earlier.

[1][12] By the 1870s, a dense working-class residential area had developed to the east of Brighton on the way to the high-class Kemp Town estate; it became known as Kemptown [sic].

[13] Methodist minister J. Martin wanted to extend that denomination's reach into the area, and on 1 March 1872 Lainson submitted plans for a church on the corner of St George's Terrace and Montague Place.

[14] In 1874, Lainson received the commission for another religious building: a new synagogue for Brighton's large Jewish community, whose first place of worship had been founded in 1792.

[31] A rare commission outside the Brighton area came in the same year: working on his own, Lainson designed a large extension to Reading Town Hall in Berkshire.

Lainson & Sons were chosen as the association's architects, and they provided two large buildings in Hove: Palmeira House in 1887, and a lavish repository and warehouse at 75 Holland Road in 1893.

[36] Lainson died in 1898, but his two sons continued in practice, designing buildings such as the Renaissance Revival-style St Aubyn's Mansions (1899) on Hove seafront.