BPC00005

Published in Wallis’s Royal Edition of Brighton As It Is, 1842, Describing Every Recent Improvement.

This is virtually the same as BPC00004 (published 6 years earlier) but the new ‘Railway Terminus’ has been put in place. South of it is still just open ground, there is no Queen’s Road as yet. Going north, the lines of the London Railway and the Shoreham Railway have been drawn in, together with a long looping roadway running north from the western side of the new station, then turning west, then turning south. This is a slightly changed route today, but essentially this 1842 roadway, going up from the station, is now Terminus Road, going into Buckingham Place, turning off into Compton Avenue, crossing Dyke Road and continuing along Clifton Road. From there the new road followed a trackway that became Powis Road, into Montpelier Street and down Hampton Place. This route took the first-class rail passengers, collected in their carriages, to the large villas of the Montpelier area, without having to travel quite narrow streets into town, across North Street and then into Western Road. On the title deeds for the first houses in Clifton Road, numbers 1 to 12, Clifton Road is referred to as being on ‘the Terminus Road, Brighton’, and in the text of the documents it is further described as ‘situate on the south eastern side of and adjoining the New Road leading from Hampton Place in Brighton aforesaid to the London and Brighton Railway Terminus in Brighton aforesaid’.

Among the Montpelier mansions that this road served was Lady Gosford’s West Hill Lodge (where Waitrose is today), Hampton Lodge, near the corner of Hampton Place on Western Road, and opposite that was Mrs Sober’s Western Lodge. Just south of Mrs Sober’s were other destinations, like the Bedford Hotel and Regency Square. The map also names these three large mansions of Hampton Lodge, Western Lodge and West Hill Lodge.

All maps: (click on image to see the full entry)