Tichborne Street: old and new

Insanitary 19th century hovels

Some of the worst housing in the town lay to the north between Gardner Street and Bread Street, in the alleys and courtyards of Pimlico, Orange Row, and Pym’s Gardens where the thousand or so inhabitants, mainly fishermen and labourers together with their pigs and other livestock, lived in appalling conditions in 175 dwellings. These hovels were so foul and insanitary that in the early 1870s, Brighton’s first slum clearance got rid of them, resulting in the construction of Tichborne Street.

The origins of the street name

Tichborne Street took its name from the ‘Tichbourne claimant’ who had addressed meetings in Brighton. The affair of the Tichborne claimant was the celebrated 19th-century legal case of Arthur Orton (1834–1898), who claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne (1829–1854), the missing heir to the Tichborne Baronetcy. Orton was eventually judged to be an impostor and served ten years in prison; he died in poverty on 2 April 1898

The image below is produced using a photo collage process. The black and white aspects are Tichborne Street in 1978, and the colour represents the street in 2011.