One entrance to the Lanes

Duke Street

Duke Street is one entrance to the Lanes, the popular name for the Old Town of Brighton. The famous cricket family, the Wisdens, had a sports shop here for many years. It is now a street of high fashion shops and fancy bars.

Victorian horse-buses were diverted up this street because North Street was too steep. This created traffic congestion so the northern part of the street was demolished in a 1870s road-widening scheme.

That’s why there are two distinct sides to this street. On one side, there are older bow-fronted buildings, all of different heights. On the other, you can see a uniform terrace of much bigger white Victorian stucco buildings.

Comments about this page

  • I’m a Brighton boy born and bred, for Duke Street it was the shop known as the Brighton Angler run by Ted Holegate for many years- he also ran the angling shop in the summer on the Palace Pier, today known as the Brighton Pier. I could talk a lot about this place in Brighton, as it holds fond memories for me and a lot of other people.

    By Paul Fleet (07/10/2009)
  • When I was 12 years old my father got me my first part time job. It was washing up in the Friar Tuck restaurant in Duke Street. The best thing about the job was that I used to get my dinner for free.

    By Eunice Pike (21/07/2010)
  • In the late 50s there was a sports shop on Duke Street which sold snorkels, masks and flippers -which were a rarity in England at that time. Skin diving was just then becoming popular, primarily because of the tv show ‘Sea Hunt. Remember buying my first set of skin diving gear there in the summer of 1958. Built a spear gun from aluminium and surgical rubber tubing and spent that summer emulating Lloyd Bridges in the sea off the Banjo Groyne in Kemptown. Little bit colder than Southern California as I remember it but great fun all the same.

    By Ian Hunt. Alberta, Canada (16/05/2011)

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