Ship Street Gardens

This twitten runs from Ship Street to Middle Street it is lined with small nineteenth-century cottages and shops.

Numbers 13-16 are listed buildings. Opposite are a group of houses around small gardens, where ‘Fig Cottage’ does indeed have a magnificent fig tree.

The map below shows Brighton in 1799; Ship Street Gardens was then called Middle Street Lane.

Brighton in 1799:based on Yeakell and Gardner

Comments about this page

  • The Prince Regent famously won a bet against one of his more atheletic junior officers saying if given a 10 yard start and a course of his choosing, he could beat the officer to the finish. The bet placed, the Prince chose the Black Lion Twitten which joins the Ship Street Twitten as the course. As the Prince was a rather broad and portly gentleman, there was no way the younger officer could get past him for he was not allowed to touch his Royal personage.

    By Roy Grant (07/08/2011)
  • When I used to give talks on twittens, a gentlemen clearly in his late 80s, told me that the shops in the Middle Street Twitten, used to be solicitors offices where a row of clerks worked on lecturn like desks covered with ledgers. When he was a small boy, he was often chased away by a clerk weilding a cane for making funny faces at them through the windows.

    By Roy Grant (07/08/2011)
  • My great, great grandfather Henry James Vaughan sold antiques at 10 Ship Street Gardens in the early 1900s.  The mosaic step outside his shop is still there and I believe listed.

    By Tracy Francis (20/08/2015)
  • My great, grandfather had a business at 10 Ship Street gardens believed to be some sort of restoration workshop the family name VAUGHAN is written in mosaic on the step outside of the premises. Does anyone have any further knowledge of this or to what the trade actually was around 1900?

    By Sue (20/08/2015)

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