Airfix, comics and banana fritters

The Regency Society and The James Gray Collection" alt="Image reproduced with kind permission of The Regency Society and The James Gray Collection" />
Image reproduced with kind permission of The Regency Society and The James Gray Collection

Brighton born and bred

I’ve lived in Brighton all my life. I was born in 1952. I went to school at Clifton College, in Clifton Road, which was attached to the church with the huge spire which you could see all around the town. The head teacher was Mrs Cronin and our first teacher was Mrs Tewkesbury.

A fantastic toy counter

I loved going to Woolworths, which had a fantastic toy counter and I would buy the ho/oo scale toy soldiers that Airfix regularly released. I bought my first record from Murdochs for six and eight. My father would often walk me and my brother to Kemp Town, where we bought fantastic bread from Fogels. We also used to buy lovely cream cheese from Taub’s in Preston Street, one of the only shops open on a Sunday.

A brilliant cake shop?

I also enjoyed going to a brilliant cake shop at the bottom of Waterloo Street – what was its name? I started my comic book collection by buying from my local newsagents, Everleigh in Dyke Road, and augmented it by going to EGB in North Road, then two doors down to The Creel, for a banana fritter.

Comments about this page

  • I remember EGB very well. I bought most of my Marvel Comics’ back issues there between 1967 and 1970 (Fantastic Four, X-Men, Avengers, Doctor Strange etc) as well as many science fiction paperbacks (Asimov, Bradbury, Clark and the rest of the sci-fi alphabet through to Zelazny). It was run by a miserable bloke who always wore a brown dust coat and gave you a load of verbal if he thought you were browsing for too long without buying anything (“if you want to read the books, sonny, go to a library…”)

    By John Wilkin (02/04/2013)
  • I went to Clifton College too and remained at the same school when it moved to Preston Park Avenue, first to number 13 then to 43. I remember Mrs Cronin, Mrs Tewksbury, Miss Lewis, Mr Challen and our lovely old caretaker Mr Want who was so kind and gave me a beautiful book on cats which I still treasure to this day. The demolition of that wonderful old church was criminal. Do you remember we used to hold our school pantomimes in the hall under the church?

    By Denise Marsh (17/02/2021)

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