“A proper public park” – How a Sussex city seized its chance to level-up its ageing seafront

Untitled Practice describes the site as a ladder of disconnected outdoor “rooms”, cut off by pathways. In places, these obstruct access from Kingsway to the seaside promenade. And site accessibility is so bad that it does not comply with current equality laws. “It has a very inter-war feel to it,” says Untitled Practice co-founder Murray Smith. “If you have a buggy or a walking stick, there are spaces that you just could not get down into.”

The architects’ vision is to rip up the outdated layout and build a new, more fluid 1.5km “proper public park”, linked by one continuous 3-metre-wide path. It will offer a sheltered walking route for pedestrians just behind the main Hove promenade, which has little shade in summer and is exposed to winds. 

Smith took inspiration from the Goods Line in Sydney and Michael Van Valkenburgh’s Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York, a 10-year project to reconnect the city to its river shoreline.

The park’s eastern edge will start by the King Alfred Leisure Centre, a well-used yet shabby facility which has been subject to many failed developer-led proposals, including Frank Gehry’s “wonky towers”, scrapped in 2007.

Running westwards, there will be a new event space, bowling greens and a two-storey clubhouse with a zig-zagging roof designed by the council’s in-house architects, a cafe, a croquet pitch, a sand sports venue and tennis and padel courts. The sports areas will be interspersed with gardens and soft landscaping containing 927 new trees and 40,000 perennials.

This level of planting could radically alter the seafront’s feel. There are currently just a handful of trees across the entire 1.5km-long site. The trees will help mitigate climate change and the site will achieve a net biodiversity gain of around 20 per cent. 

Smith, who has already completed another greening project at Valley Gardens in the city centre, concedes there is “loads of scepticism” about whether the trees will survive the wind and salty air. But he’s committed to “giving it a try”. He points to successful seaside tree planting down the coast in Worthing, as well as in Cornwall, which is extremely exposed, but where pine and hawthorn grow happily. The team have chosen plants that should respond well to the challenging coastal environment, among them hawthorn, blackthorn and the resilient Austrian pine.

The park will end at Hove Lagoon, where the first section has already been completed: a wheeled sports area with a roller rink, BMX pump track and a “plaza”-style skate park, designed by Maverick Skateparks alongside Liam Teague, manager of Brighton’s BYC Skatepark, and the council’s Ricardo Magee. It’s an offering to rival central Brighton’s famous Level and replaces an old facility that was tucked around the back of the Lagoon’s Big Beach Cafe, owned by DJ Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim. 

“It’s been almost 100 per cent positively received,” says Jack Francis, co-chair of Brighton and Hove Skate Association who has been skating in the city for 20 years. “I think that it pairs up really nicely with the other skate park that we have in the city.”

Francis praises its attention to skill progression, with a series of rails that allows skaters to master skills before advancing. “There’s such a huge demand for it, they could have built one that was double the size and it would have been just as popular,” he says.

Down at the park, some skaters rue the plaza’s lack of more challenging obstacles, and toddlers on scooters have been causing havoc. But Josu, another skater, is so impressed that, despite living near The Level, he’s been taking the 40-minute bus ride west to the new park.

Roller-skating in the park is Polly Webster, a 24-year-old who studies at Brighton University. She says the area’s roller rink, thought to be one of the UK’s first, is helping shift its user demographic. “It’s more attractive to young women and girls,” she explains, adding that they are then emboldened to try out the skate park too.

The wheeled sports area is a key part of making the project appeal to younger people who aren’t interested in bowls or croquet. “The whole rationale was to try and make that space relevant for the demographic that lives in West Hove now,” says the council’s seafront development manager, Toni Manuel, who wrote the Levelling Up Fund bid for the project. “Hove has really changed, and the pandemic showed us that a lot of the people live in flats, so that space there is very important for outdoor recreation.” 

With its wide boulevards, Hove has a reputation for being Brighton’s upmarket neighbour and wouldn’t seem an obvious candidate for Levelling Up funding.

Yet Manuel’s proposal, called Kingsway to the Sea, made the case for a park that would draw in young people from wards further north, and from the west in Portslade, which have “elevated levels of deprivation” and scant green space or activities. “It will help address the issue of deprivation by ensuring public open space that is free to use in a densely populated area with acute shortage of adequate green spaces,” said the bid.

The marked decline of Hove seafront – in contrast to Brighton’s success – lays bare the scale of the challenge facing seaside communities. And Clay says for years the council’s strategy was simply to do nothing. A local couple’s offer to pay to fix a broken fountain was even turned down on the grounds the authority couldn’t maintain it, he recalls.

Manuel says funding cuts stripped park budgets “down to the bone”. She explains: “It wasn’t that we didn’t have the ideas; it was that we didn’t have the funding… Parks and recreation facilities are not a statutory service. Investment in new facilities is really difficult when you can barely afford to maintain what you currently have.”

In around 2020, it was agreed that an improvement plan would finally be drawn up using funding from Section 106 contributions. Untitled Practice was hired to draw up plans for the West Hove seafront and the Lagoon skatepark.

Then came the Levelling Up Fund, presenting what Manuel calls a “once in a generation opportunity” to do something more ambitious. She began putting together the Kingsway to the Sea proposal.