Kemp Town is a 19th Century residential estate in the east of Brighton in East Sussex, England, UK. Kemp Town was conceived and financed by Thomas Read Kemp. It has given its name to the larger Kemptown region of Brighton.
The estate was designed by Charles Busby and Amon Henry Wilds and constructed by Thomas Cubitt. Building work started in 1823 on Arundel Terrace, Chichester Terrace, Lewes Crescent and Sussex Square. Chichester Terrace incorporated the earlier Chichester House. In 1837 Thomas Kemp fled the country to escape his creditors. The project continued under Cubitt with the support of the Fifth Earl of Bristol. It was completed in 1855, with Sussex Square larger than London's Grosvenor Square and at the time the biggest housing crescent in Britain. The original estate is a good example of Regency architecture.
At around the same time, Brighton's neighbour (and now a part of the same administrative city), Hove, was expanded to its east, meeting the western edge of Brighton, with the development of the very similar Brunswick Estate, which featured similar though smaller Regency-style properties, and its own market, police station, riding school and (as in Kemp Town) small mews streets for staff housing. These mews now provide very attractive private accommodation which can fetch similar prices to flats in the grand houses they once served.
Below and to the south of Kemp Town, at beach level, is now Brighton Marina and a proposed redevelopment at Black Rock, site of a former lido.
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Famous quotes containing the word town:
“Let us have a good many maples and hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. They are important, like the town clock. A village that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an essential part is wanting.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)