Montpelier is an inner suburban area of Brighton, part of the English city and seaside resort of Brighton and Hove. Developed together with the adjacent Clifton Hill area in the mid-19th century, it forms a high-class, architecturally cohesive residential district with "an exceptionally complete character". Stucco-clad terraced housing and villas predominate, but two of the city's most significant Victorian churches and a landmark hospital building are also in the area, which lies immediately northwest of Brighton city centre and spreads as far as the ancient parish boundary with Hove. The name Montpelier was chosen by the original developers of the area as an intentional reference to Montpellier a then-fashionable French spa resort.
Development was initially stimulated when one of the main roads out of Brighton was turnpiked in the late 18th century, but the hilly land—condemned as "hideous masses of unfledged earth" by John Constable, who painted it nevertheless—was mostly devoted to agriculture until the 1820s. The ascent of Brighton from provincial fishing town to fashionable resort prompted a building boom in the next quarter-century, and Montpelier and Clifton Hill were transformed into districts of architecturally homogeneous streets with carefully designed, intricately detailed housing. Little demolition, infilling or redevelopment has occurred since, and hundreds of buildings have been granted listed status. The whole suburb is also one of 34 conservation areas in the city of Brighton and Hove.
Historic buildings include The Temple—local landowner Thomas Read Kemp's house, now a private school—the former Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children, currently being redeveloped, and large mid 19th-century houses such as Montpelier Hall. The area also has several set-piece residential squares and crescents such as Clifton Terrace, Powis Square, Vernon Terrace, Montpelier Crescent and Montpelier Villas. The architectural partnership of Amon Wilds, his son Amon Henry Wilds and Charles Busby—the most important architects in Regency era Brighton and Hove—designed many of these. Montpelier's range of churches includes some of the city's finest, but others have been demolished in the postwar period.
Location and character
Montpelier is a centrally located inner suburb of the city of Brighton and Hove. The Lanes, the ancient centre of Brighton, is about to the southeast, and central Hove is about to the west. London is to the north. There is no single official definition of the area covered by Montpelier and Clifton Hill, but most authorities (including Brighton and Hove City Council) define it as the area west of West Hill and east of the ancient parish boundary between Brighton and Hove. The Seven Dials area and the road junction of that name are to the north, forming the apex of the roughly triangular area, and the major city-centre shopping street Western Road lies to the south. Two roads form important through routes for cross-city traffic: Montpelier Road runs south–north from the city centre to Seven Dials, and the west–east Upper North Street links the city centre to Hove. Both are busy, but traffic is limited in the smaller residential streets.
Dyke Road—the ancient route from Brighton to Devil's Dyke and Steyning and eventually on to London—forms the conservation area's eastern boundary except at the southern end, where it extends east of the road to include St Nicholas Church (Brighton's original parish church), Wykeham Terrace and other small parts of West Hill. The land rises gently from the southwest to a summit at Clifton Hill. Writing in 1833, J.D. Parry said that the hill "commands a magnificent view, and has very fine air". John Constable, who stayed in Brighton several times during the 1820s, was less impressed: he described it as "hideous masses of unfledged earth called the country". Nevertheless, he produced several paintings of the area, which provide a record of its appearance just before it became suburbanised.
Geologically, Montpelier is built on grassy downland and sheep-pasture, beneath which is chalk. This pattern is repeated across the rest of the city, most of the Sussex coast and for several miles inland. The chalk, "one of the most complete and accessible strata anywhere in Europe", was formed about 100 million years ago. As in other areas where chalk is prevalent, the soil above it is rendzina. Found in thin layers and with a high calcium content, it has a poor agricultural value.
In common with the rest of Brighton, the area has a temperate climate: its Köppen climate classification is Cfb. It is characterised by mild, calm weather with high levels of sunshine, sea breezes and a "healthy, bracing air" attributed to the low level of tree cover. Average rainfall levels increase as the land rises: the 1958–1990 mean was on the seafront and about at the top of the South Downs above Brighton.
Locally, a distinction is made between the northern part of the area towards the top of the hill—this area is known as Clifton or Clifton Hill—and the lower land to the south and west, as far as the Hove boundary and Western Road, known as Montpelier. The names are also used interchangeably, and some sources make further distinctions: the area around Powis Grove, Powis Villas, Powis Road and St Michael and All Angels Church is called Powis in one study of the area. Although Montpelier first appears as the name of the area on a map of 1824, this still makes it the earliest Montpelier in England—predating those in Bristol, Cheltenham and elsewhere in taking and adapting the name of the French spa resort Montpellier. The town was popular with rich English people in the 18th century for convalescence: it had an excellent climate and good medical facilities. The term "Montpelier Estate" is sometimes used for the area as a whole.
Demography and politics Montpelier and Clifton Hill are predominantly residential: about 20% of buildings have other uses, primarily commercial and retail. Some areas have clusters of small shops, and there are many pubs and restaurants. The southern part of Montpelier is very close to Brighton's main retail area, Western Road and the Churchill Square shopping centre. Many streets provide long southward views towards the sea.
The area forms part of Brighton and Hove City Council's Regency ward, one of 21 wards in the city. This is part of the Brighton Pavilion parliamentary constituency, which elected Caroline Lucas of the Green Party at the 2010 General Election. She held the seat with an increased majority at the 2015 General Election.
Regency is classified as a "Prospering Metropolitan B" ward by the Office for National Statistics. 0.91% of the United Kingdom population live in such a ward, whose characteristics include much lower proportions of children, manufacturing sector workers, detached houses and households with more than one car than the national average, and much higher proportions of single-person households, people qualified to degree level and privately rented accommodation than the average. Population density is also much higher in Prospering Metropolitan B wards than in the United Kingdom as a whole.
The Regency ward covers of central Brighton, bounded by Seven Dials to the north, the ancient Brighton/Hove parish boundary to the west, the English Channel to the south and Dyke Road, North Street and Old Steine to the east. It therefore includes territory that is not part of Montpelier, whose southern boundary at Western Road runs through the middle of the ward. At the time of the 2001 United Kingdom census, for which the size of the ward was measured at , Regency had a population of 8,510. Its population density of 96.25 persons per hectare was much higher than that of the city Brighton and Hove (29.98) and of South East England as a whole (4.2). The ethnic mix is similar to that of the wider city and of South East England as a whole: in the Census, 93.3% of people in Regency classified themselves as White, 2.1% as Mixed, 1.88% as Asian or Asian British, 1.79% as Chinese or Other, and 0.93% as Black British. The largest differences in comparison to Brighton and Hove overall were the lower proportion of White people and the higher proportion belonging to Chinese or other ethnic groups. The gender balance is significantly different from that of the city as a whole: while 48.38% of Brighton and Hove's residents were male (as recorded by the 2001 Census), the proportion rose to 54.49% of people in Regency ward.
History
The South Downs, a range of chalk hills, surrounded the ancient fishing and farming village of Brighton (formerly Brighthelmston). The downland pasture sloped down to the English Channel coast and was farmed in one of two ways: some parts were divided into strips according to a local system of "laines", furlongs" and "paul-pieces", and other areas were left for the grazing of sheep. The area now covered by Montpelier was an example of the latter. The five laines around Brighton were based on land with a relatively gentle slope; when the gradient or height made the land too difficult to work, no more strips were marked out and the rest of the land was given over to grazing. A map of Brighton from the 1740s shows that a large section in the northwest of the parish—north of West Laine, west of North Laine and bisected by the road to Steyning—was marked as "sheep down". It had no official name at the time, but by 1792 it had become known as Church Hill in reference to St Nicholas Church, the parish church of Brighton which stood on a hillock near the road. The part west of the road was sometimes described as "Church Hill – West Side"; the corresponding "East Side" later became known as West Hill during Brighton's 19th-century growth. The road became a turnpike in 1777, increasing its importance, and became known as Dyke Road. Vine's Mill, one of several windmills built on the Downs around Brighton, was erected in 1810.
The sheep down was not common land: its ownership has been traced back to the 11th century (to Canute, Earl Godwin and his son King Harold), and by the late 18th century it was held by two influential local landowners. Thomas Kemp held about , and John Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset owned over . When Kemp died in 1811, his landholding transferred to his son Thomas Read Kemp. The Kemp family first acquired the land in 1770, when it was sold to them by the Friend family—whose history of large-scale land acquisition around Brighton goes back to the late 16th century and the purchase of the former St Bartholomew's Priory and its grounds.