page_title: Round Hill, Brighton
section_title: Residential development in the 19th century
hierarchical_section_title: Round Hill, Brighton / History / Residential development in the 19th century
caption_attribution_description: 80 and 82 Ditchling Road, Round Hill, City of Brighton and Hove, England. One of a series of seven semi-detached villas built as high-quality housing in the 1850s as Brighton grew. They were some of the earliest houses in the area now covered by the inner suburb of Round Hill.
context_page_description: Round Hill is an inner suburban area of Brighton, part of the coastal city of Brighton and Hove in England. The area contains a mix of privately owned and privately rented terraced housing, much of which has been converted for multiple occupancies, and small-scale commercial development. It was developed mostly in the late 19th century on an area of high land overlooking central Brighton and with good views in all directions, the area became a desirable middle-class suburb—particularly the large terraced houses of Roundhill Crescent and Richmond Road, and the exclusive Park Crescent—and within a few decades the whole of the hill had been built up with smaller terraces and some large villas.
  Non-residential buildings include the landmark St Martin's Church, Brighton's largest place of worship, with its dramatically extravagant interior; the Brighton Forum, a Gothic Revival former college now in commercial use; Brighton's main fire station; and the oldest working cinema in Britain. The first hospital in England catering for mental illness was established in a house in Roundhill Crescent in 1905.
context_section_description: Between 1838 and 1840, the local Colbatch family built four large detached villas in the former Rose Hill Park on a southwest-facing part of the hill. They were described as the "grandest and most ostentatious part of Round Hill", and the first (Rose Hill Villa, finished in 1838) was a "classic Victorian building". All four were large family homes in the Regency style popular in Brighton over the previous 30 years. Iron gates, protected by gatekeepers who lived in three cottages in the grounds, gave the villas privacy.
  The site of the failed Pleasure Gardens then became one of Brighton's most exclusive residential developments in the 1850s, when prominent and influential local architect Amon Henry Wilds conceived and built the three-part Park Crescent development.  The horseshoe-shaped terrace of 48 houses faced inwards towards a private garden formed from the old cricket ground. The "most ambitious scheme" of his long career was also one of his last: construction lasted from 1849 until 1854, and he died in 1857.
  Contemporary housing developments included the southeast side of Upper Lewes Road, the west side of Lewes Road, and a series of impressive semi-detached villas on Ditchling Road, but Round Hill's most intensive period of growth began in the mid-1860s.  "Fine curving terraces of Regency-style houses" appeared on the newly built Roundhill Crescent, which curved away from the northwest side of Upper Lewes Road, and semi-detached houses were laid out on Richmond Road behind and at a higher level. The first parts of Roundhill Crescent, still with a post-Regency character despite their late date, were built in 1865. Further development of the middle-class houses on these roads was patchy—many gaps still existed in 1875— but lower-class terraced housing spread rapidly elsewhere.  Vicar of Brighton Rev. Arthur Wagner bought the northern part of the former Pleasure Gardens—still open land in 1860—and stipulated that houses costing no more than £120 should be built for Brighton's working-class population.  He lent money to builders to increase the pace of development. The tightly packed terraced streets between Upper Lewes Road and Lewes Road were mostly complete by the 1870s, and St Martin's Church was built nearby to serve the area. Larger individual houses of the 1860s included Prince's Villa, in an isolated position next to Tower Mill, and Bryn—built in 1869 on Wakefield Road and used as an orphanage from 1875 until 1937.
  Another period of rapid residential development occurred in the 1880s.  The gaps in Roundhill Crescent were filled with houses in a more contemporary style than the old-fashioned Regency-style houses of the 1860s. Several streets around Prince's Road were built between 1880 and 1884. Also in the 1880s, The Salvation Army founded a place of worship in the area.  The Citadel could hold 1,400 people, and was located on Park Crescent Terrace behind the west side of Park Crescent. Nearby, the Royal Hippodrome (unrelated to the Hippodrome in Brighton's old town) had opened on 31 October 1876.  The 1,600-capacity building hosted a circus until 1889, then reopened under new ownership on 28 July 1890 as the Gaiety Theatre and cinema.  Never a success, it closed permanently in 1900 and passed into commercial use until its demolition for flats in 1930.
caption: A group of semi-detached villas on Ditchling Road were among the earliest houses in the area.
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