page_title: Buildings and architecture of Brighton and Hove
section_title: Building materials
hierarchical_section_title: Buildings and architecture of Brighton and Hove / Architectural characteristics / Building materials
caption_attribution_description: 11 Grand Avenue, Hove, City of Brighton and Hove, East Sussex. Designed in 1900 by A. Faulkner and built by master builder William Willett. Listed at Grade II by English Heritage (NHLE Code 1205508)
context_page_description: Brighton and Hove, a city on the English Channel coast in southeast England, has a large and diverse stock of buildings "unrivalled architecturally" among the country's seaside resorts. The urban area, designated a city in 2000, is made up of the formerly separate towns of Brighton and Hove, nearby villages such as Portslade, Patcham and Rottingdean, and 20th-century estates such as Moulsecoomb and Mile Oak. The conurbation was first united in 1997 as a unitary authority and has a population of about 253,000. About half of the 20,430-acre geographical area is classed as built up.
  Brighton's transformation from medieval fishing village into spa town and pleasure resort, patronised by royalty and fashionable high society, coincided with the development of Regency architecture and the careers of three architects whose work came to characterise the 4-mile seafront.
context_section_description: Bungaroosh, a low-quality composite material, was commonly used in construction in the 18th century.  The material contained miscellaneous objects such as broken bricks, lumps of wood, pebbles and stone; this mixture was then shuttered in hydraulic lime until it hardened.  Bungaroosh walls were often hidden behind stucco or mathematical tile façades, and are susceptible to water penetration. Mathematical tiles, a similarly localised material, were designed to be laid overlapping each other, giving the appearance of brickwork. Glazed black tiles are closely associated with Brighton, and survive on 18th- and early 19th-century buildings such as Royal Crescent, Patcham Place and the shop at 9 Pool Valley. Other colours of tile are occasionally seen, such as cream (in the East Cliff area) and honey (commonly used by Henry Holland, including on his design for the original Marine Pavilion). The tiles gave bungaroosh buildings an expensive-looking façade and were easier to work with than bricks.
  Rendered stucco façades "are a defining characteristic of Brighton and Hove's historic core". Stucco gave the appearance of stone, left a smooth finish and could be worked into intricate patterns on mouldings, capitals, architraves and other embellishments.  It was used prominently on long, continuous terraces of houses, such as in the Brunswick and Kemp Town estates.  Rustication was sometimes used, especially at ground-floor level. Typical decorative mouldings include standard features of Classical architecture such as columns of various orders, pilasters, parapets, cornices and capitals. Stucco façades were not always well-regarded: writing in 1940, Louis Francis Salzman considered that stucco "hides what architectural features [the buildings] may possess and produces dull uniformity, entirely lacking in character".
  Brick buildings are common throughout the area.  Pale gault brick is characteristic of some mid-19th-century residential developments, such as the area around Grand Avenue in Hove and the Valley Gardens area of Brighton (both conservation areas).  Later in that century, smooth red brickwork became more common.  Yellowish stock bricks were popular in the 19th century for non-residential buildings and walls which were not readily visible.  Different coloured bricks, such as brown and grey-blue, were often used in quoins and dressings on walls made of flint or red bricks. The layout of brickwork "has a significant effect on a building's appearance"; the Flemish bond pattern is encountered most frequently in the city. On Victorian and Edwardian houses, brick chimney-stacks often served a decorative as well as a functional purpose, and were sometimes tall and ornate: examples include the Queen Anne-style houses at 8–11 Grand Avenue, Hove (1900–03, by Amos Faulkner).
  Stone was rarely used as a building material, as it was not prevalent locally.  Some churches and banks of the 19th and early 20th centuries were built of Bath or Portland stone, and Kentish ragstone was used for St Joseph's Church on Elm Grove, but few ordinary residential or commercial buildings have any stonework.  Artificial stone was sometimes used for exterior features such as cornices and columns, though, especially during the Victorian era.  Flint was historically a common building material as it was "always readily available in Hove, Portslade, West Blatchington and Hangleton".  Agricultural buildings and cottages used random (unknapped) flintwork extensively, as did all four parishes' ancient churches and others further east such as Ovingdean and Rottingdean.   Flints were collected from the beach and the South Downs or dug out of the fields, where they were often found near the surface.  A flint pit survived at Southern Cross near Portslade until the 20th century.  It became popular again as a building material in the early 19th century, by which time several styles of flintwork had developed: rounded pebbles in seafront buildings, whole flints in rural cottages and agricultural buildings, knapped (split) flints, and random flintwork with brick dressings
caption: Brick was often used for 19th-century houses, for both walls and chimney-stacks (11 Grand Avenue, Hove pictured).
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