This view, looking west from where New Steine is today, has only one recognisable feature, the church of St Nicholas on its hill. The house built by Dr Richard Russell in 1753 is amongst those clustered on the cliff edge. Russell advocated the sea water cure, which required his patients to not only bathe in but also to drink sea water.
An influx of fashionable visitors
With the coming of fashionable visitors in the 1770’s and 1780’s (the Prince of Wales paid his first visit in 1783) the town needed to expand beyond the old town confines of North, East and West Streets and houses were erected on the west and south sides of the Steine and to the north of North Street. By 1785 the houses behind the windmill on the east side of the Steine had just been built but there was no housing on the east cliff.
Windmills on the cliffs
Windmills were a feature on the cliffs catching the prevailing wind and forming an important part of the food chain supplying the visitors. As the town expanded new mills were built on the outskirts (or those on the cliffs were moved inland). By 1914 only Waterhall Mill at Patcham was still working. This mill survives as a private house but the windmills at Rottingdean and West Blatchington are open on some summer weekends.
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The windmill in the image is believed to be the ‘Coffee Mill’, I imagine the name being a nickname due to its appearance. It is shown almost flush to the ground which suggests it was an early ‘sunken post’ mill.
As for further details, I’m struggling.
There is a reference from 1690 when a sum of £20 which had been set aside for the maintenance of the poor was invested in the town mill – the use of the word ‘the’ suggests there was just one mill standing at the time.
According to a deed in Hove Library, the previous year (1689), the mill on the East Cliff “in the East Laithe of Brighton” was assigned by Thomas Humphrey, brewer, to Robert Leggatt, mason, along with the land it stood on.
This mill is shown (along with the 3 Marine Parade windmills) on Richard Budgen’s first large-scale map of Sussex, published in 1724.
The mill had gone by 1737 as a notice from that year mentions the “sale of the site of the town windmill” (E.S.R.O. HOW/34/16).
As for the origin of the mill, it might possibly be the mill which is depicted in the town in the illustration “Brighton fortified before the Armada” c1588, and then later in 1665, when the church wardens are recorded as paying the Lords of the Manor for two mills (the other presumably being the surviving one of the two Church Hill Mills).
The Windmills and Millers of Brighton, written by Harold Dawes and published by the Sussex Industrial Archaeology Society, has some detail on Brighton’s early windmills. It includes an image very similar, but not wholly identical, to the one above, with the caption “Coffee Windmill in the Old Steine, 1736, from an engraving in Brighton Museum”. The author says that the coffee mill was ‘known to’ exist in East Street. Hard to reconcile that with either of the images (the one above and the one in the windmills book), because in both cases the mill seems to be on slightly higher ground than the old town. Probably a hefty dose of artistic licence at work.
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