Nelson Place

In Graham Greene's famous novel 'Brighton Rock' the anti-hero Pinkie, asks the question:

Nelson Place, 1935

Backyard Brighton

'Nelson Place. Do you know it?...

....He could have drawn its plan as accurately as a surveyor on the turf: the barred and battlemented Salvation Army gaff at the corner: his own home beyond in Par­adise Piece: the houses which looked as if they had passed through an intensive bombardment, flapping gutters and glassless windows, an iron bedstead rusting in the front garden, the smashed and wasted ground in front where houses had been pulled down for model flats which had never gone up.'

The Boy crossed over towards Old Steyne walking slowly. The streets narrowed uphill above the Steyne: the shabby secret behind the bright corsage, the deformed breast. Every step was a retreat. He thought he had escaped for ever by the whole length of the parade, and now extreme poverty took him back; a shop where a shingle could be had for two shillings in the same building as a coffin-maker's who worked in oak, elm or lead: no window-dressing but one child's coffin dusty with disuse and the list of hairdressing prices. The Salvation Army Citadel marked with its battlements the very border of his home. He began to fear recog­nition and feel an obscure shame as if it were his native streets which had the right to forgive and not he to reproach them with the dreary and dingy past. Past the Albert Hostel ('Good Accommodation for Travellers') and there he was, on the top of the hill, in the thick of the bombardment - a flapping gutter, cracked windows, an iron bedstead in a front garden the size of a tabletop. Half Paradise Piece had been torn up as if by bomb bursts; the children played about the steep slope of rub­ble; a piece of fireplace showed houses had once been there, and a municipal no­tice announced new flats on a post stuck in the torn gravel and asphalt facing the little dingy damaged row, all that was left of Paradise Piece. His home was gone: the room at the bend of the stairs where the Saturday night exercise had taken place was now just air.'
From ' Brighton Rock' by Graham Greene
Published by : William Heinemann, Ltd. & The Bodley Head, Ltd.

Link here to Amelia Scholey recollections of leaving Nelson Place from the only house left standing there, and moving to Milner Flats.