An ancient manorial pigeon-house or dovecot still remains at Patcham, sturdily built of Sussex flints, banded with brick, and wonderfully buttressed.
Preston is now almost wholly urban, but its Early English church, although patched and altered, still keeps its fresco representing the murder of Thomas à Becket, and that of an angel disputing with the Devil for the possession of a departed soul. The angel, like some celestial grocer, is weighing the shivering soul in the balance, while the Devil, sitting in one scale, makes the unfortunate soul in the other "kick the beam."
It has very justly been remarked that Brighton is treeless, but that complaint by no means holds good respecting the approach to it through Withdean and Preston Park, which is exceptionally well wooded, the tall elms forming an archway infinitely more lovable than the gigantic brick arch of the railway viaduct that poses as a triumphal entry into the town.
It is Brighton's ever-open front door. No occasion to knock or ring; enter and welcome to that cheery town: a brighter, cleaner London.
Brighton has renewed its youth. It has had ill fortune as well as good, and went through a middle period when, deserted by Royalty, and not yet fully won to a broader popularity, its older houses looked shabby and its newer mean. But that period has passed. What remains of the age of George the Fourth has with the lapse of time and the inevitable changes in taste, become almost archæologically interesting, and the newer Brighton approaches a Parisian magnificence and display. The Pavilion of George the Fourth was the last word in gorgeousness of his time, but it wears an old-maidish appearance of dowdiness in midst of the Brighton of the twentieth century.
[Illustration: PRESTON VIADUCT: ENTRANCE TO BRIGHTON.]
The Pavilion is of course the very hub of Brighton. The pilgrim from London comes to it past the great church of St. Peter, built in 1824, in a curious Gothic, and thence past the Level to the Old Steyne. The names of the terraces and rows of houses on either side proclaim their period, even if those characteristic semicircular bayed fronts did not: they are York Place, Hanover Terrace, Gloucester Place, Adelaide this, Caroline that, and Brunswick t'other: all names associated with the late Georgian period.