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Jaime
Kaminski
Sussex Archaeological Society
Barbican House
169 High Street
Lewes
BN8 1YE
Brighton's transition from a town with a broadly fishing- and maritime-based economy to one of the country's principal seaside resorts has been widely studied. However, the mechanisms by which the town sustained the increasing number of visitors are less well understood. In the eighteenth century, long before hotels and boarding houses became commonplace, the visitor economy of the town was heavily underpinned by local residents providing accommodation for visitors. This could take the form of renting spare rooms in their own houses (lodgings), or entire houses (lodging houses). They were supplemented to a much lesser extent by inns and boarding houses, the precursors of hotels. The situation was such that in 1799 one-third of the 1200 houses in the town provided visitor accommodation of some description. This paper looks at the role that the residents and speculators played in the development of Brighton's accommodation sector.