Brighton has always backed the independent. Walk the narrow paths of The Lanes, or head north through Bond Street towards Gloucester Road, and you find a density of small, owner-run shops that very few cities in England can match. Most of the good ones are within a fifteen-minute walk of each other, which is the useful thing to know if you only have an afternoon.
What follows is not a ranking. It is a walk, laid out roughly south to north, past four shops we know well and send people to often. Each is run by someone who chose to do this the difficult way.
Where Brighton's independent shops actually are
Two neighbourhoods do most of the work, and they feel nothing alike.
The Lanes is the old town: a knot of narrow alleyways between North Street and the seafront, lined with jewellers, small fashion labels, cafes and the odd antique dealer. It is compact and easy to get pleasantly lost in. If you are coming from the station, walk down Queen's Road and keep going; you will reach it in ten to fifteen minutes.
North Laine sits just north of it, between the station and the Royal Pavilion. The streets are wider and straighter, the shops louder: vintage clothing, record shops, homeware, independent cafes, and long rows of shopfronts painted every colour available. Bond Street, Gardner Street, Kensington Gardens and Gloucester Road are the spine of it.
The walk below starts in The Lanes and finishes in North Laine, so you see both.
1. Ana Chic, 21A Prince Albert Street
We start at our own door, because that is where our walk starts too.
Our shop is eleven square metres. That is not a lot of room, so what goes into it has to earn its place. Everything we sell is made by hand by women artisans and quality-checked in our own atelier: crochet and knitted cardigans, tops, bags, hats and small accessories, worked in organic cotton and chunky wool. We make in small batches, so the rails change from one month to the next, and we can never quite promise what you will find.
Come in and handle things. Handmade organic cotton does not photograph the way it feels. If you want a feel for the range before you visit, the cardigans and crochet bags are the pieces people most often come in asking about.
2. Tribeca, 21 Bond Street
Five minutes north, on Bond Street, in a historic building with a dusky pink front you cannot miss.
Tribeca is designer womenswear, and one of the original UK stockists of Isabel Marant. Alongside the names you will recognise there are smaller labels from Paris, Los Angeles and New York, chosen by someone with a clear point of view rather than a spreadsheet: muted colours, simple cuts, good fabric.
It is a different price bracket to us, and a different kind of shopping. But the instinct behind it is one we recognise: buy fewer things, and buy things that were considered.
3. Lavender Room, 16 Bond Street
A few doors along from Tribeca, in one of the street's listed buildings.
Lavender Room is hard to categorise, which is rather the point of it. Clothing and shoes, fashion accessories, glass bottles and perfume decanters, soaps, candle holders, small things for the home. An eclectic mix held together by taste rather than by category. It is the shop you go into for one thing and leave having found something you did not know existed.
It is where we send people who want something lovely for someone else and cannot say what.
4. Yashar Bish, Gloucester Road
The longest leg of the walk, up into the heart of North Laine, and worth it.
Yashar Bish deals in hand-knotted rugs and flat-weave kilims: Persian, Afghan and Anatolian tribal and village pieces rather than factory production. Alongside the rugs there are kilim cushions and other textiles, and the staff are happy to talk you through where a piece came from.
This is the shop on the list we feel closest to. Everything in it was made on a loom by a person, in a tradition older than any of us, and the irregularities are not defects. They are the evidence. We work in yarn rather than weave, and at a very different scale, but it is recognisably the same argument about how things should be made.
Go in even if you are not buying a rug. The textures alone are worth the walk.
Making the most of the walk
Prince Albert Street, up through Bond Street, north to Gloucester Road. It is under a mile end to end, and it takes you from The Lanes through to North Laine, which is the quickest way to understand how Brighton is put together.
A few things we have learned from watching people do it:
- Go on a weekday morning if you can. The Lanes and North Laine are at their busiest on Saturday afternoons, and small shops are easier to enjoy when you can actually get to the rails.
- Ask questions. In an owner-run shop the person behind the counter usually chose every item in the room, and often knows who made it. That conversation is half of what you are there for.
- Do not rush the side streets. Some of Brighton's most interesting shops are one turning away from the obvious route.
- If you are buying a gift, handmade pieces travel well and are hard to duplicate. We keep a short edit of one-of-a-kind gifts for exactly that.
Every one of these shops is run by people who could have done something easier. Choosing them over a chain is a small decision that lands somewhere real: a rent paid, a lease renewed, a street that stays interesting enough to walk down.
We are at 21A Prince Albert Street, open Monday to Saturday 10am to 6pm, and Sunday 11am to 6pm. Come and say hello.
— Ana Chic