Upper Bedford Street area

Upper Bedford Street area formerly contained dense, often poor quality housing. It was extensively redeveloped from the 1920s until the 1970s. There are many images of this area before redevelopment in the James Gray Collection. Where these images are of demolished streets, images have been placed on pages for nearby present day streets. Please see the index below to see where images have been placed. 

James Gray describes the redevelopment of this area in his caption to jgc_22_147 (on Lavender Street page): 

‘This term [Hereford Street area] is somewhat loosely applied to that dense area in Eastern Brighton bounded by Eastern Road, Lavender Street, Upper St James’s Street, Bristol Road and Montague Place. In this confined space were built during the 1830s no less than 14 streets or passages, running east and west of Upper Bedford Street. Lavender Street, incidentally, took its name from double hedges of lavender, which grew on each side of the road in its early days. The first clearance in this area took place in 1925 when Paradise Street and Manchester Row were completely swept away and the worst of the houses in Hereford Street were demolished and replaced by council houses.

(Please note that general practice in this website is to name streets using their current name. Historic street names are included  only in areas such as this where there has been exceptionally complex development making it impossible to locate images accurately using a current street name. )

Historic street index

Historic street names appear on the left with a link to the present day street page where images can be found (usually the closest to the original image) is on the right.