Brighton, drawn from its own streets.

Brighton on paper

The coast is the strongest line in any seaside print, and Brighton's runs almost exactly east to west, so the water fills the bottom of the sheet as a single unbroken block. The streets meet it along the front in a hard parallel line, and the piers reach out into it — the working one as a long spur, the wreck of the other as a shape offshore where the map still holds it.

Behind the front the city is built up three valleys, and the roads follow them: London Road, Lewes Road and Ditchling Road climb inland from the centre while the ground rises either side, which on paper shows as long radials with terraces combed off them at right angles, stopping and restarting where a hill got in the way. Between the front and those radials sit two very different patches of small streets. The Lanes are medieval — short, kinked, opening into yards. North Laine is Regency and industrial — a tight parallel grid of narrow streets laid over old field strips, and at a two-kilometre frame it is countable street by street.

West of the centre the pattern turns formal: the squares and crescents facing the sea, drawn as long curves and rectangles with their gardens in the middle, and beyond them Hove's wide avenues running straight down to the water at regular intervals. East of the centre, Kemptown does the same thing on a smaller scale. The railway comes in from the north and stops abruptly above the centre, with the viaduct curving away east on its own arc, the one line up there that ignores the streets.

At five kilometres across the print holds Hove to Kemptown with the sea along the bottom and the racecourse hill at the top corner. Widen to twelve and the Downs arrive, which is a quieter print; tighten to two and it becomes the streets you know by name.