A quest in Brighton: finding 52 Clarence Square

I have been silent on this blog since the final day of my all-too-short, and very intense, month with the Headlam papers and feeling that I was getting to know the family.

For some years, I'd wanted to be the kind of academic who spends their time in archives. For the most part, though, the kind of research I do on ancient Greek mythology, religion and culture doesn't involve archive work. My time as a Barker Fellow at Durham in February and March 2024 was an opportunity to do something rather different: to immerse myself in a collection, to follow up leads, and to see what I could find out about the place of Classics in the lives of the Headlam family. It was a departure from my usual research, and one I loved.

One of the things I hadn't anticipated was just how much the experience would be shaped by the unexpected. I went in with a set of questions about elite schooling and young men's enculturation, but the papers led me in other directions too. There were letters about everyday life, family relationships, poetry, and the interests of the children - both the boys and the girls. Some of what I found was directly relevant to my project, while some of it left me with questions I haven't yet had time to pursue.

One such detail was the time spent in Brighton by one of the family members, Margaret Headlam. During this period - or perhaps because of it; I wasn't quite sure - there was a bitter correspondence between her and her brother. The issue seemed to be connected in some way with a stay at 52 Clarence Square.

The reason I'm writing again now, two and a half years later, is that I'm in Brighton at the moment, with my fiancé, James. This is a rather different kind of expedition from my time in Durham, where I was doing everything on my own, immersed in the Special Collections and following the Headlams through their letters. This time, James is here too, and I've found myself returning to those papers in a rather different setting.

I decided that I really ought to try to find 52 Clarence Square, or at least the site of it. And so we set off!

Clarence Square is a few blocks back from the seafront hotel where we're staying, among the elegant squares of Brighton. It feels at once like another world, evoking a time when someone from a well-off background might spend time on the south coast, and yet it is very close to the concrete NCP car park and the shops of Western Road and Churchill Square. The layers of the city are all around : the historic squares, the modern buildings, and the changing street layout that can make it difficult to work out where something once stood.

North side of Clarence Square, Brighton. Photograph by Hassocks5489, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0. We were so immersed in the search for 52 Clarence Square that we forgot to take a photo at the time.

We stood looking at the square, trying to work out where Margaret might have stayed. The difficulty was that there were no numbers on the doors after the highish 40s, so we looked online to find out that the Prince of Wales pub is at number 47. The building occupied by Kokoro, next to it, has a Western Road address rather than one on the Square.

So where does that leave 52 Clarence Square? Perhaps the numbering has changed over time. Perhaps the pub occupies what were once several separate addresses, or perhaps changes to the area around Churchill Square have made the old layout harder to reconstruct. I haven't established which, if any, of these possibilities is right. But I'm going to run with the idea that the site I'm looking at is somewhere around the corner where the Prince of Wales now stands, and imagine that I might finally have found the place where Margaret stayed.

James’s photo of me outside the Prince of Wales, Clarence Square, with the Sole Trader sign at the edge of Churchill Square in the background in a reminder that the modern city is part of the challenge of trying to work out where 52 Clarence Square might have been.

I am picturing Margaret where the pub now stands, writing intense letters to her brother and receiving his letters in return. I don't know exactly what happened between them, or even whether the stay in Brighton was the cause of their falling-out. That is part of what I still want to find out.

The correspondence that caught my attention was from 1861, when John was writing to Margaret in a way that seemed to me strikingly different from the polite conventions of nineteenth-century letter-writing. As I wrote back in 2024, his letters were full of long, sometimes barely decipherable sentences, apparently expressing considerable frustration about something Margaret had done. There were hints of religion, of gifts, and of other people whose confidence and affection she was trying to gain. But I was left wondering what, precisely, had happened.

Then, on the last day of my time in the archives, I came across a letter dated 12 November 1865, written from 52 Clarence Square. I had to leave before I could read it properly. The letter began, as so many nineteenth-century letters do, with 'My dear Margaret', before moving into something rather less conventional:

'To say that your last letter is the most painful one that I have received would be but a weak explanation for the extreme sorrow that it causes me [...]'

I was left with that sentence, and the address. I wanted to know what Margaret had written, what had caused such sorrow, and whether this was John writing to her again. I would need to return to the letter, check the handwriting and work out what was going on.

That, I found, is one of the pleasures - and frustrations - of working with an archive. A document can offer a tantalising glimpse of something that mattered deeply to the people involved, while providing only part of the story. One task is to follow the evidence, see what else turns up, and discover whether our first impressions hold up.

This is also part of what I wanted to share when I started this blog. I'm not reporting on a completed piece of research. Rather, I'm sharing what it is like to find my way through material that is new to me, to follow questions that arise unexpectedly, and to work out what I can and cannot say about what I have found. It is a different kind of academic experience from my usual work on ancient Greek myth and religion, and that is precisely what makes it interesting to me.

That was more than two years ago now. But being in Brighton has brought it all back to me, and it has felt good to resume this blog with a fresh little quest: to find the address where one of the Headlams once stayed. It is a small question, perhaps, but one that leads back to a much larger set of questions about Margaret, her family, and the relationships and beliefs that shaped their lives.

I would like to return to Durham to continue consulting the archives and to write a study building on what I found out in 2024. I'm enjoying returning to the papers in my mind, too, and wondering what else I might discover. There is still so much I haven't had time to investigate properly.

But for now, at least, I have a place to look at while I think about Margaret, John, and their letters. I haven't solved the mystery of 52 Clarence Square, and I can't yet be certain that I have found the building where Margaret stayed. But it feels good to have a new lead, and to be thinking again about the glimpses of lives that emerge from letters people leave behind. And this connects with what this blog is really about: following threads, sharing discoveries as they happen, and seeing where curiosity leads.