George, Prince of Wales - later Prince Regent, later George IV - began coming to Brighton in 1783 for his health and for the company of his mistress Maria Fitzherbert. He rented a small farmhouse, then enlarged it, then in 1815 commissioned John Nash to remake it into something else entirely. What Nash produced, finishing in 1823, is one of the strangest buildings in Europe: domes and minarets in a Hindu-Mughal style, with the interiors done in chinoiserie, a forty-foot dragon hanging in the Banqueting Room over a chandelier weighing a tonne, and lotus-shaped lamps in the Music Room. Queen Victoria found the place embarrassing and sold it to the town of Brighton in 1850 for £53,000; the town has run it as a museum ever since. The Royal Pavilion is Grade I listed, the most-visited building in Brighton, and a reminder of just how strange the British Regency could be when it really tried.

Russell's seawater cure made Brighton fashionable. The Prince Regent made it famous. But it was the London and Brighton Railway, opened in 1841, that made Brighton mass-market. The fast trains from London Bridge cut what had been a four-hour stagecoach trip down to under two hours, then under one. A day at the seaside became something a clerk and his family could actually afford, and Brighton tilted abruptly from a Regency spa to a Victorian holiday town. The Palace Pier - properly the Brighton Marine Palace and Pier - opened in 1899. The West Pier, more elegant, had opened in 1866; it closed in 1975, partially collapsed in 2002 after a series of storms, and burned twice in 2003. Its black skeleton still stands offshore, perhaps the most photographed ruin in southern England.

Two areas at the heart of Brighton get confused by visitors and defended fiercely by locals. The Lanes - bounded by North Street, West Street, and East Street - are the original tangle of fishing-village alleys, narrow streets full of jewellers, antique dealers, and Italian restaurants. The North Laine, to the north of North Street, is a different beast entirely. The word "laine" is Sussex dialect for a strip of agricultural land; the area takes its name from the medieval fields it sits on. North Laine today is alternative-shopping nirvana: bongs and magic potions, vintage clothes and fairy wings, second-hand records and tattoo studios. The two areas together give Brighton its peculiar texture - a Regency street plan, a hippie marketplace, and a working seafront, all packed into a square mile.

Brighton has been called the gay capital of Britain for decades, and the title is largely uncontested. The Kemp Town district, east of the Palace Pier, is the centre of the city's LGBT life, with St James's Street and Marine Parade running through it. Brighton and Hove Pride, held on the first Saturday of August, draws crowds in the hundreds of thousands and shuts most of the city centre down. The festival is one of the largest Pride events in Europe. The city's cultural Bohemian streak - artists, writers, musicians, comedians - has been reinforced by London's high rents pushing creative workers down to the coast since the 1990s. The Brighton Festival, held every May, has been running since 1967 and remains the largest annual multi-arts festival in England outside Edinburgh.

Graham Greene published Brighton Rock in 1938 - a novel about a 17-year-old gangster called Pinkie Brown and the small-time razor gangs that ran the city's racetrack rackets. The book pinned a particular kind of menace to the Brighton seafront: dance halls and rock-pull peppermint candy and the threat of violence behind both. The 1948 film adaptation starring Richard Attenborough as Pinkie made the image permanent. Brighton in real life had moved on by then, but the literary association stuck. The piers, the racecourse, the seafront amusements, the back streets - they all still carry a slight Pinkie shadow. Tourists still buy sticks of Brighton rock candy with the name running through the centre. The candy itself is genuine; the menace is mostly fiction now.

Brighton beach is not sand. It is shingle - small smooth pebbles in shades of grey and white - and the locals will gently correct any visitor who calls it a sandy beach. The shingle stretches for five and a half miles along the south coast facing the English Channel, ending at the Marina to the east and continuing west into Hove. The Madeira Drive seafront has been the finish line for the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run since 1927; the first Sunday in November sees hundreds of pre-1905 cars complete the 60-mile route from Hyde Park. From the height of the British Airways i360 - a 162-metre observation tower opened in 2016 on the site of the old West Pier's landward end - you can see the Channel stretching south, the Downs rising north, and the curve of the Sussex coast going east toward Beachy Head and west toward Worthing. On a clear day the Isle of Wight is faintly visible at the western horizon. Brighton sits in a sweet spot of geography and history that has rewarded almost everyone who has come to spend a day.