I was recently reading historical accounts of cavalry charges — I think the specific one that jogged my memory was from Brett Devereux’s A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, but I cannot find the exact article as I write this — and I was struck by something. Reading those accounts of brave footsoldiers facing off against a wall of horses stirred something from the depths of my mind. A memory. Not a flashback, but certainly an unexpectedly vivid recollection. And I realised at once that an experience that many might think has been dead and gone for a century or more lives on. In me. I feel a profound duty to posterity to record what I remember of that day, and to share with you what it was really like to be there, and to experience what so many infantry units before me must have experienced.
The year was circa 2010. A group called “March for England” had arranged for a few dozen of their members to travel down to Brighton by train, to protest the insidious influence of Islam in British society (or some similar right-wing concern trolling; I cannot remember their exact policy platform). At the time we often called them the “EDL”, conflating them with Robinson’s “English Defence League” which had actually disbanded several years earlier (if memory serves). They had arranged to come to Brighton for several years in a row. And they had two clear reasons for doing so: 1. it is a seaside town with generally pleasant weather, and 2. it is populated almost entirely by emphatically left-wing hippies and anarchists whose every fibre of being opposed the MFE and their every policy statement and who would therefore be compelled to come out to the streets to violently oppose them. They were correct on both premises.
Those of you reading these presents at close to their time of publication will probably have intuited that recent events could have prompted me to journal my experience. Indeed a mere few weeks ago, on the 13th June 2026, we had another protest and counter-protest in Brighton, of the kind that I had not heard of for many years. I confess that I did not attend this protest, and cannot reliably tell you how it compared to the ones I attended. I heard that over ten thousand Brightonians turned out, and that they managed to pin the right wing protestors down near the train station. I know that at least this much is true, because I had a hospital appointment in London on that day, and I had to change my plans last-minute (not having realised the scale of the disruption) to travel via Hove station instead. This prior engagement was one of the reasons I did not attend the more recent protest. The other, I must confess, is that I quite frankly consider myself too old for these things. I was very happy standing my ground against political adversaries in my twenties; but today I find that I have neither the physical endurance nor the will to participate. Not that I consider it unimportant. Despite my frustration on the day, I am glad that several of my more youthful acquaintances have continued the tradition. Brighton has been, for quite some years now, a lone bastion of tolerance in an increasingly conservative Southeast. But having given what I could in my twenties, I feel no hypocrisy in leaving it to today’s twenty-year-olds to hold the fort. Perhaps what follows will give some justification for my lack of present engagement.
Returning to my past experience, the episode I am about to describe was not the first such protest I had attended. I had been to counter-protest the MFE each and every time they had visited. Because I was a left-wing hippie who felt compelled to oppose them. The usual order of events for me was to show up to the coast road (Kingsway), form a wall of disapproval, and wait for the right-wing visitors to appear and make my feelings about them known. There were many ways this was achieved: some had placards. Some had whistles they blew (ostensibly to prevent the fascists from being heard, but I have to be honest: I don’t think there was any danger of them giving a rousing speech). Many, like myself, merely stood and jeered. In any of these cases it is a joyous thing to engage in: the feeling that one is part of a thing that is larger than oneself is a powerful and sometimes overwhelming experience which satisfies a deep-seated need in the human psyche. I went to these protests, in truth, not out of a deeply held political conviction (although those I do have) but out of a need to feel that I belonged somewhere. I had spent much of my teenage years feeling that I did not fit with the expectations of my peers, that I had no place to be. But as I graduated into adulthood I became aware of my city more broadly, and I realised that this was a place in which I could belong. It was this impulse that drove me to become more and more engaged each time I attended a protest, to become little by little emboldened to push up against and defy authority. Even though, in the cold light of day, I would have to admit that the police’s attempting to hold apart two violently opposed factions was a legitimate use of state force. Or perhaps I would not have admitted that at the time. It is possible that I have become more centrist with age.
I know that the protest that I am recollecting happened around 2010 because that is the year that I began attending university, and unlike many students my political activism sharply decreased once I began studying in earnest. In truth I am far more engaged by Taylor series and Riemann manifolds than the rights of man. This was the last MFE counter-protest I attended, and so it must have been around that time. I should point out, for the benefit of those who may be reading these presents in a time far divorced from my writing them, that 2010 is just over fifteen years previous to the present day. I am familiar (in a cursory manner) with the literature on eyewitness testimony, and so I cannot truthfully tell you that I shall be sharing with you what actually happened. I can only promise that I will share what I remember, as I remember it. I do wish that I had kept a diary at the time, to provide a more faithful account of what I now realise is a quite extraordinary event. But I have never been much of a diarist, principally because I have never really regarded the happenings of my life as notable or worthy of record. Of course, at the age of 35, I now know enough of historiography to know that the writings of a commoner about their own day to day life is one of the rarest and most sought-after treasures in the entire field of history. It is that lacuna that I seek to fill by writing this essay. As the Greeks say: the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, the second best time is now.
Let me now set the scene more completely: it is the year 2010, or just before. I am twenty years of age, or slightly less. No younger than eighteen, I don’t think. I am stood on the seaside pavement of Kingsway, facing the disjointed collection of facades that comprise the city centre skyline. Very few of the regency-era buildings that characterise most of the city are visible as I look over the road: there are Victorian mid-rises, with a couple of formless concrete brutalist interruptions imposed among them, and whatever you would characterise the architectural style of the Brighton Odeon as on the street corner opposite. The summer sun beat down on me, giving simultaneously the joy of a summer’s day well spent and the encroaching fatigue of heat stress. I could hear cheap plastic whistles sounding sporadically all around me, and dotted along the street were placards bearing messages of various kinds: I cannot in truth remember the overarching theme of the political representations, but I feel confident in asserting that they were ‘right on’.
Opposite us was the junction that terminated West Street, which lead to Queen’s Road. And at the top of Queen’s Road, as every Brightonian knows, is Brighton station. The main entry point to the city for those who rely on public transport (which in the Brighton area is quite possibly most people). The idea was, as I remember it, a kind of defence-in-depth operation. The most enthusiastic and the most veteran protestors were at the entrance to the station, ready to interdict MFE before they came into the city proper. Sporadically placed down Queen’s Road and West Street were the intermediate squadrons: those ready to press back against the encroaching out-of-towners and hopefully push them back toward the station, and out of the city. And the last line of defence, the most casual and risk-averse of the local representation, were us on Kingsway. We were lining the street that MFE were planning to march down, to make them feel unwelcome should they manage to make it all the way to the seafront.
One presence that was new to me was a number of participants from the ‘black bloc’. This was, or so I had been told at the time, not a movement or a cause. It was a method of being, a way of protesting that sought to resist state encroachment on the right to manifest. This method was to dress all in black, including balaclavas that covered all but their eyes. At the time I think I supported them and their right to protest in this way. There had been accusations (possibly founded; I did no research at the time and cannot claim to have looked into it in the present day) that the police who were assigned to manage protests had been covering the serial numbers on their epaulettes (which they were by law required to display) so that they could not be identified. And the obvious inference from this was that they were planning to do things in the course of their ‘managing’ of the protest that they would rather not have to defend at a disciplinary hearing. But, at this point, all of that was irrelevant to me. I was stood on the pavement, facing the city, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder against hundreds of my fellow political sympathisers as we did the real stuff of politics: making ourselves and our opinions known in their full strength to those who would oppose us. The black bloc were as any other presence in the crowd: welcome allies in our political fight against the right-wing.
At this juncture, my memory is at its most vague. I remember the dense crowd I stood as a part of. I remember the police in their body armour, helmets, and perspex shields. They stood watching us, over the road (or possibly in the road), but did not bother us. At some point I began moving with the crowd up West Street, towards Queen’s road. I was, I think, merely caught in the excitement of it all. I remember there had been mention of a plan by the police to camp the outsiders in the King & Queen (on Marlborough Place, a few streets back from the seafront and away from the station). I do not know if this plan was successful. I only know that we moved in. And as we moved, as one cohesive mass, I was carried along a street that seemed to have, to my surprise, almost no police standing on it. Possibly none at all. The sun still shone brightly upon us, and I think by this point, as we walked past the modernist jumble of West Street, that I began to regret my youthful stupidity in not having contemplated bringing a bottle of water with me. As we got closer to the station, the pavements of Queen’s road widened. The tarmac that usually held two lanes of vehicular traffic was on this day clear of its normal occupants. We were able, briefly, to relax formation and move as a diffuse mass of political outrage. We joined with several groups of more adventurous counter-protestors, some from the black bloc but not all, who had been waiting on Queen’s Road: as we moved we gradually increased in numbers and density like some kind of Marxist Katamari.
Somewhere near the junction where West Street becomes Queen’s Road, we encountered our adversary. Or the crowd did. By this point I was pressed shoulder-to-shoulder against my fellow travellers. I went where they went at this point not out of curiosity but because I had no other option. I did not see the MFE members, but I remember pressing against something that felt like a mosh-pit, and seeing black bloc members mingling with us, diffusing in from the wider crowd. I heard chants of “get the fuck out of our city”. I remember at the time thinking that they must be surrounded, and that the chant was therefore somewhat counterproductive. But I’m not sure I know that for sure. Perhaps they were pressing them forward, toward the station. In any event, we did move forward some more. At some point the chanting began to fade away into the distance. Perhaps they went to the train station. Or perhaps the (unseen) police shuttled them to their camp at the King & Queen. I don’t think it mattered to the blob. I heard shouted suggestions of direction, which at the time I thought came from the newly arrived black bloc members. We kept moving forward, until we came to Upper Gloucester road.
For those of you who do not know the city, Upper Gloucester road is a smaller street, one lane each way, which branches off left from Queen’s Road just before you reach the station. It is on a slight incline (although I doubt you would notice it in most circumstances). It goes on for three or four blocks before terminating in a T-junction where a residential block begins. Along that distance both sides of the street are dotted with junctions where smaller residential streets spread out from the collector road. It is, usually, a wholly unremarkable piece of urban infrastructure. The like of which you could walk down a thousand times and not for a moment think anything of. This day however, it was something entirely different. As I rounded this corner, pressed forward by the blob, shoulder to shoulder with my outraged comrades, I was confronted by a sudden mass of fluorescent yellow. The police, who had seemingly retreated from Queen’s Road, and whom I had thought in my naiveté might have just not shown up in numbers, were on the hill. There were vans parked up on the road behind them, currently unused. Police on foot (and in riot gear) were stood in a line across the street in front of us, blocking the way. In between, in the middle distance, were mounted police. They too wore full body armour, and wielded round perspex shields. I did not think it at the time, but in hindsight they resembled medieval knights ready to face down a peasant rabble.
The police on foot expressed to us that we should turn around and walk away. I think, I couldn’t really hear them. I was deeply embedded in the blob and the blob had compressed when we entered the smaller street. Not only could I feel conspirators pressing into my shoulders, now I could feel myself being pressed forward and into the protesters in front of me. It was only because I am somewhat tall that I was able to catch glimpses of the police presence at all. What I could no longer see were our recently arrived allies from the black bloc. I cannot be certain they were at the front, but it seemed at the time a reasonable guess. In any event, having been confronted by the police, and feeling emboldened by numbers, we did not want to move back. I heard disapproving noises and, despite being worn out by dehydration and having been carried far further than I had intended to go, I joined in. I was, once again, part of something bigger than myself. The police wanted to tell us that we could not walk down a street in our own city. That would not stand. We jeered, we booed, we punched the air, we told them they were fascists. I heard noises in the distance like rocks being kicked down the street. In hindsight, it is possible that they were being thrown. We stood our ground at the base of the hill. The police front line parted, and exposed the line of cavalry. They crouched on their horses, shields held up, truncheons ready, like coiled springs.
Those of you who only know of cavalry from computer games might think that this is an unusual use of them. The popular conception seems to be that cavalry are, exclusively, a flanking force: their purpose is to out-manoeuvre the infantry and get around them, press into their side (where they are weakest) and “roll them up”. This, to be sure, was a function of cavalry in pre-mechanised warfare. But there was another function, a tactic that was very frequently employed against lightly armoured and untrained infantry (which on that day, is essentially what we were). The frontal charge was a simple concept; the men on horses essentially play chicken with the men on foot. It has been described in some detail by other historical sources from previous eras, but it seems to be assumed that this is an experience that had been consigned to the dustbin of history after world war one. That is, in fact, not quite true.
We stood our ground. When I realised the police were about to move in, my resolve wavered. But I could not escape. There were angry protestors to my left and right, my front and back. My only option was to hold my position and try not to be crushed by the impromptu huddle. I suspect that the formation had tightened further, but to be honest I cannot confidently tell you that happened. I only know that I was standing in the third or forth line of a shieldless phalanx that was staring down a line of cavalry. All around me, jeers and chants. Defiance of the very concept that the police could tell us to turn around. I don’t know where we were even trying to go, and I somewhat doubt that anyone else did either. You might expect me to say that we were being lead by the nefarious plans of the black bloc. But, in truth, even they seemed to operate mainly out of defiance on principle and not any kind of strategic nous. I heard, in the muffled distance, an officer yelling commands. And then, all of a sudden, the chaos broke out.
I don’t think I saw them begin to move. I remember being afraid, and unable to escape. And then I heard hoof-beats coming toward me. I pressed backward, instinctively, away from danger. The man in front of me pressed backward into me. But the formation held us firm. I heard the clattering of riot shields. The hoof-beats got louder. I think I caught glimpses of the charging horses as they approached, between the heads of the crowd, they moved far faster than I would have expected. The people around me held faster than I would have expected. I thought in that moment that my doom was inevitable. The unstoppable force was about to meet the immovable object. These people, these veterans and principled anarchists, would not move for any force. Poseidon himself could not dislodge them.
The hoof-beats clopped so loud that I was certain they were upon us. I could feel my heart beating in my chest. My skin was slick with sweat. My mouth was dry as I took hurried breaths, wishing that there would open up some magic escape hatch that would allow me to not get trampled by horses. I do not know how long this all took in objective time; given the length of the street and the galloping pace of a Irish Draught horse it cannot have been longer than seconds. But it felt, in my inner world, that it took an hour or more. My fate slowly crept toward me, as I realised that there was going to be no escape. I leaned left and right, desperate to feel a gap in the wall of flesh. It was unyielding.
As I pressed backward, I suddenly felt something give way. The man to the left of me had fled. Without contemplation, I bolted after him. I saw dozens of others fleeing alongside me. At first I was running sideways to find a way around the phalanx. But before I had reached the edge, that formation had vanished. I was running diagonally, down the slight slope, toward the street corner. The crowd began to thin out. The hoof-beats had disappeared. I now know that police horses never actually trample the crowd. Or at least not intentionally. They will have stopped just short of our front line, as we broke formation and fled. Despite this commitment to always stopping short, the police cavalry very rarely lose a game of chicken. Having lived through that day, I can very clearly understand why. I hope that these presents have given you some insight to the effectiveness of the cavalry charge as well.
As I understand it, this was not the end of the chaos: the MFE had some substantial trouble arriving at the train station safely. The police had to clear a path between the King & Queen and Brighton station for them, to allow them to depart and put an end to the day’s activities. I am not sure if what I witnessed was part of the police clearing that path, or whether it was merely a minor skirmish caused by the opportunistic movements of the counter-protestors. Thinking about it now, as I write this, the almost total absence of police from Queen’s Road may well have been because they had been moved to secure MFE’s exit corridor. It would most likely have been plotted along North Road, the major road next to the King & Queen which connects to Queen’s Road, or along Trafalgar Street, the steep hill that connects the road on which the King & Queen sits directly to the station. But it is just about possible, given the commotion and that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, that they had needed to lead them up Gloucester Road. The road in between the two others mentioned that joins Queen’s Road at the exact junction where it also meets the Upper Gloucester Road.
Regardless, having been routed, I lost my enthusiasm (such that it was) for participating in disorder. I proceeded back down Queen’s Road toward the seafront, and left the MFE to be dealt with by others. I happened to encounter some friends of mine (I had not intentionally gone out with anyone, but I knew that many of the people I knew were planning to attend the counter-protest and we had all expected to see each other at one point or another) around the ship street area. And because we were all sweaty, sun-damaged, exhausted messes, we decided to go to the Marwood for coffee and cakes. Incredibly, given what had just happened, the Marwood was indeed open for business. It was somewhat dead but there was no sign of the chaos that I had, mere minutes earlier, escaped. We sat down, and had a pleasant lunch together, discussing what we’d all done and what we thought was going to happen next. I told my friends about my experience with the police horses, but in nothing like the vivid detail that I gave in these presents. It seemed to me that sharing the emotions I had felt might have cast a pall on an otherwise pleasant afternoon meal.
The Marwood was a pillar of the Brighton I knew. The character of the place was welcoming but eccentric, and it had been the site of many such post-participatory windings down. This pillar, sadly, stands no longer. The Marwood shut its doors a few years back. It was the culmination of a series of changes that seemed almost to wipe out the Brighton I knew in my teens and twenties. I had feared that the spirit of the place had departed, that the atmosphere I cherished would inevitably dissipate. And so it was, despite the unpleasant experience I have described, a great delight to me to discover that the pillar of political activism and resistance to the mainstream norm still stands in this city. As I said, I do not know whether there were similar charges involved in this year’s protest. But I do know that if there was, they were faced down with the same resolve and defiance that I witnessed on that day fifteen years ago.