A brief, half remembered history of The Brighton Bead Shop
My father was, by all accounts, a rather eccentric man.
He always wore old weird suits. Even down to the tiny details of wearing sock suspenders on special occasions.
He kept his hair shaved down to a number 1 all over, even after gaining a massive scar from brain surgery.
He knew a surprising amount about Buddhism.
He was obsessed with reggae but also had an extensive collection of Marc Bolan memorabilia.
He never showed much of an affinity for animals but was vegetarian for most of his life.
He also, at least for the 14 years I knew him, never purchased or consumed a single Nestlé product.
When he first opened the shop, he lived above it. With a dinky kitchen, two rooms in which I later spent a lot of my youth, and downstairs, out the back, a toilet and bathroom.
He also had a cat in the early years. His full name was Poland, all of his siblings had been named after European countries. Po used to sleep on the till, and sometimes he’d remain so still that people would think he wasn’t real. I don’t think I ever met Po, but out the back of the shop, on the way to the toilet, there was a little plaque where he’d been laid to rest. I always wonder if it’s still there but I’ve never had the confidence to ask.
From what nuggets of information have been shared with me over the years, my understanding is that my dad moved back to his home town of Brighton to open a shop and get away from some trouble he found himself in up in London.
He never had much of an interest in beads really. From my understanding, he just saw a gap in the market that he knew he could fill. The Brighton Bead Shop was opened on the 5th March 1986. I was not there. I was more than a decade away from being born.
My half brother was born in 1994. The story went that when our dad first brought him into the shop, he told him ‘one day, this will all be yours’, at which point my brother instantly started crying.
If you spent much time in the North Laine of Brighton between 1986 and 2016, you probably visited the Brighton Bead shop. Upon entering the shop, notable things included;
Big, dark wooden tables like printers drawers but filled with beads.
A surprisingly large mural of Ganesh, the Hindu God with the head of an elephant.
An ever changing collection of arty, often queer, young women behind the counter.
I sometimes wonder how the women who worked in the shop look back on it now. As someone who is now the age that many of them were, and as someone who hasn’t worked in retail but has had my own collection of weird jobs; I wonder how they look back on their time there. Was it a time filled with creativity and friendship, or was it a shitty retail job with a weird boss?
Polly was always my favourite. She’d often hand me a cardboard box and a roll of tape and encourage me to let my creativity run wild. She had the biggest, most infectious smile. I think she later became a youth worker. I’m sure I’m not the only young person whose life was made better for knowing her.
Freiya was the first trans person I ever knowingly met. I was about 7. I was terrified of her at first, but she was lovely, and she did a lot of the incredible window displays that the shop was known for. I’m so grateful to Freiya, because just by existing as she did, she normalised things. If it wasn’t for her, my mum might not have been so chilled when I came out as trans.
In November of 2001, the wholesale arm of Beads Unlimited moved into a warehouse at the end of Conway Street, next to a branch of the Salvation Army building and a five minute walk from Hove station. I had just turned 2, so I don’t remember it, but I do remember seeing photos of my then 7 year old brother playing football in this huge, empty warehouse before it was filled with beads.
Although I spent much more of my time in the shop than the warehouse, my little neurodivergent brain loved it there. I loved building the boxes, folding them along all the right grooves in the right order. I also loved packing the pliers, and I would often just be left with a whole bunch of pliers and a load of their boxes, happily taking on the task of slotting the pliers into their plastic homes before sliding the cardboard backing in and voila, one set of pliers ready to buy! I remember the pliers had red handles and the packaging was blue.
I also loved the special steps on wheels. They’d wheel around until you put your weight on them, then they’d brake and you could climb up them to get things off of high warehouse shelves. In adulthood, I spent a few years looking after museum collections, and whenever I started at a new museum, I’d always be comforted to find almost identical wheely steps. Both in childhood and adulthood, I would climb all the way to the top of the stairs just to sit there. To feel as big as I could. To feel as far away as I could from any sense of reality down below.
My mum started working in the bead shop in the late nineties. She told me once that she took the job thinking it was just gonna be like any other short-lived retail job. Little did she know she would be stuck there for about 15 years.
In her time at the shop, she quickly climbed the ladder to a managerial position. She also
Was in charge of hiring and firing.
Helped open the warehouse in Conway Street.
Taught jewellery making workshops in what would have been my dad’s living room a decade earlier.
Gained a small amount of internet notoriety with her tutorials on Bead TV.
Oh, and she also got engaged to the boss, became a step-parent to his young son, got pregnant with her own child (me), and helped him recover from a fucking brain tumour. All in a day’s work.
Even if you’ve never been to Brighton, if you’ve ever been to the bead section of a HobbyCraft, or tried to buy beads online in the UK, you would probably recognise the Beads Unlimited brand which the Brighton Bead Shop grew into.
Not only did I spend a lot of time in the shop and the warehouse, I also spent a lot of time hanging around bead fairs. My mum would hire an Enterprise van and take me, a woman from the shop, and a shed load (van load?) of beads, all the way to an exhibition centre, or a race course, or any other big hall that middle aged women could flock to.
Once in year 7 maths, I mentioned a bead fair to some of the boys who sat next to me and they reimagined it to be like a bead-themed fun fair. It never was. It was just a lot of stalls in an often windowless hall and hundreds of people buying and selling beads. I would be there with a book, or my Nintendo DS, or my homework. Some of my time would be spent hunched under the table. Some of my time would be spent bothering my mother and whichever colleague she’d brought along. Some of my time was spent helping ferry beads from the van to our stall, and then doing the same in reverse with everything not sold by the end of the day.
The shop no longer exists, and it’s been a long time since my dad owned the company, but the brand (which at some point along the way was trademarked as Beads Unlimited) still exists, and you can still buy beads from them. A few of the most ugly charms have remained the same since my childhood.
My memories, knowledge, and idea of the lore around the bead shop really differ from that of The Beads Unlimited Story found on their website. It has, however, been helpful for figuring out a few dates.
According to their website, Beads Unlimited now operate out of a warehouse near Horsham, and there’s a stationary shop where the bead shop once stood. It’s sleek and clean. No more tiles on the walls, no more homemade window displays. Barely a trace of the shabby, artsy little shop which once was. They’ve scrubbed away the ghosts of my childhood, of the supposed empire one of us was destined to inherit. There’s still ghosts all over Brighton for me though, in the North Laine, the Seven Dials, the train station, outside Poundland where I last saw my dad. I hid behind the bike hire sign so he didn’t see me.
I have a friend who has a similarly fraught relationship with their dad. They cut him off but somehow miraculously still kept up with their cousins and grandmother. When I cut my dad off I also eventually lost everything else. I wish I could have my brother and the bead shop back. All I’ve got left now is a stationary shop, some memories, and a few pairs of pliers.