Even today, much of Brighton—a Georgian resort town an hour south of London—has resisted much of the gentrification that is so rapidly altering the capital. Back in the early '90s, when James Long just about recalls staggering to the stone beach wearing a bathrobe to recover from the night before, this was a place where the Levellers-loving radical crusties and clubbers on a comedown after Coco rubbed along just fine. Around them crumbled some of the British Empire's most bravado-charged architectural jewels, chief of which was the ersatz pleasure palace built for George IV, the Royal Pavilion.