In Defence of Brighton, My Shitty Seaside Shangri-La

I've lived in Brighton for five years, and it keeps getting better. Despite its turgid local politics, pebbly beach and ongoing heroin epidemic, the thought of moving back to London still fills me with a suffocating, existential dread.

Brighton gets a lot of shit for thinking it's cooler than it actually is. It's the veganism of cities; you'll know it's cool before you've been, because everyone from there will have told you – now that they've left London – about how fucking great their lives are there (coincidentally, it's also full of vegans). But behind the constructed façade of hip coffee shops and ethical food stores, Brighton is still, in essence, one of those iconic, crappy British coastal towns. Underneath the small batch, artisanal perfume, it reeks of sleaze, fights, nostalgia and piss. The futility and failures of modern Britain meet somewhere in the South Lanes; that's why it's beautiful.

Sitting on the beach on a winter evening, staring into the putrid channel, you can't help but feel you're starring in your own angst-ridden coming-of-age drama. All the while, murderous seagulls shit on visiting families, and men with big red noses cradle cans of White Lightning. People miss that duality when they come for the weekend.

It was the perfect place for me to move to as an emotionally-crippled 18-year-old with chronic insomnia. Having that cosy façade of the town to cling on to when the endless intertwining of days and nights got too much was something I never felt I had in London.

I saw far too many sunsets over the course of my first years in Brighton. Whenever I shut my eyes to sleep, my brain would shock me into a state of panic and I'd find myself chain smoking at my stained desk, practically begging my thoughts to stop before the sun lit the sky.

On winter Sundays, when the inertia of living on a university campus in what felt like a prison cell – coupled with the insomnia – got me down, I would walk the Lanes on my own in the evenings. Staring through the steamy windows of pubs, watching people older and happier than me drink mulled cider and eat steaming plates of food I desperately wanted to be able to afford always calmed me down. Watching the city's perpetual struggle to create a unique identity for itself (even if that identity came from embracing the shallowest of the 21st century's cultural runoff) made me feel like there was hope. And I'll always love it for that.

Living in Brighton, you see the ugly side of the city. You see shower walls covered with black mould, entire houses that stink of mephedrone filled with university dropouts, pushing 30, sweating from their eyes and staring into nothing. Windows are filled with black and white portraits of dead relatives, mangy dogs gnaw chicken bones on the piss-rinsed curbs. But within the chaos, there's a kind of happiness.

Perhaps it's the claustrophobia. Central Brighton lies in a valley between two hills, geographically oppressed and protected from the rest of the country at the same time. It makes you feel safe.

I do sympathise with the Brighton's critics – and there are lots of them. To an outsider, I guess it looks like a holier-than-thou enclave of runaways from reality, deluded in a faux-trendy utopia with a shitty beach and thieving seagulls. Brighton's not the cultural capital of the country, as some of its more vocal residents would have you believe. It's not some progressive haven where peace and love prevail over the evils of neoliberalism, homophobia and urban decay. Those things still happen here – if perhaps a little less than in other places, thanks to the rampant activism of many residents. Many of those activists might be dreadlocked white guys, but they routinely give parading racists a right fucking kicking, and I'm OK with that.

For me – even factoring in the gormless wannabe fashionistas, openly misogynistic rugby lads and pseudo-bohemian ex-Liberal Democrat voters – it's just a decent place to live. Yes, there are wankers here – many, many wankers. Wankers in skinny jeans, wankers in suits, wankers doing poi and bongo circles, and wankers like me who call people we've never met wankers. But we're content wankers, suckling on the bountiful tit of our shitty seaside Shangri-La.

One particularly pissed-off columnist once wrote in the Independent: "Brighton has gained its peculiar character from people who will not, shall not, cannot grow up: those steadfastly avoiding the call of maturity."

It's a fairly accurate assessment. After all, the city used to be dubbed "the death of ambition" – people don't seem to want to leave. And many that do leave come back with an almost fatalistic resignation. But you know what? If maturity in 2015 means living in London and watching culture give way to property developers and paying more for a month's rent than your grandparents made in five years, fuck maturity.

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