Monday’s bank holiday marks the start of the summer season, nowhere more so than in Brighton, where the fun and frolic hides a richly religious history

During the afternoon of 28 June 1879, John Henry Newman began his last visit to Brighton. Fifty-three years earlier, the young Oxford then-Anglican curate had come to find his mother and sisters a home there, at 11 Marine Square, where he would sometimes stay. This time, however, he stepped off a boat from the Continent on to the old Chain Pier, returning from Rome, for the convert to Catholicism was now a cardinal. Next day he said Mass at the Church of St John the Baptist, Kemptown, and was driven to several parishes to visit priests. The following Monday he left for London to return to Birmingham.

Newman’s Brighton stay was another marker in the rich religious life of a city that, ironically, according to the 2011 census, is second only to Norwich as the most irreligious in the United Kingdom – 42.4 per cent of its residents claimed no religious affiliation.

What religious reputation Brighton does have owes something to Graham Greene, who located the town in Greeneland – a seedy world of moral ambiguity. Brighton Rock was his first novel to engage with Catholicism, and has the vicious, eccentrically Catholic Pinkie as its central character. He tells his Catholic girlfriend, Rose, who asks him if he believes: “Of course it’s true. What else could there be? Why, it’s the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don’t know nothing.”  Maybe Pinkie visited the jewel of St John the Baptist, only the fourth Catholic church to be consecrated (in 1835) since the Reformation.