Victorian Industrialists
By the late 19th century, Brighton was growing fast — and Banfield’s were building it.
New homes needed to be constructed, maintaining, decorating, and connecting to bigger infrastructural grids: gas, water, power. Banfield’s had specialist teams in almost every trade.
At the start of the 1800s, Brighton was already a fashionable health tourism hotspot, made famous by George, Prince Regent, who built the illustrious Royal Pavilion and Stables in homage to the town.
By the close of the century, it was the place to be: a direct rail link put the seaside town’s grand boulevards in easy reaching distance of an increasingly smoggy London.
In 1856, sixteen years after the London to Brighton railway was completed, and the year the Crimean War ended, Ebenezer, the blacksmith’s son, set up his first ironmonger’s workshop in the town centre.
One forge soon became three. One workshop became four buildings, with new shopfronts opening every few years. By the end of the 19th century, Banfield’s was a team of fifty.
Ebenezer Banfield. He got the name Ebenezer before the Dickens character. It means ‘stone of help’.
