As the Great War started a century ago, the foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey famously observed that the lamps were going out all over Europe.

This was literally true in Brighton and other Sussex resorts where wartime lighting restrictions came into force.

But while many other parts of Britain suffered, Brighton prospered during the long years of conflict.

Thousands of people visited the resort on the August Bank Holiday weekend (then observed at the start rather than the end of the month).

People stood all the way on trains, the main form of transportation to the coast. And all the attractions opened as normal.

The holiday feeling continued for the rest of the month and other summers were equally busy. More people flocked to Brighton in 1915 after Zeppelin attacks on London.

Holidaymakers also went south rather than north after Scarborough in Yorkshire was bombed by a German battleship, causing loss of life.

The Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, took time off from his busy life to relax in Brighton several times, as did his successor David Lloyd George.

It was so different from the Second World War when Brighton suffered badly from the German bombardment. Then 200 people died and thousands were injured.

Huge numbers of homes were damaged and many were destroyed. The beaches were mined and a German invasion was a real threat.

Entertainment continued in Brighton throughout the First World War with theatres and cinemas packed. Concerts were well attended and so many people moved to the coast that the population increased by 30,000.

Of course there were ugly reminders of the war that was devastating much of Europe. The sound of gunfire almost 40 miles away could be heard in Hastings.

Wounded men started to arrive to be treated in hospitals and temporary shelters.

There were far more casualties in battle in the First World War than the Second World War and when the war memorial was created in 1922 it had more than 2,600 names on it.

Indian soldiers were treated at another makeshift hospital in the Royal Pavilion and it was reported that when some of them saw the ornate decorations of the palace they thought they had died and gone to heaven.

King George and his wife Queen Mary paid a visit to this hospital in 1915 as did Lord Kitchener, the man whose face stared out from a million recruitment posters for the war.

Other members of the Royal Family came to Brighton during the war and a less welcome visitor was Horatio Bottomley, editor of John Bull, who lived in Sussex at Upper Dicker. His speech at the Hippodrome in 1917 was on Truth and Justice.

What the war did do was to radicalise Brighton. There was widespread anger that while battles raged, society paraded in the resort as before.

Poor people demonstrated against profits being made from their deprivation and the unequal distribution of food. There was an enormous demonstration and march in January 1918. The trade unions grew in strength so that in 1926 Brighton was one of the leading centres in Britain for observing the General Strike.

Suffragettes, numerous in Brighton before the war, continued their work afterwards and a local shop worker, Margaret Bondfield, became Britain’s first female cabinet minister in the Labour government of 1924.

Women, having taken over many men’s jobs while soldiers were being slaughtered on the battlefields, often retained those jobs in peacetime.

Many of the leading politicians in Brighton after the war were on the left, such as Herbert Carden and Lewis Cohen.

It took a long time for the left to gain power but by the end of the century, they controlled the council and had MPs for all three seats in Brighton and Hove.

Although Liberals remained as a party and survive to this day, they never produced MPs in Brighton again. Nor did they ever form another government.

Conservatives remained in power for most of the remaining century and are still a major political force today but if they had ignored working people before 1914, they did not after the war was over.

There are many old people in Brighton who still remember the Second World War but the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 seems remote to most of us.

Even though Brighton survived it relatively unscathed, the First World War changed the town in so many different ways forever.