Meat Is Murder

When Lucy gets married next week little girl dresses little girl dresses, she wants to walk down the aisle with flowers in her hair.

'I want to be a beautiful bride, a real lady,' she slurs. 'Just like Kate Middleton.'

But there is nothing ladylike about Lucy tonight. Dressed as a French maid and waving a flashing plastic sex toy at me, she is reeling drunk. Instead of flowers in her hair, the young bride-to-be has tied condoms to her locks.

'I feel like a princess!' she says, before stumbling and falling flat on her face on a pavement already sticky with spilt booze. 

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Drinking session: bridal gowns vera wang A hen party in in modern day Britain is no longer the innocent rite of passage it once was, as this group pictured on West Street in Brighton shows

Welcome to Brighton on a Saturday night — this is Britain's hen party capital, where the alcohol flows and anything goes.

Lucy is one of thousands of girls who come here every weekend during the peak hen season to have what the companies who bus them in and out promise will be 'the party of their lives'.

'Here come the girls!' they chant, as they pour out of their seafront hotels in their hundreds at the beginning of the night.

All are dressed up, some as air hostesses, some as fairies, some as builders — cocktail dresses for wedding and some hardly dressed at all. In an instant, they transform Brighton's city centre into an alcohol-fuelled fancy dress party .

I've been watching them for hours, intrigued and appalled by this modern-day female fertility ritual.

No effort is spared in the organisation, which is usually left to the bridesmaids. The groups wear badges and sashes sashes and carry accessories — whistles, headbands and necklaces, often bearing crude sexual slogans.

If they use a tour operator and buy an off-the-shelf hen package, the bride can go free.

Kay Stringer and her friends have chosen a burlesque theme for their weekend.

'We've come to bond with each other and celebrate,' says the 28-year-old London bride. Her weekend activities have included a trip to a karaoke bar, a Naked Butler experience — where a naked man waits on you — and visit to a burlesque bar.

'This is our chance to get to know each other, share secrets and have a girlie laugh,' they told me, when I met them on the pier carrying out dares.
Kay had just posed for a naughty photo with a stick of rock.

'We won't be drinking too much celebrity bridal gowns celebrity bridal gowns, like the stags do. I want to remember the night,' she tells me.

Alas, as I would find out later, such restraint is rare indeed.

'It's come about because of sexual equality, female spending power and a new-found female sexual confidence'

Another group, from Devon, which included both the mothers of the groom and bride, were there to 'get to know each other before the wedding '.

They were daring members of their group to take off their bras 'while talking to a stranger'. They had paid £170 for the weekend, which included a male nude life drawing class. In the march towards equality, whatever stags can do, hens can do better.

'The hen party is an expression of modern female liberation and a throwback to ancient female bonding. It's a commercial phenomenon and is big business,' says Heidi Mirza, professor of equality studies at London University's Institute of Education.

'It's come about because of sexual equality, female spending power and a new-found female sexual confidence.'

A new-found drinking confidence, too, which — once nightfall came — turned anything charming about this female ritual sour, as Brighton's daytime carnival atmosphere turned into seedy, night-time carnage.

It changed in an instant at about 8pm, when as many as 1,000 hardcore hens packed into a single stretch of road by the seafront.

Brighton's West Street is Hen Party Ground Zero. It's a no-go area for residents, who fumed to me about drunken visitors ruining the city centre.

'Brighton during the week is heaven. Brighton at the weekend, hell,' said one.

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On the pier: This party picked burlesque as their theme for their trip to Brighton

And certainly, while the rest of Brighton slept or behaved normally, I watched as one 400-yard stretch of the city centre descended into hen-party madness, as girls from all over Britain poured in with just one intention: to get blind drunk.

'The whole point is to get smashed,' one of the hens, from a Portsmouth group wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Tasha's Tarts On Tour, tells me. 

'The bride is already smashed and we've lost her!' one of them yells.

They have been drinking Jagermonsters, which I learn are vodka and Red Bull cocktails.

'They cost £2.50 and I've had 20!' one of them yells, before screaming into my face that she feels 'absolutely mental'.

'Why shouldn't we behave like this?' someone from a group called Becky's Busty Builders asks.

'Boys have done it for years. We just want a bit of fun. Girls are the new boys!'

The two strip shows catering for them at the bottom of West Street attest to that. They are where many of the hens start the evening ; about 700 were split across the two clubs on the night I was there. I opted for the club with the show called Dreamboys.

We were barely seated before the drag artist compere started shouting at us: 'Are you p*ssed yet?'

'Yes!' the crowd of girls roared.

'We've been drinking all day,' the girl next to me whispered. She was wearing a pink tutu and black tights.

Apart from me, there were only hen parties in the audience — 15 groups in total, including three teachers and a nurse. At the end of the show, the brides-to-be joined the three male strippers on stage to lapdance and pose for photos.

In the audience, whooping at the full-frontal nudity and tricks with cartons of cream and baby oil, were several grandmothers, wearing T-shirts proudly emblazoned with 'mother-of-the-bride'.

'We offer a good night out, bridal gowns 2012 bridal gowns 2012' says Tristan Mills from cabaret show Adonis.

'The girls just want a laugh and a chat and why shouldn't they have it?

'Tonight, we will have had about 2,000 hens enjoying a great night out in our five locations across Britain.'

Celebration parties now bring in three per cent of Brighton's visitors — about a quarter of a million people, according to the 2009 Visitor Survey.

Hen and stag parties between April and September make up the bulk of that; roughly four thousand revellers each weekend, all descending to 'get smashed' in one of the 1,000 licensed premises in this seaside city.

Shortly after 10pm, I get talking to Sgt Mark Baker about Operation Marble — bridal bridesmaid dresses bridal bridesmaid dresses the way Sussex Police handles and protects its thousands of hen and stag party visitors.

There are so many coppers on the street it reminds me of the times, as a journalist, I've joined police dealing with serious riots.

But Sgt Baker is smiling. 'The hens don't give us trouble like the men do,' he says.

'The girls aren't violent. They just drink too much. We like to make sure they stay safe. We keep away predatory males, stop the women wandering on to unlit beaches. We try to keep it good-natured.'

Which I see him do, time and time again, as drunken women appeal to him and his colleagues for photographs, kisses and more.

'I'm here for some a*** grabbing, snogging and dancing, bridal reception dresses ' says 25-year-old Kellyann, before giving Sgt Baker 'seven out of ten' and asking him if he'd 'be her sex toy' — an offer which he good-naturedly declines.

But it's not all softly, softly. It takes 30 policemen every weekend to keep order in this hen hotspot. They are well organised with walkie-talkies, strategies and serious manpower.

It's apparent Brighton's 'party business' is worth enough to its economy to invest in some serious policing to keep the revellers safe from their own excesses.

There are taxi marshalls to stop fights breaking out in taxi queues, yellow warning cards to keep troublemakers away and even a safe space in a church where people take the lost and found. People, Buy top quality China wholesale cheap Summer Wedding Dresses from reliable Chinese Summer Wedding Dresses wholesalers on wedding that is, not possessions.

All these measures mean Brighton has won beacon status for the way it 'manages its night-time economy'. A euphemism perhaps for 'the way it manages its night-time drunks'.

There are more policemen on foot in the city centre tonight looking after the stags and hens than there are out responding to crimes, such as burglaries, in the rest of Brighton and Hove.

Sgt Baker and his colleague PC Mike Taylor explain that trouble flares up when the hens move from the pubs to clubs at about 11pm.

As well as spilt alcohol and fast food on the pavement, there is now vomit and urine too. Much of it from the girls.

I watch as three violent male drunks on the other side of the road are pushed to the ground by officers.

They are head-locked and handcuffed as the hens step over them giggling, oblivious to the drunken aggression simmering around them.

This happens several times during the course of the evening.

'It will be bad again when the clubs empty,' Sgt Baker says.

When they do, in the early hours of the morning, the hens left standing totter to the kebab shops where another fight breaks out. Again, the police rush in and bring the man to the floor.

By 2.30am I've had enough. Impressed with the police operation but depressed by the need for it beautiful bridal gowns , I head back to my hotel along a seafront still heaving with drunken hens.

The brides were now dishevelled and shoeless, some crumpled on the pavement with mascara running down their faces, soggy chips and ketchup in their hands.

Each and every one of them was a million miles from the princess bride they longed to be.

Suddenly, I feel sad for them; if any of these women had had the 'time of their lives' I very much doubt they will remember it.

The Saturday I visited Brighton there were eight arrests, one drunk-and-disorderly fixed-penalty ticket and five other police fines for disorderly behaviour.

Eight people were admitted to casualty at Royal Sussex County Hospital with alchohol-related conditions.

How many revellers woke up hung over and full of regret about how they spent the night before is not a matter of public record.

I had started the day intrigued by the hen party phenomenon, with its rituals, costumes and bonding. I'd even been charmed by some of the mixed-generation groups of women I'd encountered.

But I was finishing it not just shocked but saddened.

The night-time binge drinking had turned the promise of a 'once-in-a-lifetime celebration' into a seedy, violent Saturday night.

If this is equality, count me out.

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