Somewhat later the other coast towns began to develop, and so long as the railway controlled that development, their growth was regular and almost according to a set law. Fashion or the doctors would recommend some point upon the coast. The long coastal railway from Brighton to Portsmouth afforded a station at the place, and the town increased in regular fashion, not with the station as the centre, but as the point from which branches spread out to the sea, so that these towns all more or less resemble a tree spreading from the railway station, and trippers hurrying from that station to the beach are like the deployment of a regiment [Sidenote: THE WATERING TOWNS] from column into line. These towns are, of course, stretched out along the beach; for their separate and successive organisation, the continual presence behind them of the coastal plain, with its railway parallel to the shore, has afforded admirable opportunities. That plain from Brighton to Bosham is perfectly flat; the crossing of the rivers has presented the only obstacle, and that obstacle was insignificant. The railway could run pretty well in a straight line and build up the towns along the sea. Even to-day the villages are linking up with the towns. Rustington is full of bricks. Rottingdean, for twenty years a sort of suburb, has now long been full of painters and others. A curious collection of bungalows has sprung up on the long pebbly beach which shuts out the Adur from the sea. Opposite these barracks lies Lancing; and even upon the extremity of old Selsea a new settlement, now nourished by a light railway from Chichester, is arising. At Seaford, which is saved a little by its hills, the same attempt at rapid building is made. There is one feature in this string of houses all along the coast of the county which Sussex men note with a pleasure not unmixed with malice. It is this, that while places of absolutely no commercial use and of no historical importance in the growth of the county are thus gradually being turned into appendages of London (so that all the way from Beachy Head to Chichester Harbour you have within the space of some fifty miles at least sixteen miles of houses), yet the places characteristically Sussex, the places upon the sea-line, which have gone to the building up of the county, and in which the population naturally gathered, continue to resist with extraordinary tenacity.