"Laine" is a Sussex dialect term for an open tract of land at the base of the Downs. The space surrounding the old centre of Brighton (The Lanes) was once occupied by five of these "laines", open plots of farming land, one of which was North Laine, divided by tracks into hides & furlongs.

At the end of 19th century, this area was saved from municipal Brighton growing all around it and it made into a settlement & market area with a market garden planted and the old tracks made into streets. By 1840 Brighton railway station was built marking the northern border of North Laine.

During the reigns of George IV and William IV and through the first quarter of the reign of Queen Victoria, despite the grandeur of their Royal Pavilion, the North Laine section was known mostly for its squalor, abysmal living conditions and high concentration of slaughterhouses. One resident of note was George Herbert Volk, second son of railway engineer Magnus Volk, who worked in a small workshop at 86 Gloucester Road in the years 1910-1912. By the 1860s, the city began to clean up the area, knocking down old tenement houses (population density in one slum neighbourhood, Orange Row in the Pimlico slum district, was approximately 130 people to 17 houses) to replace them with more modern streets. A famous resident at this time was Tom Sayers, a popular British heavyweight boxing champion of the middle Victorian era. He was born in the Pimlico slum area and trained in North Laine. At his death in 1865, 10,000 people attended his funeral at Highgate, London.