This is not as common a site as it once was. A properly laid hedge and right on the boundary of urban Brighton. Such skill, such precision, such artfulness in bending nature to man's will. They say that a job done well will last fifty years before it'll need doing again. Probably the finest livestock barrier devised, and growing and enriching itself naturally after this drastic surgery, although in this case the livestock is human on the eastern edge of town. Bordering land owned by the City, one can only assume some sort of unusually imaginative and benign decision was taken to adopt this far-from-cheap form of hedge maintenance. If you want chapter and verse on the craft of hedge laying, and it is poetry! - read Roger Deakin's 'Wildwood' which covers the subject wonderfully well.
