City Limits?

Down by the West Pier in the scorching summer of 1995 Brighton's famous sub-culture was flourishing. Every Sunday a crowd gathered to play drums and dance. It was a typical spontaneous Brighton scene, and visible proof of the town's bohemian credentials. The following year, despite attempts to regulate the noise, residents who could hear the drumming eventually won the day. The djembes were nudged aside by a short-lived go-cart track, while the market, which fell from favour last year, and still faces an uncertain future, was encouraged to expand in order to 'crowd the drummers out'.

On the much-admired new seafront there is now no shortage of entertainment and organised cultural activity. But the Brighton culture that the drummers represented has become harder and harder to find as the process of gentrification and rising prosperity transforms the face of the city. Just one of the many sub-groups which co-exist in Brighton & Hove, they seem to have melted back into the underground.

Brighton & Hove has always been a magnet whether people come to live here, to study, for the gay scene, or escaping something. They have always appreciated the quality of life in this laid back town where they can spend the best years of their lives strumming guitars. But recently the word on the street is of newcomers buying in to the Brighton dream and bringing with them hard cash. Things are changing, and slacker types and locals minding their own business are finding themselves struggling with a faster pace of change and rising prices.

At the forefront of the city's metamorphosis is the council, with talk of economic regeneration and digital futures. The town has undergone a civic transformation, changing its name to include Hove in 1997, and then from town to city in the blink of an eye in 2000. If last year's city bid served to celebrate some of the population's hopes and expectations, winning it has also given a focus to the fears of many residents, who worry that the effects of growth will exclude them and bring dubious benefits.

The council is playing down city status as a sort of rebranding of the town for marketing purposes, a spin on people's perception: "It's about how we're seen by the outside world", a council spokesman told The Insight. It was: "a publicity stunt, a chance for us to show off as a city. It's just part of a continual campaign to regenerate the place. The idea was to raise the profile of Brighton & Hove nationally, and to get people to look at us in a new way, particularly employers." Other benefits city status bestows include the ability to better "position us in the city-breaks market" and a bid for the title of European City of Culture for 2008.

The council hopes business, both home-grown and new to the town, will help provide "sustainable and inclusive prosperity" through jobs. It has created a new Economic Partnership to nurture economic regeneration, which will be 'business-led to make sure that, as far as possible, economic conditions support the needs of local companies.' "The dream is of lots of high-skilled well-paid jobs. If we can get companies here offering decent money, everyone will benefit." Eyenetwork, a videoconferencing booking service, is one of the new media companies the city is so keen to attract. It started up here in 1999 with one employee, now has four and business has trebled. The company's plans for further expansion have been boosted recently by a large capital investment and is planning to take on more staff. Lisa Honan, its director, is keen they should be local. "I wouldn't look to headhunt in London when there is so much talent down here," she says.

Well paid jobs and the growing IT and new media industries in Brighton & Hove may be good news for the one third of the population who have degrees or IT skills. But there are fears that this kind of economic regeneration will further widen the divides which already exist not between the two former towns, but along class lines. Businesses like the growing call centre sector bring work to the city. But wages are currently 9.5 per cent lower than the national average and agency wages for call centre workers are lower in Brighton than in Birmingham. It's no coincidence that Brighton & Hove came first in a study of the most profitable places to do business in the country in 2000, yet it also contains some of the top ten per cent most deprived areas.

Well aware of the gap between the two Brightons, council departments are equally successful at attracting funding for the economically deprived areas in the Place to Be which hide behind its Regency facades. The city receives more money from the Single Regeneration Budget than anywhere else in the Southeast, nearly £100m, and has recently been chosen for a £50m package from the pilot New Deal for Communities to address poverty in East Brighton. With unemployment at 3 per cent above the regional average, the kind of jobs which are created as the city grows will be crucial for the 'sustainable and inclusive prosperity' it needs. Nearly a third of adult residents lack basic numeracy and literacy, and despite the two universities, a lower than average number of local youngsters enter further education. "You can't just create employment without looking at who needs it in Brighton," says Jenny Backwell, director of Brighton Housing Trust. "If you were to set up a high tech computer business in Brighton you would probably have to import people. You might then say, 'I have created forty jobs,' but they will not be for the kind of people I am concerned about, who cannot find anywhere affordable to live because their overall income is very low. House prices are getting higher partly as a result of Londoners moving in."

Sheriden O'Connell at Blakers residential sales and lettings can confirm this. "Through the week about 80 per cent of customers are relocating to Brighton and 60-70 per cent of those are from London. Rocketing house prices in London have a lot to do with it, but we also see quite a few people relocating for work related reasons. Buy-to-let is also popular, because the rental market is very buoyant." But Jenny Backwell says: "about one third of the population in Brighton cannot pay for their own housing costs." Brighton & Hove Council pays out £40m a year in housing benefits, effectively subsidising private rental. "Housing benefit distorts the market. If you put all that money into building social housing you would have an asset, you would get an income from it, and you could maintain it. Rents would be half that of the private sector, and it would cut housing benefit."

London's Evening Standard recently described Brighton & Hove as a "cosmopolitan alternative to London" for, ironically, families who are being priced out of London. "Houses are similar but at a much lower cost." It lists the desirable areas: the Regency squares, Clifton Hill, Hanover and Poets' Corner. Many locals are losing hope of ever entering the property market as buyers. Paul Wiseman, who owns the Pavilion Pine workshop in Regent Street is lucky enough to have bought some years ago. "People who have their own home thank their lucky stars. But your gain is someone else's loss. Maybe it's okay for me, but so what? My son, who is nearly 16 and likes it here, gets quite depressed and worries that in his home town he won't even be able to rent." Paul Dickinson, a freelance ecological consultant, settled in Brighton when the pull of his Sussex Square weekend flat made it his full-time home. "Brighton's like an addictive drug - it's the pull of the sea. It's very cosmopolitan, has wonderful shops and really good housing stock. It's a shame locals can't afford to live in Brighton, I can't afford to live where I grew up, in Hampstead."

Writer and actor Clive Ford has lived in Brighton all his life. "Every time I turn on the TV, I see another ad filmed in Brighton. When we were trying to sell scripts, we were often asked: 'How can we make Brighton the star?' We said it's not, it's the backdrop. But they like to perpetuate the Brighton myth because it sells. It used to attract true bohemians, now it attracts tired London media types. Brighton is being repackaged and sold as some sort of Xanadu. In some ways I blame people like Julie Burchill who come down and claim Brighton for their own, she writes about Brighton like she's selling it."

Burchill responds: "I see his point, but I'm not going to apologise because I didn't for a moment realize how much Londoners hated their home and were desperate to relocate. I had NO idea they'd be flocking down like rats after the Pied Piper. I moved down six years ago when Brighton was still a town of great diversity and originality - before it was sold off to brewers and assorted highest bidders. I bought my house for a quarter of a million pounds from a couple retiring to Bath, so I can hardly be accused of doing some young native Brightonian out of their first step on the property ladder. When Londoners come down and buy one or two-bedroom flats, this is what they are doing. I predict that in 20 years time nurses and teachers won't be able to afford to live here, and we'll wake up in a place that is somewhere between a brothel, a playpen and a huge brewery… I just want to know how the council can justify spending so much money on window dressing and nothing on the infrastructure."

A sorely needed new library is set to begin rising from a derelict site on Church Street in late July. The project is a PFI partnership between the council and Norwich Union PPP which will build and run the library, down to the books, in return for ownership, or a long lease, of all the non-library land. Its plans for the site include housing, retail premises, offices, surgery and a 'boutique hotel'. Land on the other side of Regent Street is to be redeveloped for commercial use on the ground floor. Komedia has plans for expansion, and high hopes that it can strike a deal with Norwich Union to take a leading role in its redevelopment.

Brighton & Hove Wood Recycling Project were surprised to find itself excluded from Komedia's February brochure in drawings of a planned four-storey extension. The Project describes itself as a "financially self-supporting not-for-profit environmental group," whose aims are to recover and reuse some of the vast quantities of timber needlessly being landfilled from building sites. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the project is its unusual employment system. With five full-time and one part-time workers are half a dozen volunteers who give their time to the project on the understanding that when they have created enough economic activity to create a job, it will be theirs. "The people who work here don't consume jobs, they don't answer adverts or go through an interview process," says founder Richard Mehmed. "They choose the project and create their own jobs - that's why they're so committed."

The council is aware of a scarcity of business premises - a recent study ranked Brighton & Hove 96th out of 100 for the suitability, quality and availability of its property. The prospect of finding and paying for new reasonably sized premises at market rates is making members of the Wood Recycling Project apprehensive, although the council has been charging them low rent on a short-term lease. Mehmed is philosophical. "I'm not whingeing about being thrown out - we always knew it was short-term and it's moved us on being here. But it does raise issues about what place there is in the town for low-tech, low-capital businesses which require space."

Attracting business and bringing prosperity is also bound to add to the accommodation problems the city already faces. The council's cross-town consultations on the future of Brighton & Hove included a survey called 'The Place to be Creative'. "Quality of life for the artistic community," as Paul Hudson, acting Project Manager for Arts and Culture points out, "comes down to what artists can afford to pay themselves." Money from South East Arts means that there's a lot more funding around now for arts. But Daniel Bernstein, who took part in the survey, thinks that what came out of it most strongly was the need for quality of life, "not money or jobs, though that's part of it. What they wanted most of all was to be able to afford to live here."

Rising house prices, and the insecurity this brings for those outside the property market, are part of a national tendency which is market-led. But some are concerned that exercises such as the city bid may have unforeseen consequences. Londoners who have come down to escape the rat-race may be surprised to find the town rapidly becoming a city in ways the Place to Be campaign never intended. "Brighton is becoming a victim of its own success," says Clive Ford. "It should be very careful what it wishes for - it might come true."

copyright New Insight 2001

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