The Brighton & Hove Wrap - 25th April 2025
City Nature Challenge, sea defences cash + bus timetable changes
🍻A community group is trying to raise £400k to buy The Actors pub on Prince’s St, Brighton, reports The Argus. The pub is due to be sold and the group has until June to raise enough money to “secure a mortgage” for the building.
➡Says The Argus: “The pub has played an important role in Brighton’s LGBTQIA+ community for over 60 years, hosting Gay Liberation Front meetings in the 1970s (…) to helping launch the UK’s first Trans Pride in 2013.”
➡Here’s a link to Queer the Marly’s GoFundMe page.
🚧The Argus has a photo update on the work to restore Madeira Terrace’s arches. The Royal Crescent steps have been shut again for two weeks to accommodate the work, says BBC News.
🚬Approximately 120 “illegal tobacco products” were seized from a vape shop in Hove as part of co-ordinated police raids on businesses in Sussex, Hampshire and Thames Valley, reports Brighton and Hove News.
🦤The Booth Museum on Dyke Road is now closed for 12 months for “essential improvements” — BBC News. It will open for pre-booked school events and special monthly event days.
🌳From May, a further 1,400 elm trees in Brighton & Hove will be injected with a vaccine against elm disease, says Brighton and Hove News.
🚨A former manager of Concorde 2 has been sentenced to six-and-a-half years for rape and sexual assault, reports The Argus. The attack took place in 2019.
🏠Changes to how the council allocates housing have come into effect (as of Tuesday 22nd). Some of the main updates to the policy:
➡Applicants must have lived in Brighton & Hove for five years or longer — down from seven.
➡If someone who is homeless or at risk of homelessness accepts temporary accommodation, they will remain on the housing register.
➡The Argus offers background on the changes and more details.
🏬Revised plans for a new entrance to Imperial Arcade, Brighton, can be seen on Brighton and Hove News’ website.
🐁The City Nature Challenge starts this weekend (until Monday 28th): it’s an “effort to connect with nature by discovering and recording local wildlife”. If you want to take part, here are the instructions. You’ll need the iNaturalist app.
⚽Brighton Museum’s exhibition on Albion’s first year in Europe will now run until 13th July.
🌊The council is being asked to approve £4.5m in extra funds to rebuild sea defences at Southwick beach and to “build new groynes and replenish shingle” between the King Alfred leisure centre and Second Avenue, reports the BBC.
➡£6.5m is already budgeted for the scheme, which is to be completed by April 2027.
👩🎨The Old Market, Hove, is looking for six visual artists to create a series of public artworks that “celebrate and reflect the rich heritage” of the building.
🚌The timetables for Brighton & Hove Buses routes 13X, 23, 24, 25, N25, 26, 46, 50, 77, 78 and 79 have changed or are changing this week — The Argus has the details and there’s an update from the company here.
⛪Sussex Police is appealing for information after St Mary’s Church in St James’s St, Kemp Town, was burgled on 28th March.
♻Brighton and Hove News breaks down Brighton & Hove’s recycling rates as DEFRA releases its latest figures on local authority waste management. There was a 1% year-on-year drop in recycling in March.
🚶♀️Brighton is the third-most walkable city in the world, says a Time Out survey.
🦅Lovely report from The Argus’ Annabel Stock as the first of four Peregrine falcon eggs hatched in a nest box on the top of Sussex Heights flats this week. Here’s the webcam from the nest box:
📀There’s a record fair at Brighton Open Market on Sunday (27th), according to this Facebook post (though not advertised on the market’s website).