Funding culture, connecting communities
Pay-what-you-can has become the polite default for Brighton’s smaller gigs, scratch nights and open studios. But when the bucket goes round, it’s often the artists and technicians absorbing the shortfall. Here’s how to keep access without turning culture into a whip-round.
A 40-cap gig in a church hall or a two-week shopfront exhibition can disappear under insurance, licensing and safeguarding paperwork before a single ticket is sold. Brighton & Hove needs a shared, council-backed compliance desk — not to take responsibility away from organisers, but to stop the smallest groups paying the highest paperwork premium.
Brighton & Hove’s festival calendar is held together by volunteers who steward sites, staff box offices and build sets for expenses-only pay. As the 2026 season closes, we look at the real ledger behind that goodwill — and what a fairer funding settlement would need to include.
Brighton’s buskers are the city’s most visible cultural workforce, but the support they get is mostly a permit and a shrug. It’s time to treat street performance as arts infrastructure — with a fund, storage, weather cover and a fair pitch system.
Brighton & Hove is great at the unveiling and less great at the years that follow. If a mural is worth a launch party, it is worth a future tenure agreement covering maintenance, credit and removal rights. In 2026, a standard handover deal should be the default, not an afterthought.
Brighton & Hove is packed with open calls, auditions, workshops and micro-grants, but too many of them live in the same closed loops. If opportunity is part of the city’s cultural infrastructure, it needs a front door everyone can find — not another group chat.
A fiver here, a twenty there, plus a weekend of unpaid proposal writing: Brighton & Hove's open calls add up. We follow one composite 2026 commission from advert to rejection email and ask who can afford to keep applying — and what funders can do about it.
Access riders keep arriving after the flyer has gone to print and the box office has opened. It’s time Brighton & Hove treated them as creative planning, not admin — with a standard access line in every commission and venue agreement.
Brighton & Hove's cultural calendar is stacked after dark, but default 8pm starts quietly exclude carers, parents, older residents and shift workers. If 2026 is the year we talk honestly about access, the clock has to be part of the conversation.
Every cultural project in Brighton & Hove runs on a second, invisible workload: risk assessments, insurance, access audits, box-office reconciliation and the rest. If funders keep treating that labour as a free extra, the whole sector stays quietly precarious. It's time for a realistic core-costs line in every grant.
Match funding sounds neutral — until you realise it rewards groups that already have cash, staff and donors. A look at how 'find the other half' rules work in Brighton & Hove, what counts as in-kind, and how funders could redesign match to build capacity instead of gatekeeping.
Brighton & Hove's cultural sector runs on goodwill, gaffer tape and invoices that arrive after the party. If we want a resilient 2026, prompt payment needs to be part of the commission, not an afterthought.
Brighton & Hove's cultural life is shaped as much by bus timetables and fares as by artistic vision. If funders are serious about access in 2026, travel support needs to move from the margins of the budget to the main line.
Embedded artists are moving into planning departments, housing teams and public health work — not as decoration, but as civic colleagues. Brighton & Hove has a real chance to fund this properly, with fair pay, clear accountability and a long enough horizon to matter.
Pub function rooms, church halls and community centres carry a huge share of Brighton & Hove's cultural life, yet almost none of them appear in a funding strategy. Here's who runs them, what they actually need, and what a small civic venue fund could realistically buy.
The grant cheque gets the ribbon-cutting and the group photo. The hard part starts the following week, when the room still needs to be paid for and the person who ran everything is quietly falling apart. A frank look at what sustainability actually asks of Brighton & Hove arts projects.
Brighton & Hove now has something happening most weekends from April to October, and a fair few in between. More culture should be good news. So why do artists, volunteers and half the audience feel like they're running a relay they never signed up for?
Public art in Brighton & Hove is commissioned through notices, scoring matrices and panel meetings most artists never see. This is a look at how the money actually moves — and why the city's own makers so often end up on the wrong side of the shortlist. Not a complaint. A list of things that could change by next spring.
Brighton's outdoor arts season is still budgeted as though summer were a guaranteed delivery partner. A practical look at weather-resilient staging, licensing, access and why the promenade deserves commissioning in February as well as July.
Every time a studio block becomes flats, the city loses something it cannot rebuild. An argument for treating artists' workspace as infrastructure – and for creative land trusts, community ownership and planning conditions with actual teeth.