Viva Brighton
Viva Brighton is a monthly magazine for Brighton and Hove, published by Viva Magazines alongside its sister title, Viva Lewes. Based in the city at Brighton Junction, 1A Isetta Square, the magazine has chronicled Brighton's people, food, history and seaside culture through themed monthly issues — each edition organised around a single word or idea — written and photographed substantially by local contributors. Its issues in the middle of the last decade ran through the forties and fifties in sequence; by the start of 2020 it had reached issue 83, with issue 85 following in March of that year. A monthly, independently published city title with a defined personality, a long-serving cast of writers and photographers, and a photographer-at-large whose portrait series became one of its signatures, Viva Brighton stands in this directory as Brighton's own magazine.
Publisher and sister title
Viva Brighton is produced by Viva Magazines, which publishes two monthly print publications based in East Sussex: Viva Brighton and Viva Lewes. The pairing is significant. Lewes, the county town of East Sussex a few miles inland, is a distinct community with its own strong identity, and the publisher serves it with its own title rather than treating it as an appendix to the city — the same person has, at different times, edited both magazines, and an editor's farewell in issue 44 of Viva Brighton, in October 2016, explained that he was moving to Lewes to concentrate on editing Viva Lewes, leaving the Brighton title with a colleague. Contact details printed in the magazine placed both titles under the vivamagazines.com domain, with the Brighton office at Brighton Junction, 1A Isetta Square, Brighton BN1 4GQ, and separate telephone numbers for advertising and other enquiries — the small, permanent infrastructure of an independent publisher rather than a pop-up project.
The themed issue
The most distinctive feature of Viva Brighton's editorial method, visible throughout its published issues, is the theme. Each monthly edition was organised around a single prompt — one word, treated as what one editor called the month's magic word — and the contents were gathered in response to it. Issue 44, in October 2016, took the theme Plenty, inspired by the autumn harvest, and filled it with bakers, Chinese food and beer brewed from bagels. Issue 38, in April 2016, took the theme Home, and explored it through the interior of the Royal Pavilion, the living rooms of interior designers and the mind of an architect, alongside a decluttering agent and a door-to-door personal trainer — while also, characteristically, turning the theme outward, to the people sleeping rough on Brighton's streets and to refugees in Calais. Issue 48, in February 2017, took the theme Flesh, and poked about in the city's fleshier parts. The device gives a local magazine a structure beyond listings and news: a monthly essay, in many voices, on one aspect of the city's life.
Editors and the team
The magazine's mastheads across the 2010s record a stable small team. In the period around issue 42, in August 2016, the editor was Alex Leith, the deputy editor Steve Ramsey, the art director Katie Moorman, the photographer at large Adam Bronkhorst, and the publisher Lizzie Lower. Leith's farewell editorial in issue 44 recorded four and a half years in the editor's chair, handing over to Lizzie Lower — who had, he wrote, been intimately involved with the production of the magazine for two years and knew the ropes — while he moved to the Lewes title, continuing to contribute articles. By issue 50, in April 2017, Lower was editor, with Ramsey still deputy editor, Moorman art director, Bronkhorst photographer at large and Becky Ramsden as publisher. That continuity of names, with roles rotating within a small group, is characteristic of independent magazines: the same people write, edit, design and publish, and the readership comes to know them.
Contributors and photography
Each issue drew on a wide bench of named contributors — in a typical 2016–17 masthead, more than a dozen: writers and artists including Alexandra Loske, Amy Holtz, Andrew Darling, Ben Bailey, Chloë King, David Jarman, Di Coke, Holly Fitzgerald, Jay Collins, Jim Stephenson, J. J. Waller, Joe Decie, John Helmer, Lizzie Enfield, Martin Skelton and Nione Meakin, among others. Photography was central. Adam Bronkhorst, the photographer at large, maintained an ongoing portrait project with the magazine called The Way We Work, whose monthly themes — one month's, documented on his own site, was Care, photographed among the staff of Martlets Hospice in Hove — produced portraits of the city's workers, from care staff to a farmer at Mile Oak Farm, photographed holding a chicken. Bronkhorst also photographed a private tour of Brighton's Victorian sewers for the magazine. The response to the Martlets feature, passed back through the magazine, recorded subjects asking for extra copies for family and friends — a measure of how the title's photography landed with the people it depicted.
Brighton and Hove: the subject
The magazine's territory is the city of Brighton and Hove on the East Sussex coast — formed as a unitary authority in 2000 and granted city status for the new millennium — a seaside city of the Royal Pavilion, the piers, the Lanes and Kemp Town, with two universities and a national reputation for creativity, nightlife and independent retail. Viva Brighton's coverage, as its issues show, ranged across that whole personality: its food and drink, from bakers and Chinese restaurants to bagel-brewed beer; its buildings, from the Pavilion's interiors to Victorian sewers beneath the streets; its work, through the portrait series; its pleasures and its problems, from home design to street homelessness faced plainly in the Home issue. A city magazine succeeds by knowing its city's stories are inexhaustible, and the themed structure institutionalised that knowledge: any subject, from plenty to flesh, could be found somewhere on these streets, in any month.
Regular elements and reader life
Beyond the themed features, the published issues show the apparatus of an engaged monthly: competitions run with local businesses — one, in the pages of the February 2016 issue, offered dinner for two delivered from one of Brighton's longest-established Italian restaurants, with entries invited by photograph or in words through the magazine's social media and a winning signature dish promised a feature in the April issue — and puzzle competitions with ingenious logic problems set for readers. Competition terms directed readers to the magazine's website, vivabrighton.com. The magazine maintained a Facebook presence under the Viva Brighton name, and its social channels served as the everyday connective tissue between monthly editions. Regular contributors' columns and series — the competition corner among them — gave readers familiar voices to return to, while the themed features kept each edition distinct.
Print monthly in a digital city
Viva Brighton's issues were distributed digitally as well as in print: editions survive as flipbook publications on the Yumpu platform, where issues including numbers 83, 84 and 85 — January, February and March 2020 — can be found alongside earlier numbers, evidence of a title still publishing monthly editions at the turn of the decade, with its sequence reaching the mid-eighties. That sequence is itself the simplest measure of endurance: issue 36 in February 2016, issue 38 that April, the forties through late 2016, issue 48 in February 2017 and issue 50 that April, then on to the eighties by 2020. Few independent city magazines sustain an unbroken monthly rhythm across that span. The title's listing in this directory records it as an independently published monthly distributed across the city, celebrating Brighton and Hove — its people, history, food and seaside culture — and the issue record bears the description out.
Relationship with Viva Lewes
The sister title deserves its own note, because the two magazines illuminate each other. Viva Lewes applies the same publisher's approach to the smaller, older county town inland — its editions ran in parallel, reaching issue 162 by March 2020 on its own longer sequence, displayed alongside Viva Brighton's numbers in the publisher's digital archive. The two titles share staff histories — an editor moving from the Brighton chair to the Lewes one; a publisher drawn from the Brighton team — and share the same design language and monthly discipline. Together they form a small East Sussex publishing house organised on a simple principle: that individual places, even places a few miles apart, deserve magazines of their own, edited for their own readers, rather than pages in a regional round-up. Viva Brighton is the larger and younger-city-facing of the pair, but the pair is the context in which it was made.
Place in Brighton's media
Brighton is well served by news media — a daily newspaper tradition, national coverage of its politics and festivals, and a dense ecosystem of listings sites and blogs — but a monthly magazine of record, printed, themed and written by people who live in the city, occupies different ground. Viva Brighton did not compete on news; it accumulated a portrait of the city, issue by issue, theme by theme: its bakers and brewers, its hospice staff and farmers, its pavilion and its sewers, its pleasures and its rough sleepers. Assembled over eighty-five and more editions, that portrait is a social history of Brighton and Hove in the 2010s told from inside. In this directory the magazine stands as the city's independent monthly — small in team, local in everything, and built to last by the oldest method in magazine publishing: know your place, and keep finding new things to say about it.
