Live & Let Live – LGBT+ history project receives Lottery funding

Latest Group CIC receive National Lottery funding for project charting Brighton & Hove’s LGBT+ history, from all gender perspectives.

Latest Group CIC are based in Manchester Street at The Latest Musicbar and TV Studios, a few yards from the gateway to St James Street and Kemptown Village.

The funding will help create a permanent digital exhibition that charts the city’s liberal social history across the last fifty years, much of it based East of the Pier and focusing on the successful LGBT+ story.

The project will be created and screened in Manchester Street both internally and externally over the course of the coming year.

Directors of Latest have been promoting events in Brighton since 1978, publishing magazines since 1982 and filming professionally throughout this century and before!

The projections will be, an all-encompassing colourful display of the large archive of fascinating material that they have on video and film and on posters, flyers, newspaper and magazines. The project will use this unique resource of visual history.

They will chart Brighton & Hove’s LGBT+ history from both female and male perspectives, indeed from all gender perspectives, in this, the most liberal of British cities.

However, Brighton was not always like this and Latest will credit those who built this beacon of hope and diversity that is the modern city of Brighton and Hove.

They will put up signs that recognise Kemptown!!!  It’s surely no accident that the current director of the resurgent Brighton Pride is named Paul KEMP!

Live And Let Live! will work with both professionals and volunteers who will all have access to training and educational opportunities.

Lloyd Russell-Moyle, MP for Brighton Kemptown & Peacehaven who is a patron of Latest Group CIC and supported the funding bid, said: “I am thrilled that the CIC has received this award from the Heritage Lottery Fund and I am confident that this exhibition will attract audiences in huge numbers and hundreds of participants who will join in celebrating the diversity of our city and take advantage of the learning opportunities that it will offer. An exhibition of this kind will create a focus of attention for both visitors and locals and help in what I believe in most passionately – the regeneration of St James Street and Kemptown Village and East Brighton – East Of The Pier – as one of the city’s most vibrant communities. We don’t talk Diversity, we are Diversity. We live and let live. We’ve seen the support from the public over here and indeed across Brighton and Hove for the Madeira Terraces. East Of The Pier, the rebirth continues with this project.”

Michelle Roffe, Head of Heritage Lottery Fund in South East England, added: “We are delighted to support Latest Group CIC in exploring Brighton and Hove’s LGBT+ heritage through local people’s stories, archives and film. Thanks to National Lottery players, participants will learn new skills and explore their heritage, whilst providing a lasting record of this important heritage for wider communities, both locally and beyond.”

The exhibition will also be available to be viewed online and accessed by other organisations globally. At the end of the project, archive materials will be donated to The Keep to ensure they are accessible to all.