Our Place

In 2017 Kae Tempest was the Guest Director of the Brighton Festival and wanted to ensure that the Festival was in the city’s communities as well as its stages. The Festival approached Brighton People’s Theatre to see if we could help establish a new way of working with communities in the city.

In 2017 Your Place was born, two weekends of arts activities made by, for and with the communities of Hangleton and East Brighton on the outskirts of the city. Kae Tempest performed at community centres in both areas.

We developed partnerships between local community organisations the Hangleton and Knoll Project, Due East and the Brighton Festival. Our role was to chair the steering group which meets monthly throughout the year to plan the event and to enable them to take increasing ownership of it.

From 2018 – 19 the mini-festival within a festival grew and the communities have taken increasing ownership of the event, reflected in the name change to Our Place in 2019. Attracting hundreds of local people, over 50% of whom say that they don’t engage with the arts, Our Place has, in the words of Beth Burgess, Executive Producer of the Brighton Festival, “changed the Brighton Festival”.