Local community publisher launches Queer History Walk

A free online history walk about queer lives in Brighton during the 1950s and 1960s has been created by local community publisher QueenSpark Books. The walk is one of a new series of interactive history trails called Discover Brighton, enabling locals and visitors to step into the city’s past.

The walk – Daring Hearts - is based on QueenSpark’s pioneering but long out of print book of the same name. It’s drawn from interviews with lesbians and gay men speaking openly about their lives in and around Brighton in the 1950s and 60s. In this period the town enjoyed a national reputation as a haven for queer people with lesbians and gay men arriving from all over Britain for holidays and to settle down.

The walk will take you back in time to experience some of their favourite haunts and cherished memories. Through these stories you will see why the town became such a magnet for queer people. Though the memories are often light and humorous, they also reveal the prejudice, shame and terror many faced in the years before decriminalisation. The walk begins at the Palace Pier with a New Year’s jape and a lost shoe, winding through St James’ Street and the Laines ending at West Street where the infamous Chatfield’s used to be. The hour-long trail takes in former gay bars, the legendary Arts Ball, a cottage and a gentleman’s outfitters - where you’d get your inside leg measured even if you went in for a tie! The Daring Hearts walk was created by local volunteers Jenny Donoghue and Daren Kay, who artfully curated the walk from a sample of the stories in the book. Daren said:

Helping to put the walk together was a wonderful opportunity to bring this amazing collection of stories to life for a new generation of fans of queer history - it was quite literally a walk down memory lane!

All the Discover Brighton walks are digitised, enabling you to follow the route on your web-enabled smartphone or tablet, with historic photographs, texts and audio recordings at the points of interest. Other walks feature seaside and wartime stories, lost theatres, cinemas and shops, ‘slum’ clearances, the city’s alternative spaces, and unsung heroes.

QueenSpark, the UK’s longest-running community publisher, has been documenting and archiving the lives of local people since 1972. The charity’s development director, John Riches, said:

No other city in the UK has such a unique ‘people’s history’ as that held by QueenSpark Books. It is testament to the thousands of local volunteers who, over nearly 50 years, have collected these stories –and the hundreds of people that have told them. We’re delighted that we can now make this history freely available to locals and tourists to access as they walk around the city.

The walks form part of QueenSpark’s Archives Alive! project, which is supported by the National Heritage Lottery Fund.

The walks are available from the book publisher’s website:

www.queensparkbooks.org.uk/discover-brighton/

To purchase an e-book of the Daring Hearts book, visit:

www.queensparkbooks.org.uk/books-projects/daring-hearts-e-book/ org.uk/