The Brighton School is a radical, postgraduate art school, working for the benefit of Brighton itself. It aims to harness the talent and ideas of the best Brighton graduates and put this talent to work on the city. At the same time, the school gives these graduates paid experience of real, public projects, and a means to stay in the city.

The school’s first project took place in 2015, and was built around a public art brief for London Road, a main high street in the city, teetering on the edge of gentrification. Spacemakers assembled an interdisciplinary team of five talented graduates from the University of Brighton to meet the brief: Alex Nunn, a filmmaker; Isabella Podpadec, a painter; Malcolm Bradley, a sculptor; and Martina Mina and Roz Wells, both architects.

Through six months of intensive support and programming, and with the help of external tutors/organisations including Muf, Air, Kathrin Böhm and Eastside Projects, the school produced a strange, subtle and beautiful work of public art, in the form of the first urban stone circle in England, and probably the world. We’ve published a book about the process, and the politics behind it, which you can find here.

We’re now working on turning The Brighton School into a permanent institution for the city. Long-term we don’t just want the school to do public art: we want it to do public everything. We think it can be a new way of creating public projects across Greater Brighton: new housing, new public spaces, transport, economics, whatever the city needs.