Brighton Up: The Inside Story of Brighton & Hove Albion's Journey From Despair to Triumph and the Premier League tells the story of how Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club bounced back from the heartbreak of missing out on promotion to the Premier League by the narrowest of margins, to achieve that ultimate goal earlier this month. Acclaimed sports journalist Nick Szczepanik, a lifelong Brighton fan with strong contacts at the club, documents its travails over two turbulent seasons. The book explains how the Seagulls, written off as certainties for relegation to League One before the 2015-16 season, overcame the loss of one of their own in the Shoreham Air Show tragedy to go on a record unbeaten run. But although top scorers in the Championship, they fell agonisingly short of their target of automatic promotion by a single goal, then lost out again in the lottery of the play-offs. The football world expected them to be crushed by disappointment and outspent by the big guns of Newcastle, Norwich and Aston Villa, but instead they regrouped and came back stronger in 2016-17. Led by experienced and inscrutable manager Chris Hughton and backed by owner Tony Bloom - the world-class poker player nicknamed 'The Lizard' for his ice-cold blood - they played with a determination not to let the heartbreak happen again.

How would you feel if your football club was bought by a businessman who saw your ground as real estate? And what if your ground was demolished leaving you with nowhere to play next season? Many fans believe that when Bill Archer, a Blackburn-based entrepreneur, bought Brighton and Hove Albion, he had no passion for the club or the game but rather saw an opportunity to make a profit. If so, he made the fatal mistake of misjudging football fans. In July 1995, Brighton's local daily paper led its front page with the headline 'Seagulls Migrate', announcing that the Goldstone Ground was to be sold to a property developer for £7.4 million and that 'home' games were to be played at Portsmouth. All this without one word of consultation with the fans. What followed was the biggest campaign in the history of football to save a club. Drawing on dozens of interviews with people directly involved - the fans, the FA, the players and the management - Build a Bonfire dramatically traces the progress of the two-year fight with the board: two years of despair, absurdity and solidarity. In so doing, the book not only explores implications for other clubs, in a world where the battle lines between football and money are being drawn ever tighter, but also creates a picture of that strange and wonderful thing: the football fan. And having lived through the crisis and listened to the fans, the authors can offer their Ten Essential Steps to Depose your Club Chairman, should the need arise . . .

Twin towns with a fascinating history, they constitute the Sussex resort that, to mark the Millennium, the Queen declared to be a City. A giant step from the Neolithic camp built on Whitehawk Hill in the fourth millennium B.C. The author, who since 1950 has worked as a planner in Brighton, has now produced the first integrated history of the two towns. His sense of humour is evident on every page of an entertaining and richly illustrated narrative, through prehistoric downsmen to the trippers and the technocrats of today's proud City.

Ordinary in Brighton? offers the first large scale examination of the impact of the UK equalities legislation on lesbian, gay, bi- and trans (LGBT) lives, and the effects of these changes on LGBT political activism. Using the participatory research project, Count Me In Too, this book investigates the material issues of social/spatial injustice that were pertinent for some - but not all- LGBT people, and explores activisms working in partnership that operated with/within the state. Ordinary in Brighton? explores the unevenly felt consequences of assimilation and inclusion in a city that was compelled to provide a place (literally and figuratively) for LGBT people. Brighton itself is understood to be exceptional, and exploring this specific location provides insights into how place operates as constitutive of lives and activisms. Despite its placing as ’the gay capital’ and its long history as a favoured location of LGBT people, there is very little academic or popular literature published about this city. This book offers insights into the first decade of the 21st century when sexual and gender dissidents supposedly became ordinary here, rather than exceptional and transgressive. It argues that geographical imaginings of this city as the ’gay capital’ formed activisms that sought positive social change for LGBT people. The possibilities of legislative change and urban inclusivities enabled some LGBT people to live ordinary lives, but this potential existed in tension with normalisations and exclusions. Alongside the necessary critiques, Ordinary in Brighton? asks for conceptualisations of the creative and co-operative possibilities of ordinariness. The book concludes by differentiating the exclusionary ideals of normalisation from the possibilities of ordinariness, which has the potential to render a range of people not only in-place, but commonplace. All royalties from this book will be donated to Allsorts Youth Project, Brighton & Hove LGBT Switchboa