A 10-year chronology of the project

This timeline describes how My Brighton and Hove evolved from a museum exhibit into a community heritage website. You can download the timeline as a Word document at the foot of the page.

1995

  • Original My Brighton touch screen exhibit launched in local history gallery at Brighton Museum and ArtGallery.
  • Exhibit won a Gulbenkian museum award.
  • Prince Charles interacted with the exhibit on his visit to Brighton Pavilion.

1996

  • My Brighton cited as example of good practice by the Department of National Heritage.
  • Project used by the Museum Documentation Association to train museum curators in good multimedia work.
  • British Council sponsored curator John Roles to talk about the project in Australia, Italy and Portugal.
  • Similar ‘My Town’ projects inspired in Finland and Cambridge, UK.

1997

  • CD of the exhibit launched, co-sponsored by multimedia company Desktop Display, who produced My Brighton
  • Free copies sent to schools in the local area (Others sold for £9.99).

1999

  • Council gave £2,000 to Make Multimedia History group (voluntary organisation founded by My Brighton designer Jack Latimer) to do follow-up Internet project.

2000

  • 60 volunteers started work on converting ‘My Brighton’ CD onto the Internet.
  • My Brighton and Hove website launched

2001

  • My Brighton and Hove open day held during Brighton Festival.
  • Website singled out as an example of best practice in collaboration between museums and community groups by the National Grid for Learning.
  • Featured on publicity for New Statesman New Media awards.

2002

  • My Brighton and Hove won Best Community Website award in Virtual Festival.
  • Site totally redesigned by team of volunteers.
  • Local historians join mailing-list to answer queries from website visitors.
  • Local editors appointed for neighbourhoods in Brighton and Hove.

2003

  • Council funds My Brighton and Hove to run volunteer training scheme, in order to include the views of some of the city’s under-represented communities on the website
  • New PageMaker feature helps people easily add their words and photos to the site.
  • My Brighton and Hove project invited to make presentation at national museums conference.

2004

  • My Brighton and Hove commissioned by 24 Hour Museum to produce History Trail about Brighton.
  • Three Centuries photo tour published in collaboration with the East Brighton Bygones Group.
  • Site collects photos of the 1960s for the Brighton Museum History Centre.
  • The site has: “a national reputation as an exemplary local history site” (Jon Pratty, editor, 24 Hour Museum)
  • Site wins Best Community Website 2004 award in Virtual Festival.
  • Over 20 regular volunteers now working on the website

2005

  • My Brighton and Hove collaborates with BrightonMuseum on exhibition about Brighton Boozers
  • Site visitor figures double again over the previous 12 months.
  • A new ‘My Brighton and Hove’ oral history sub-group is formed.
  • Site wins Best Community Website 2005 award in Virtual Festival.
  • Site begins migration to a new database-driven content management system for contributory heritage sites, developed by Jack Latimer and Ian Grant.
  • Site collaborates in BBC People’s War reminiscence project

2006

  • My Brighton and Hove founder members set up CommunitySites (www.communitysites.co.uk), a company providing software and support for community and heritage websites.
  • My Brighton and Hove commissioned by Brighton Council to run a workshop in the Friend Ship festival, encouraging kids to get involved with community heritage.
  • Visitor figures nearly double again over the year, to 3,800 visitors per day.
  • Site is completely re-designed and migrates to new content management system for contributory websites, designed by CommunitySites.
  • ‘My Brighton and Hove’ has 2,400 pages, gets about 3,800 visitor sessions per day, and features over 750 places and topics in the city.

Download the timeline

Downloads

Comments about this page

  • That is an incredible set of events and many congratulations for achieving so much. My Brighton and Hove is a wonderful example of how to create a ‘living’ document and one that offers an oral history of the city.

    I suspect that many people turn to the page when they first put on their computers. I know I do.

    By Philip Burnard (27/03/2019)
  • This timeline starts in 1995, however a distinguished geographer Prof WG Hoskins famously stated ‘everything in the landscape is older than you think it is’; which certainly works here as I was one of the original team of ‘history heads'(even though I am a geographer!) who worked on setting up the original My Brighton with Brighton Museum head John Roles, the DeskTop Display team of Stella and Pete; plus the technical side of Ian Grant and Jack Latimer; Melitta Dennett did the sound recordings. All the research was done individually and all brought together weekly in Jack’s front room up in Hanover and was produced over copious quantities of Pringles and green olives (very Brighton!). We did a huge amount of work on this project which was completely new to most of us. It must have been 1992 as in 1993 my wife and I went to USA on a flight paid for out of my consultancy fee! Now over 30 years on it is still one of the first things I tap into when I open the laptop.

    By Dr Geoffrey Mead (19/05/2023)

Add a comment about this page

Your email address will not be published.