Strike a Light – Arts & Heritage worked with Brighton Dome and Brighton Festival to deliver a project to capture memories of events, performance and shows at Brighton Dome over the years. It was called ‘I Was There’.

The project began in 2020. Due to lockdown we had to take a hiatus from the project, and relaunched it in Autumn 2021.

Graduations, tea dances, roller derbies, pop icons, Suffragette protests, cutting-edge art, silent discos, hairdressing championships, tear-jerking theatre, fierce debates and Eurovision winners. We’ve seen it all.

‘And since being converted into a performance venue 150 years ago, our stages have been graced with a dazzling array of illustrious artists, writers, dancers, musicians, actors and directors – from Harold Pinter to Maya Angelou, Muddy Waters, Ella Fitzgerald and Stevie Wonder to David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen and all the late Dancing Queens in between.’

We recruited and trained volunteers who planned and held interviews to creatively re-tell moving memories from Brighton Dome & Brighton Festival visitors. This work will end up being part of an exciting story-telling project about one of the most vital arts centres in heart of Brighton & Hove, and the memories collected will be shared with generations to come.

To find out more about what our volunteers did, you can download the research job description here:

1940s photos of Brighton Dome found in an old bookshop in 2018

Supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund