Brighton Beach Lovers on until – March 29th 2026

The exhibition will initially show 14 hand-printed and framed black-and-white photos from 2000 until 2025, although his connection to the beach goes back much farther than the millennium.

“As a kid and as a teenager, I grew up on the beach and I skived off school to go down to the beach, usually over in Hove, down at the Medina groyne,” he recalls. “I never sort of occupied any of the Brighton beaches when I was younger.

The very first memory that I have of Brighton Beach was next to the Pier on the right side between the two big groynes. Bernie Winters, a comedian, who did theatre and he also had a TV show, had a St. Bernard and he always dressed in a fur coat. I remember people whispering around me, ‘Oh look over there, that’s Bernie Winters.’ Can’t imagine anyone under 40 having a clue who he was!

The first images that I took down on Brighton Beach were in 1987, just after the big storm, and I’ve got the squatters on the West Pier, which was back in the 90s. This project began in late 1999 or early 2000 when I decided to start taking more photos down on the beach.”

Stewart’s work has been published internationally and in many newspapers and magazines in the UK, including all the national broadsheets, and many will remember his acclaimed record of two traumatic seasons in the history of Brighton & Hove Albion, entitled More Than 90 Minutes.

Brighton Beach Lovers is one of several projects that he is working on, and he expected to complete it a lot earlier. “It just so happens it’s come to the 25th year,” he says. “Initially I was just going to do it for a year.

And the year became five years, five became ten, ten became 20, and now 20 has become 25. Purely because I moved away from Brighton in 2007, I went to Spain for a few years. Then I came back, landed back in Brighton in 2010. And then I left again in 2012, because I met a girl from Kent.

So for the majority of this whole project, I’ve not even lived in Brighton. I’ve become a local lad who just happens to drop in for a day or two every so often with big gaps in between. For many years, I’ve always felt a lot of guilt about not coming down more. But that’s more to do with geography and time, as well as the costs. Because I’ve done all this on film, which is a really expensive way of doing a project like this.

But because you’re not living in that place all the time, you see and you realise the changes that it undergoes. When you always live in a place, you don’t really notice that. So yeah, huge life changes, world changes all in that time. But over a quarter of a century, you would expect it.

The reasons why people walk the pebbles are the same and have never changed: teens jumping off things (I used to climb up the Palace Pier and jump), day trippers with cold boxes of food and drink, swimmers, or they come to just doom-scroll their mobile, when once they read their newspapers, or to think, make a decision or to be with family, a girlfriend, boyfriend, lover or perhaps just to watch the passers-by.”

So is the project now finished? “No. But 25 years is an end point. Anything else that I do after this year will just be like an add-on. In essence, this is just 25 years of me passing through the town as a day visitor.

There are so many things that I know that I’ve missed, you know, events or happenings and there are so many gaps that in many ways, I don’t think I’ve done it justice. Even though when other people look at the work, they think it’s strong. It’s a representation of the beach front between the piers over 25 years, but I just think that I’ve not captured as much as I could have.”

Brighton beach also provided him with “my greatest ever regret, and I still often think about this on a weekly basis, how much it scarred me. I went down to the Fatboy Slim concert, the first one, on the most incredible summer evening. I was thinking about whether to take the camera down. And I thought, do you know what? It’s going to be crazy down there. I’m going to be drinking, and it was a bloody expensive camera that I didn’t want anything bad to happen to.

But to this day, because we were down by the water’s edge, just the stuff that I was seeing, the whole energy of it, it would have been fantastic to include an image or some of those images within the series. I didn’t even take any photos on my phone.

But it’s still a huge archive.”

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