How the festival started... by Chairman, Roger Marlowe

Back in the early 2000's when the newly created City of Brighton & Hove contemplated applying to be City of Culture 2008 a committee was formed. It was mainly the Arts and culture leaders, a few great and the good, lead by the Council top brass and a few commercial makeweights.

Whilst we obviously had the best cultural offer it was awarded (fairly predictably) to those up north. One conclusion that occurred to me from all the discussions at that time was the vibrancy of our own Arts Festival in May and how desirable it would be to have another comparable Festival another month in Brighton & Hove.

After reflecting over what that should be from Books, Films and Fashion I felt that the biggest impact would come from food and drink. I knew that quite small towns such as Ludlow and Abergevenny had put themselves on the map with their food festivals and I felt we had something comparable to offer here. I knew that it would take some money to pilot a project so I sat on the telephone asking all the big name restranteurs to give me £500.00 each to get us off the ground.

Nearly all came through, from Hotel du Vin, Drakes Hotel, Seven Dials restaurant and Moshi Moshi. 14 in total. We all met in February 2003, decided to have a Festival in June and so the first Festival started in June 2003 with massive support from the Council and the main sponsor Sainsbury giving us £5000.00 after I had telephoned them to ask them for help only about 60 times. Since then we have gone from strength to strength.

If we are to learn any lesson from our history it is that back in 2003 Moshi Moshi argued that we should have a moral compass as well as one of just promoting the City's brilliant food offer. It is hard to believe now but the idea of persuading the community of the benefits of local food was not then even on the edge of most people's vision. As we began to argue that it should be the Festivals objective to persuade restaurants to offer local food and highlight its benefits to the community we found ourselves at the beginning of a food consciousness revolution.

Now every supermarket showcases some local food and many of our top restaurants put it first on their menu. Curiously enough the by-product of our choice to make the Festival a campaigner for good, fresh, local and seasonal food has been to attract a committee of people to run the festival that shared those passions and were prepared to contribute a disproportionate amount of their time to making it happen.

And if you measure your wealth by how many friends you have then I have truly been rewarded by that choice then to create a food festival. The committee that delivers the Festival is comprised of: Ida Lee, JUSTBIZ; Paula Seager, Natural PR Ltd; Melissa Love, We Love Local; Jade Gandey, Rageous Media; Adam Styles, Style Accountants; Frank Jay, New Era Associates; Jake Kempston, KOBA; Roger Marlowe, Paskins Hotel.