Anyone even remotely familiar with Brighton will be aware that there’s something distinctly witchy about the city. Though chain stores dominate the newer areas, the oldest parts are still littered with crystal healing shops and holistic apothecaries, and there remains an impressive proportion of the population who look as though they’d be entirely at home at a Stonehenge solstice celebration. In the latest census, Brighton and Hove was recorded as being home to 111 Wicce, the highest number anywhere in the UK. The city even boasts a witch-themed bar and restaurant in the Lanes.
It’s clear that Brighton is something of a hotspot for modern-day Paganism - but why?
Before we get into answering that, it’s probably important to clarify what a witch actually is. When I say the word ‘witch’, I’m sure the image conjured up in your mind is one of women with pointy hats on broomsticks, or maybe even a green-skinned Cynthia Erivo belting out Defying Gravity. However, when I use the term here I’ll be using it to refer to people who practise magic in the modern day; that is, those that believe that crystals have protective powers, or that certain herbal concoctions have the ability to heal or to harm. This is slightly distinct from, but overlaps significantly with, Wicca, a Pagan religion founded in Britain in the 1940s and 50s which revolves around nature worship. Most people who identify as Wicce also identify as witches, although not all do.
Having said all that, don’t worry too much if your brain is slightly boggled by the above paragraph. I’ll be using both terms here without dwelling too much on their complexities - so, please do just sit back and enjoy the article.
You might expect an article about witchcraft to begin way back when, perhaps during the witch craze of the Middle Ages. However, witch data relating to Sussex from this period is virtually nada. It seems that the county was an unusually witch-free zone, with only 16 people persecuted for witchcraft here over the entire period, most of them for bewitching farm animals. The link between Brighton and witchcraft is actually a relatively recent thing, first forged when Doreen Valiente - the mother of modern witchcraft - arrived to set up shop here in 1956.
Witchcraft had only been legalised in Britain five years earlier, though Valiente had been practising it since she was a teenager and had already published numerous texts on the subject. Alongside Gerald Gardner, the founder of Gardnerian Wicca and another prominent writer on the subject, she helped both to modernise the movement and to gain it acceptance within society. She fought back against assumptions that witchcraft was synonymous with devil worship, promoting instead a form of ‘white’ witchcraft which held healing and personal growth at its heart. Though rooted in ancient traditions, her version of witchcraft incorporated many important modern issues such as environmentalism and social activism. She was also an outspoken feminist - she complained that ‘we are allowed to call ourselves High Priestesses, Witch Queens and similar fancy titles …. but we are still in the position of having men running things’, and throughout her life strived to change this.
Largely thanks to Doreen Valiente’s influence, Brighton’s Wicce community became increasingly established over the course of the 70s and 80s. By the end of the 20th century the city was home to multiple different covens, along with many solitary practitioners. Shops and meeting places sprung up everywhere, many of them still in existence today. Valiente’s legacy continues to be apparent not only through the blue plaque erected in her honour at Tyson Place, her former home, but also in the diverse and thriving Wicce community seen in modern-day Brighton.
So there you have it - a very potted and by no means comprehensive history of Brighton and witches. But what does the city’s Pagan scene look like today - and what does the future hold for it?
As we’ve covered, both Wicca and witchcraft have certainly left their mark on the city in ways both material and harder to pin down - for instance, the emergence of ‘occult pop’ on the Brighton music scene with bands such as Everyday Saints and Bonnie Trash. Ending articles with a somewhat cheesy celebration of Brighton’s accepting culture seems to be becoming my annoying cliche, though, so I promise I will not be doing that here. Instead, I’m going to end with a confession of sorts. I went into this knowing next to nothing about witchcraft or Wicce, expecting to come out of it with nothing more than a funny article about women with crystals and pointy hats. What I found, however, was a hugely diverse and interesting collection of traditions and practices with an incredibly rich history, in many senses way ahead of its time when it came to important social issues such as women's rights. Witches, it turns out, are all around us - and especially if you live in Brighton …