Campaign to get a statue of a bear in brighton

There’s not much my home town of Brighton hasn’t got. It’s a pretty ace place to live on the whole. Occasionally you get the odd whiff of urine off West Street on a Saturday night, but this is a small price to pay for an otherwise terrific city.

What Brighton doesn’t have though is a statue of a bear. We all know that a city can’t really put itself on the world map unless it has one. I went to Boston in the USA a while back and they had a 4-metre high one. It was very impressive. Bicester Village Factory Outlet in Oxfordshire also has a statue of a bear. He’s called Porridge.

This is a campaign to get our own bear statue in Brighton. It would not only delight locals of all ages, but would bring in much needed tourist revenue. Especially if we put it in the Marina. They could do with the trade. Just think for a minute about how great it would be to have a Brighton bear statue. It could become a meeting point, a landmark, a place for students to adorn the bear’s head with stolen traffic cones.

I've already sent a letter to Brighton MP Caroline Lucas and I'll be drafting letters to the council and the Prime Minister in due course. I’m also going to get a petition going and start to put the feelers out to any local artists who feel like taking on the role of crafting the beast. We’ve got some good artists in Brighton, so I think we’ll strike gold. We’ve got some truly awful artists too, but I won’t approach them.

I’ll be knocking up flyers any day now. These I shall tactfully leave in Costa Coffee and places like that. I may even put some in the local libraries. Mind you, the last time I did that was with some postcards of my poems, and they got thrown in the bin within the hour. I won’t dwell on that now though. It hurts too much.

Until a proper website is up and running (very soon), my Campaign Facebook group will be our virtual head office. From here we can pool resources, ideas and all that old guff. For a start we need to decide what type of bear the statue will be. Grizzly, Panda, Polar? I just don’t know. Let’s work together to get this happening. I know we can do it.
And do please pass this on to anyone you know who likes bears.

Brighton's bare without a Bear (statue)

Join the Facebook Group Here

Sign the Official Petition