THE city's innovative campaign to crowdsource more than £400,000 to help fund the restoration of the crumbling seafront arches has made its target with just 24 hours to spare.

The Argus understands the Save Madeira Terraces campaign's £421,056 target figure has been achieved and will be formally announced shortly.

A £50,000 donation from Soho House, which is renovating a property in the area and hoping to open next year, has brought the campaign home in style.

More than 2,100 pledges have been promised to the since its launch in late June, ranging from individual gifts of a few pounds to five-figure donations from businesses and £100,00 from Brighton and Hove City council.

Celebrities including Fatboy Slim, Damon Hill and Peter James have backed the campaign and a community raffle with more than 600 prizes raised £16,771 last Friday.

Had the campaign failed to hit its goal by midnight tomorrow, none of the pledges would have been collected. The city would have risked being hamstrung in future requests for funding had the public not shown their support for the iconic structure.

Howard Barden, head of VisitBrighton, said: "It's just a fabulous outcome isn't it.

"The whole city has got behind this and I think it's testament to the passion in the city for the Terraces.

"It was an opportunity for the city to show we care deeply about them and we've risen to the challenge.

"And without that level of support from everybody including The Argus we might not have got there, it's been brilliant.

"It represents the heritage of the city and hopefully now through this we can move forward and save it.

Anyone who has pledged £2 or more has become a “friend” of Madeira Terraces and will be eligible to vote on which businesses will move into the first three restored arches.

Jax Atkins, who helped raise nearly £17,000 for the campaign with the city's largest ever raffle, said: "I'm over the moon.

"This really got people together and talking about it and raised awareness.

"I think this shows how much the Terraces mean to us, and how important they are as the image of Brighton.

"I'm very pleased to have been included and played a part. The voice of residents needed to be heard and it has. 

"Some people think council tax should pay it all but council tax can't pay it all that's the facts of life and once people realised that they were happy to get involved in their own way - legwork, marketing, buying raffle tickets, donating prizes, anything.

"Now this means they've got a new lease of life - so onwards and upwards to getting lottery funding and anything else that might be available."

The cost of the full restoration of the Victorian structure is estimated at £24m, but the £400,000 fund is enough to renovate three of the arches and will be a powerful bargaining chip when the council bids for greater amounts of heritage funding.

It also unlocks £1 million in council funding earmarked in the budget proposals outlined in The Argus last week.

The campaign has been run through funding platform Spacehive, which will be paid around £15,000 for this project.

Once restored, the 1897 structure, which was designed by Phillip Cawston Lockwood, is intended to become the catalyst for regeneration of the eastern side of Brighton’s world-famous seafront.