The energy in this town is quite amazing. In the last week alone I have been contacted by three people.

One perfectly sane man wants to see if The Place To Be can support him in making a silent movie about Brighton and Hove in the year 2000. Another one wants to mount a version of The Tempest, involving professionals, amateurs and all manner of windsurfers and swimmers on a floating platform off the beach.

And three artists rang who want to collect all the empty bottles from a Friday and Saturday night in bars and restaurants in Brighton and Hove and recycle them into bricks for neighbourhood groups to make sculptures and mosaics to decorate their local environment.

Now, I'm sure that in all the towns that are our competitors for city status there are people who come up with fantastic ideas. We don't necessarily have a monopoly on those here. But I can't help feeling that the response of Brighton and Hovians (please someone tell me, is that what we should call ourselves?) to unusual ideas is 'can-do' rather than 'how strange'.

And that's what drives much of our local economy - small businesses motivated by creativity. It always seems no coincidence that the Body Shop started here. No one laughs at you in Brighton and Hove when you suggest that you're going to make shampoo out of bananas.

Look at the North Laine, full of thriving shops, each one idiosyncratic and individual, making up a shopping district that people travel miles to visit. Delightful eccentricity is what singles out our town from so many others.

The examples are legion. Many of you will have read Jakki Phillips' interview with Damian Harris in the Argus a week or so back. He started the now hugely successful Skint Records, which sponsors the Albion. Well there, by his own admission, is a creative "layabout" who made a million.

Would he have felt the freedom and would he have had the support in Reading or Luton to make his music, experiment DJ-ing in the clubs and take the risk? Probably not.

Someone would more likely than not have told him to get a proper job. He may have had the idea in those two towns, but would have had to run away to Brighton and Hove, like Norman Cook, his creative partner, to make it happen.

And these days, with international businesses being started by students and sold for millions, the business ethic is growing in leisure time more than in big corporations. Which suits me just fine.

The question that fascinates is how do we as a town create an atmosphere that encourages this spirit of entrepreneurialism? How do we reach those people, of all ages, but particularly the young, across the town with that spirit of enterprise and the confidence to make their idea a reality?

Well, last week several of us went to pitch one idea that might help to the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA), a regional Government body. The idea is called an Enterprise Hub.

What you need to start a business, or just to 'go out on your own', as the old Renault ad used to have it, is really a sense that you're not completely barmy, that there's a market out there and that you're not risking your family or your kids. You may also need to know some basic answers about dull stuff such as VAT or tax.

If you just want to start a window cleaning business because you don't want to work in a stuffy office, you need to know about insurance, the cheapest way to advertise and what other window cleaners are doing so you can offer something better.

All this information is around, but most of it is contained in official buildings or in the heads of specialist advisors or people you just don't know. And how do you find them when you're starting out?

And, as important, how do the people with all this advice find you? Entrepreneurs in Brighton and Hove are often alone in the undergrowth of our economy, which is so full of freelances and people working on their own.

Now our Enterprise Hub idea is not rocket science. It's perfectly simple. We want to use the Internet to create an instantly accessible website where you can be guided, where you can meet other people trying to start out and which will help you to develop your ideas in the security of your own home.

So whether you want help developing your CV, finding out about VAT or floating a maintenance platform out to sea to do Shakespeare, you can find help and a place where no one's going to giggle at your dreams. The idea is to harness the energy in the town so Brighton and Hove can become Britain's number one place to be an entrepreneur. And it looks like SEEDA might give us the money to start. Yippee.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.