Art gallery transformed Bilbao could Brighton do the same?

Jeff Koons's "Puppy" — forty feet of blooming colour — guards the entrance to the Guggenheim Museum, and a short walk away a vast bronze spider by Louise Bourgeois looms over the water.

The Guggenheim gallery is extraordinary, but what struck me most about Bilbao was not the famous titanium building itself. It was that the art had spilled out of it and onto the streets. Sculpture on the waterfront, installations in the squares, prisms in the pavements, and people from around the world moving between them — the whole city behaving as though it were one big gallery with no walls. Art was not just shut away behind an entrance fee, it was part of what it felt like to be there.

It is worth remembering what Bilbao was before. For most of the twentieth century it was a hard-working industrial city of shipyards and steel and, when those industries collapsed, it was left with unemployment, decline and a river no one wanted to walk beside. Then, in 1997, it did something bold. It commissioned one astonishing building and used it as the centrepiece of a wholesale reinvention. The results were so dramatic that "the Bilbao effect" entered the language as shorthand for culture-led regeneration.

The figures are striking. Visitors to the city rose from around 100,000 a year to well over a million, almost overnight, and the regional government estimated that the ordinary taxes generated by all that visitor spending — in hotels, restaurants, shops and transport — more than repaid the cost of the building within about five years. The museum estimates that it now contributes hundreds of millions of euros to the local economy each year and supports many thousands of jobs across hotels, restaurants, shops and transport. But the numbers, impressive as they are, only tell part of the story. The deeper change was in the city's confidence and its sense of itself. Bilbao stopped being a place people left and became a place the world wanted to visit.

Brighton and Hove is of course not the same as Bilbao in the 90s. We already welcome around 11m visitors each year, and there are plenty of reasons to visit. But we are, by almost any measure, one of the most creative cities in Britain. We host more than sixty festivals a year, including the largest annual arts festival in England. We have far more artists and creative businesses than the national average, world-class creative universities, and a reputation for imagination that stretches back generations.

And yet, for all of that, we do not have a single major gallery to call our own. We have an excellent museum, some brilliant smaller spaces and an extraordinary community of makers — but nowhere of real scale and ambition. A city that breathes creativity has never quite had the landmark its talent deserves.

That is not a complaint. It is an opportunity, and it is one we intend to seize. We’re making plans for an internationally significant gallery on our eastern seafront at Black Rock, beside the Marina, and we are actively seeking the investment to make it happen through our Seafront Prospectus.

It is hard to imagine a more fitting site. A major gallery could turbo-charge investment and regeneration on the eastern seafront and Black Rock is a perfect canvas for a building that could become a symbol for the whole city.

The economic case is compelling. A destination gallery draws visitors who stay longer, spend more and come back — filling hotels, supporting cafés and restaurants, and drawing footfall and life eastward along the coast. It creates jobs, from construction through to careers in curation, education and hospitality. And it gives our own young creative talent a reason to build their futures here rather than drifting to London, keeping the brilliance our universities produce in the city that nurtured it.

But if the Guggenheim shows us anything, it is that a gallery like this need not stay behind its own doors. The best of them change the streets around them. They spill out — into public art, into the life of the neighbourhood, into the simple pleasure of a place that feels alive with ideas. Brighton and Hove already has that spirit in abundance. A gallery of real ambition could give it both a home and a stage.

Bilbao is a city that bet on culture and won. And it did not have Brighton and Hove's head start — our festivals, our artists, our restless creative energy were the envy of Europe long before Bilbao reinvented itself. Our city already has the imagination, and we now have the opportunity to be bold and deliver something truly exciting for the city’s future