Simon Fanshawe, chairman of the Place to Be executive which is spearheading our bid for city status, updates you on the campaign

For all the success of Brighton and Hove in dragging itself up from the doldrums of the late Eighties as a tourist resort, we still don't have a major nationally known club in the town.

That is despite the regeneration of the seafront by the council and the traders, which practically everyone agrees has done wonders for the morale of the town.

The Zap or The Honey Club occasionally hits the top ten lists in The Independent or the specialist music press.

And people from the South Coast and London come down for a night of fun in town - that is if they can find a seat on the increasingly litter-strewn, unlooked-after Connex trains. But there is not a club that people in Manchester and Newcastle or even Paris and Berlin have really heard of.

At the moment a public inquiry is grinding through three days of witnesses and submissions about one proposal on The Aquarium Terraces. The developers want the council planners to allow them a capacity of 1,750 in the club in the new development.

That way the major music entrepreneurs, Cream, can be tempted to open something similar to the hugely successful club they have built up in Liverpool.

I should declare an interest at this point. I live on the seafront.

In fact I live opposite the Marina end of Madeira Drive, which is where much of the increase in weekend traffic will emerge on to Marine Parade.

There will probably be extra noise, certainly extra people and, damn them for not always treating our town decently, extra litter.

But I am in favour of the club. And so should we all be if we want this town to grow more prosperous.

Brighton and Hove is not locked inland like, say, one of our other city competitors, Swindon, which has little to take you there to live, apart from the presence of several company HQs in architecturally undistinguished and ugly offices and the fact that if you drive for half an hour, you might get a glimpse of some beautiful Wiltshire countryside.

Our economy is absolutely linked to the sea. Whether everybody likes it or not, we are a resort. We all know that many of our jobs depend on other people wanting to come here. They come to shop, to wander along the front and, of course, to dance the night away.

It would be madness now, just as the economic tide is turning in Brighton and Hove, to put the brakes on.

Rather we should be finding ways to encourage operations like Cream, as Liverpool has done, because their international exposure has made them face up to the issues that arise from running a major club.

They have useful experience that they could bring to us. For instance, there's the traffic issue. In our case, where better to provide parking than on Madeira Drive?

But Cream will go further. They have said they will make it profitable for individuals to run coaches that bring the clubbers and, better still, take them back home. And Cream work closely with the police, who need to be confident that they can deal with any potential trouble.

But it is not up to them to compromise the economic future of Brighton and Hove by simply limiting the capacity of every venue.

Numbers don't always equal trouble. On New Year's Eve there were 50,000 people on the streets but only nine arrests. It was a very mellow night, and the police were as affected by that as much as the rest of us were.

An international club on the seafront would be a boon for the town. A profitable operation could employ as many as 40 people on full-time, decent wages.

Surely we need these jobs and we need the boost to our prominence as a resort?

Those of us who live on the seafront can support the new club knowing that it is our gift to the rest of the town.

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