The Actors

A pub does not usually need a council ruling to survive a change of hands. This one did. In January 2022, Brighton & Hove City Council listed the building at 4 Prince's Street as an Asset of Community Value — a legal status that forces a delay and a right to bid before the freehold can be sold out from under the people using it. The building had been The Marlborough. By the time the listing went through, it was reopening as The Actors, and a fair number of directories never caught up.

The campaign that won the paperwork

The venue's queer history predates the paperwork by decades. The Sussex Gay Liberation Front started meeting there on Tuesday nights in 1974, with a disco on Fridays, and a theatre space was built into the building not long after — a pub organizing a movement downstairs and staging one upstairs, in the same building, at the same time. Marlborough Productions ran that theatre as a not-for-profit from 2008 to 2020, putting on work by performers including Big Freedia and Kate Bornstein.

Then came COVID, and a landlord decision that put the building's future in doubt. Queer the Marly, a campaign co-chaired by Michelle Steele, organized to keep it — a not-for-profit CIC, hundreds of community testimonials, and a case for ACV status built specifically on the argument that this building does something a market transaction doesn't account for. Scene Magazine covered the win in January 2022. It reopened that October as The Actors, now under Laine Pub Co's management, with a 60-seat theatre upstairs and the pub's queer identity intact underneath it.

What actually runs there now

CUBIC-V, Near's design desk, was asked to look at the theatre specifically, and the point worth making structurally is this: the interesting thing about this building was never the stage. It's the floor plan. Sidebar, Backbar, Lightroom and Theatre are four distinct rooms doing four different jobs on the same night, which is why a Tuesday can carry a poetry open mic in one room while nothing at all happens in the others — the building was built to let a community run several kinds of gathering in parallel rather than choosing one.

That plan is still working. The current weekly schedule runs Dyke Night, a Queer Midweek Munch, a Women of Colour Meet Up, Dykes Who Dance salsa and bachata classes, and a quarterly Black Brighton Market — genuine, recurring, dated programming, not a claim about inclusivity sitting on top of a generic pub. The theatre itself has picked up Brighton Fringe's Best Small Venue Award twice, in 2023 and again in 2026, and the pub took Brighton's own Pub of the Year in 2025.

One reply in a June 2026 r/brighton thread asking for trans-friendly recommendations named The Actors and mentioned trans flags displayed in the windows — one account, but consistent with a pattern running through r/brighton going back years, where the venue is the default answer to "somewhere queer and easy" long before anyone mentions the theatre upstairs.

The name that won't update

None of this fixed the paperwork problem. Search engines and legacy directories are still catching up — some carry pages titled "The Actors" at a web address that still reads the-marlborough-theatre, a fossil of the old name sitting underneath the new one. If you're told to meet someone at the Marlborough in Kemptown, you're not being sent somewhere that closed. You're being sent here, under the name the council's own protection order was written to outlive.

Kemptown's other rooms make an instructive contrast: Green Door Store, across town under the railway arches, survived by selling tickets years out; this pub survived by getting its freehold legally shielded. Two different ways a small room outlasts the market around it.