The matchless QueenSpark Books, the UK’s longest-running community publisher, has its extraordinary origins in a ‘quack’ wellness fad launched from a mock Grecian temple on the south-western side of Brighton’s Queens Park exactly 100 years ago.
This was the brainchild of Friedrich Adolph August Struve, a German pharmacist and balneologist – someone who studies the therapeutic properties of mineral-rich waters.
After (not so wisely) poisoning himself with cyanide, Struve sought his cure in the famous spas of Europe and so hatched a (much wiser) idea to invent a machine to turn ordinary H2O into curative water. Kerching!
Where better, then, to try this out than the fashionable sea-side resort of Brighton.
And so, on the edge of Queens Park, in 1825, Struve sunk a 150ft well and turned the town’s rather ordinary ground water into a giant SodaStream. Voila! The German Spa.
From May to November, well-heeled Brits would queue in their carriages all the way to the sea to visit the resplendent pump room. There among the gold plaster mouldings, polished mahogany and chandeliers, they could salubriously sip from a range of chemically enhanced waters suited to their ailment. A decade later it was renamed the ‘Royal’ German Spa after King William IV granted his patronage.
By the 1860s, doctors questioned the efficacy of ‘taking the waters’ and the spa frenzy soon fell out of fashion. The pump room subsequently became a humble bottling plant, a WW2 fire-watching station and a storage facility and eventually fell derelict, boarded up and overgrown.
That is, until 1972, when a businessman attempted to develop the site into a Casino and luxury restaurant. Horrified residents quickly organised, petitioning and pestering city councillors until his plan was defeated. The reluctant council eventually coughed up the cash to develop the spa into a nursery, something practical to benefit the local community.
Happily, the Royal Spa Nursery is still going to this day.
The longest-running community publisher
The story doesn’t end there, however. The street newspaper that residents used to publicise their campaign was called QueenSpark, and featured the Sparchives column which printed local people’s memories of the area. The newspaper evolved into a community book publisher, QueenSpark Books, dedicated to telling the stories of ordinary working-class folk.
The first book was published in 1974 – an autobiography of carpenter Albert Paul, spanning the period before and during the First World War. In Poverty – Hardship but Happiness Albert recounts his life in working‑class Brighton: the daily struggles, the low-paid, precarious work, and the social norms of the time. It set a tone of working‑class autobiography, a non-romanticised view of the realities of life.
His story was so fascinating that one day Albert got the shock of his life when a presenter from the BBC’s current affairs programme, Nationwide, knocked on his door wanting an interview. Still living in meagre accommodation, Albert had no electrical sockets for them to power their equipment and had to beg a neighbour to let the TV crew run a cable up to her house.
Since then, QueenSpark Books has published over 110 books covering themes from slum housing, war, migration, personal memoirs, graphic novels and photographic collections. Now the UK’s longest-running community publisher, for half a century it has captured the voices of ordinary people in extraordinary times.
A million stories
A personal favourite of mine is Daring Hearts, which tells the stories of 40 lesbians and gay men from the 1950s and 1960s. It was the first book in Britain to use oral histories to examine the queer past in a particular town or city. Daring Hearts gives testimony to those lives generally silenced or undocumented at a time when being gay was shameful, legally precarious and often forced people to lead double lives. The interviews reveal everyday life: how people socialised, where they met, the terror of police raids, and the small freedoms and moments of joy that people carved out in a town they felt to be a gay ‘Eldorado’.
What I love about QueenSpark Books are the unique perspectives the books give you into place that you may think you know well. The city is revealed through the eyes of theatre goers, clubbers, migrants, soldiers, toilet attendants, homeless people, fishermen and even enslaved Africans; it’s hard to think of a theme that hasn’t been covered.
In Catching Stories, recording the lives of those involved in Brighton’s fishing community, Doris tells the story of her husband, Eddie, hauling in some very heavy fishing nets to discover “a German pilot, still sitting in the cockpit of his plane, fully dressed in his flying uniform – not a pretty sight…”
In International Service, shop assistant Kathleen Wilson is cheerfully arranging bacon rashers when a bomb drops on the nearby Preston Viaduct. Managing to dash into the back of the shop just in time to survive the blast, she shakily makes her way back to find the windows imploded and everything full of dust and glass. Cans of food were rolling down the road as “a little old lady picked her way diligently over the rubble and broken glass” and said to her, “Are you open, dear?”
In 1935, fifteen-year-old Bert Hollick signed on at Brighton Station for his first shift on a Pullman Train. Working on the midnight shift from Victoria to Brighton, he learnt to ladle soup from a tureen at seventy-five miles per hour (without redecorating the carriage ceiling) and serve a three-course lunch in a speedy fifty-eight minutes.
In The Crowd Roars, the Great Omani is about to jump from the West Pier into the sea, ablaze with petrol; trussed up in a straitjacket and with his hands manacled. Will he make it?
Giving a voice to the overlooked
QueenSpark Books is important because it preserves histories that might otherwise be lost. It gives voice to those who are often unheard or overlooked in more traditional publishing and values people’s lived experience over their literary credentials. But QueenSpark isn’t just about books, it reaches out into schools, community centres and digital platforms, constantly reinventing ways to capture and communicate these important histories. The Discover Brighton history walks being one example.
What started as a ‘quack’ wellness fad for the elite has somehow transformed into a 50-year project dedicated to community voice and memory. History isn’t just about kings, queens, battles and grand monuments. It is found in the daily lives, struggles, and triumphs of ordinary people. The past is best told not from the top down, but from the bottom up.
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