The Keeper of the Village's Memory

There is a building on The Green in Rottingdean that has been, at various points in its history, a private house, a boys' school, vicarage, a library and a museum. The Grange is one of those English buildings that seems to accumulate meaning with each generation that passes through it. Today it houses Rottingdean Heritage — the village's museum, gallery and archive. But a building only holds so much on its own. What gives The Grange its memory is the people who keep it. And this week I met the Grange's Hon. Archivist.

I sat down for a coffee with Mike Laslett.

Mike Laslett, Hon. Archivist

It was immediately clear that Mike knew everyone. We sat at a small café in the village centre, and before the coffee had arrived I'd heard all about the server's attempts to quit smoking, how the postman who'd just walked by had once sat for a famous artist, and how the beautiful old tree above us used to be the centrepiece of the local primary school's playground, now long gone. History was coming back to life all around me; ghosts swimming into sharp focus. Ask Mike about a house on the high street and he will tell you who lived there, what they did, who they married, and what became of their children. He knows the village not as a set of dates but as a living web of people — the famous and the entirely ordinary, the still-here and the long-gone, all of them connected in his mind by threads he can follow without hesitation. Listening to him is like watching someone read a map that only they can see.

I asked how he came to the role. He'd rather fallen into it, he said, following a favour — then added, conspiratorially, that he couldn't stop now even if he wanted to. He enjoys it far too much.

At one point Mike produced a list of names in his own hand, each with a note beside it. It took me a beat to realise what it was: he had compiled it as preparation for our meeting — possible leads for LightKeep.

Mike came armed with a shortlist of leads for the project. The first pieces in the jigsaw.

What struck me most is that Mike doesn't keep his knowledge behind glass. He is woven into the community itself. He gives history talks to groups around Brighton, taking the village's past to people who want to understand it. He is active in the local church. And every couple of weeks he leads a group through the churchyard, telling the stories of the people beneath the stones — turning what could be a melancholy place into one of the liveliest history lessons you could hope to attend.

Then there is the archive itself. Behind the public rooms of The Grange sit photographs and documents — wartime and well beyond — the accumulated record of a community over generations. Mike knows it intimately. To stand in front of it with him is to understand how much of a place's life is held in such collections, and how easily it could be lost without someone to tend it.

So this was an important conversation. Mike arrived having already given the project real thought, and there is a great deal still to discuss — about the archive, and the people whose stories should be kept. I'll write more as it takes shape. For now I'll only say that every project like this begins with a single conversation. This one began with Mike, and the thousand stories he carries are exactly the ones LightKeep exists to keep.