Risk List

Brighton and Hove Reform Synagogue, Sussex

Status: Grade II listed (April 2025)

Derek Sharp Associates and John Petts, 1967-68
Threat: Demolition

** As the Risk List went to press, the building has been saved with a Grade II listing designation, some 18  months after C20 submitted an application. It becomes only the second post-war synagogue on the National Heritage List for England. **

Set back from the seafront in leafy backstreets adjacent to the County Cricket Ground, this unassuming 1960s modernist synagogue contains an extraordinary artwork that’s been termed the ‘The Guernica of Brighton’. Designed by renowned post-war artist John Petts, the Holocaust Memorial Windows at Brighton and Hove Reform Synagogue depict the burning bush flanked by Torah stories on one side and Jewish festivals on the other, in a blazing triptych of reds and blues, set over 1,800 individual pieces of coloured glass. These elements are bound together by barbed wire and the chain link broken by a sapling, representing the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Sir Simon Schama has called them a ‘synagogue masterpiece’ and Alison Smith, Chief Curator at the Wallace Collection, ‘one of the greatest works of 20th century religious art’, with The Rest is History podcaster Tom Holland adding ‘How can this synagogue not have been listed? Its windows are a work of post-war religious art on a level with that of Coventry Cathedral.’ Petts was commissioned to work on the Brighton and Hove project after receiving international acclaim for his stained-glass window at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. This commemorates those killed in the terrorist bombing by the Ku Klux Klan in 1963, and went on to become one of the key icons of the American Civil Rights Movement.

The synagogue was currently threatened by plans from a local developer that would see the historic building demolished to make way for a block of flats, with a smaller replacement synagogue apologetically placed elsewhere on the site. With the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz being commemorated in 2025, the destruction of this luminescent memorial would be simply unthinkable.

How to help

Write to the Minister of State for DCMS, Chris Bryant MP, to voice your support for listing: chris.bryant.mp@parliament.uk

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