The Number 7 to Love

On a cold bright morning on Madeira Drive, a sign-painter's ladder slips, and a stranger with a Scottish accent catches it. That small moment starts a chain that runs through twenty love stories in one seaside city.

A widow takes up winter sea-swimming with a man in red trunks. Two nurses on opposite shifts leave each other notes on the fridge. A man returns to Brighton every October for a reason he won't say.

A busker by the Pavilion meets the woman who walks past him every day. There are first loves and last ones, love that is ghosted and love that is found again, and a marriage that has lasted twenty-five years.

The lives in this city cross in cafés, on the number 7 bus and on the pebbles of the beach. By the last page, one photographer's year of pictures shows how every one of these stories was connected all along.