The Edward Reeves Archive lightbox exhibition returns in 2025 with STORIES SEEN THROUGH A GLASS PLATE: WORKING LEWES. Including formal portraits taken in the Reeves’ Studio as well as Lewes street scenes, it reveals the world in which the subjects worked and the people they may have encountered. Contemporary newspaper reports and guidebooks have provided personal back stories of lives lived in this busy market town.

Illustrated with stunning photographs, showing the amazing quality of the images taken from the original glass plates, the lightboxes are placed in locations relevant to the subjects:

Living just across the road from photographer Edward Reeves, Arthur Kemp was described in the studio records as ‘Bird Stuffer’: he pursued the popular Victorian art of taxidermy. Further down the street you will find Miss Cockrum, fancy draper and milliner, later listed as one of the first female jurors in Lewes. More unusually there is a grave digger and a cricket bat maker – also both women.

At the 1930’s Odeon Cinema the usherettes, ‘chocolate girls’ and lab coated projectionists would have seen workers from the Phoenix Iron works, the nearby cement works, and jockeys from the racing stables on a night out. By the 1960’s the town was so busy that a controversial Council plan to relieve traffic congestion led to a war of words in the national press.