4 December 2025

Trafalgar’s Eastbourne Theatres New Era campaign really took off (quite literally! 🛫✈️) and we’re delighted to be shortlisted for Campaign of the Year for The Stage Awards 2026! Winners will be announced in January.

Since we welcomed Eastbourne Theatres to the Trafalgar family in April, our teams have worked collaboratively to highlight this exciting new chapter and position the three iconic venues – the Congress Theatre, Devonshire Park Theatre, and the Winter Garden as cultural destinations not just in Sussex, but on the national stage.

We embraced the theme of A New Era at Eastbourne Theatres, with a clear ambition to attract even more high-profile productions and to establish Eastbourne as the starting point for national tours.

A key part of this repositioning was to openly celebrate Eastbourne’s virtues as a vibrant town – a thriving creative hub – and a magnet for a growing number of significant events and cultural initiatives.

To amplify Eastbourne’s evolving identity on a national level, we developed a major campaign with the Eastbourne team and the Airbourne Eastbourne International Airshow as a centrepiece. The flagship event draws over 750,000 visitors across four days and was the perfect opportunity to showcase Eastbourne Theatres to a broader audience.

Trafalgar Theatres became a gold sponsor of the Airshow – ensuring excellent coverage and promotion of the venues and the revitalised programme throughout the event. As part of the sponsorship, we worked directly with one of the performing pilots, Rich Goodwin, even branding his aircraft with promotion for Fiddler on the Roof.

Commenting on the campaign, Eastbourne Council’s head of events Peter Martin, said: “Trafalgar Theatres delivered a masterclass in creative impact with their Eastbourne Airshow campaign… that turned heads on the ground and in the sky… the result was an extraordinary surge in engagement and brand visibility, proving how powerful a campaign can be when innovation and imagination take flight.”