Princess Anne to visit Brighton and Hove

Princess Anne is coming to Brighton and Hove a week on Monday (5 March).

The Princess Royal is due to visit the Brighton and Hove Citizens Advice Bureau and the Sussex Eye Hospital.

The royal visit coincides with the start of a fundraising campaign by the CAB which is staffed almost entirely by volunteers.

The bureau is a charity needing a six-figure sum every year just to keep going. It expects its caseload to rise as a growing number of people struggle with welfare reforms and rising unemployment.

Edlira Alku, director of the Brighton and Hove CAB, will show Princess Anne the bureau’s offices at Hove Town Hall in Tisbury Road.

The royal visitor is patron of the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux. She will meet caseworkers and volunteers and one of the many people to have been helped by the local bureau.

Among those she meets will be staff specialising in money advice and those working in the HIV Project which has been providing advice to HIV clients for 16 years.

Brighton and Hove CAB chairman Matthew Simkin said: “We are very fortunate to have Princess Anne as our national patron and to be able to welcome her in person to our bureau.

“Her support for the work of the CAB service is greatly appreciated and we are delighted she is able to join us to thank our team of volunteers and paid staff for all their hard work and dedication, and to celebrate the launch of a fundraising campaign to support the provision of free independent advice to the people of Brighton and Hove.”

The local CAB has been helping people in the area since 1939 and in 2010-11 staff and volunteers advised nearly 7,000 clients on 20,000 problems.

The princess will also visit the Sussex Eye Hospital in Eastern Road, Brighton, to mark its 180th anniversary.

The hospital is run by Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, which also runs the Royal Sussex County Hospital and the Royal Alexandra Children’s Hospital.

The Sussex and Brighton Infirmary for Diseases of the Eye opened on the corner of Middle Street and Boyce’s Street in Brighton in 1832 and within a few years needed larger premises.

It moved to Queen’s Road in 1846 and changed its name to the Sussex Eye Hospital in 1881. Just over 50 years later it moved to its current site in Kemp Town.