Well Brighton is the home to a few famous web designers… Andy Budd, Jeremy Keith and Richard Rutter are all in the area at ClearLeft!
Not sure on the meet-up front to be honest, This conference is my first official “meet” with other professionals so it’s a bit of a reach out for me too… But there’s upward of something like 5,000 web professionals within the Brighton & Hove region so there must be a few of those kind of things going on 
Gosh, really? I guess that makes sense though, the place does has that certain ‘vibe’.
I’ll have to check out those conferences.
On a similar subject, do you happened to know of any meet-ups or groups around the city for getting a bit of interaction, doesn’t have to be networking?
It’s a great place for web design, we have several conferences down here (I’m attending dConstruct in September) and there’s more web professionals in the region than anywhere else in the UK according to statistics released a while back (even more than London which is surprising).