School was out and so was the sun. Brighton was heaving. The train station was a crush. The day-trippers slowly advancing upon the marina knew what they had come for. The sand, the sea, the boutiques in The Lanes, the rainbow flags, and craft beer. This is tourist-board Brighton, a city that my colleague and resident Rafael Behr calls “a coastal exclave of pseudo-London urbanity”. Like all such myths, it hides a multitude of inconvenient facts.

This story involves a punch-up at a vicarage, an anarchist dad, and working-class people getting organised

Moulsecoomb and Bevendean, although just 10 minutes’ drive from the pier, are two big housing estates blessed with neither glamour nor cash. “You have the groovy and then you’ve got the real,” says Helen Jones, a Bevendean resident. “Up here, you have people fighting for every penny.”

The neighbourhood officially ranks among the most deprived 3% in England. Its residents suffer from some of the worst health and education statistics in the country. Jones, a community worker, can tell you the consequences: families that have never worked; households deep in debt; adults who can’t read.

Pleasures enjoyed by holidaying families are seen as off limits. Many local people just don’t go to the beach. As Jones says: “The thing about not having money is that you simply can’t take part.”

It was a baking hot day when I met her, with the South Downs beckoning. “Look around: it’s beautiful. But how many shops can you see? How many cafes? How many resources?” She reels off the tribulations of a decade of austerity: a park nearly shut for good, a GP surgery closed, the adult education centre folded, big cuts planned for the local school. “Live by the seafront and you’re in tourist town – you get everything chucked at you. Out here, you’re not seen – so you don’t matter.”

It’s a story I have heard too many times in too many places across Britain: people too poor for the market to take an interest in, and too invisible for the state to take notice. Except in this case the community had an answer to its officially sanctioned neglect – and Jones and I were sitting in it.

We were in a beer garden. More precisely, the last beer garden in the last pub in the entire neighbourhood – a pub that was shut down in 2010 and almost died. Instead, Jones and her neighbours brought it back to life, in a story that involves a punch-up at a vicarage, an anarchist dad, and working-class people getting so well organised that the politicians were forced to listen to them.

Bevv regular Jonathan Woolven: ‘Before it was just that dreadful pub up the road. Now I’m proud of the Bevy.’ Photograph: Linda Nylind/Guardian

This pub used to be the Bevendean Hotel, until one too many fights forced the police to close it in the spring of 2010. It lay empty for years, leaving around 18,000 people without a local. Brewers sniffed around but couldn’t make the sums work. The area’s reputation for roughness did not help: a local vicar once received a postcard addressed to “The Reverend John Wall, The Vicarage, The Dodgy Bit of Brighton, England”. That this was all the address the sorting office needed tells you something about the suburb’s standing.

In the end, local people raised the funds and opened the Bevy in 2014. With banners reading “More Than A Pub”, it certainly doesn’t look like tourist Brighton’s gastropubs and cocktail palaces. Jones calls it “a back-to-front community centre”.

When I visited on Monday, it was serving lunch for users of the Bridge advice centre, which had just closed down. That’s what the Bevy does: act as a hub in a community that has almost no other public space to meet, to rally against school cuts or housing problems. Chauffered along in the pub’s navy-blue minivan, the lunchers sat in the community cafe while several older regulars perched on the bar stools. This being the summer holidays, a young girl zoomed about on a hoverboard, making a staff member mutter: “I’m going to close my eyes and not think about health and safety.”

The Bevy is neither cool nor especially pretty. Instead, it’s different and important. It’s not the hard-drinking, sticky-floored drinking den of old; nor is it a money magnet. Pints are well over a quid cheaper than they charge in the centre of Brighton and – almost unheard of in this industry – all bar staff over 18 are on the proper living wage of £8.75 an hour. Working almost anywhere else, the Bevy’s 20-year-old apprentice would be close to £100 a week worse off.

The difference lies in the fact that this pub is a co-operative owned by its members, with profits invested back into the community. Britain now has more than 100 of these “community pubs”, and their stories can be strikingly similar. In some chocolate box of a village, the boozer is about to shut, so residents hold the mother of all whiprounds and a public asset is saved. When prime minister, David Cameron himself propped up the bar of a community pub, while his government rightly chipped in to a £3.6m fund to open more.

Among such heartwarmers, the Bevy sticks right out. Those other stories are largely rural; this one is suburban. Those are about preserving the heart of a village; the Bevy is about creating an institution to bring together a fragmented community. And it remains Britain’s only co-op pub on a housing estate. Others could rely on local people pulling £500 out of their pockets; for the Bevy, they hesitated to ask residents for more than a fiver.

Most of all, those other pubs didn’t have Helen Jones, or self-described anarchist Warren Carter. Even friends describe the pair as “stubborn bastards” – and they needed to be. When the authorities got wind of their plan, a police officer emailed to say that the pub would never be allowed to re-open. The council gave them bad advice, while local politicians didn’t have a clue. “All the Labour people now saying, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve always supported the Bevy’: they did fuck all, apart from bringing down some doughnuts once,” says Carter. “None of the parties did anything.”

Born to be stubborn: Helen Jones and Warren Carter. Photograph: Linda Nylind/Guardian

The team would go to every half-relevant meeting. One would plant a question about the Bevy, giving Carter his excuse to make a sales pitch, while a third would eye up the hall for rich Brightonians to badger into handing over money. Respectability was lent by the parish vicar, the aforementioned Father John, who saw the social isolation all around and could see how the Bevy might help. He believed: “At the heart of every community, you need a good church and a good pub.”

When they launched their community share issue, he let them use the church. Even the £200,000 the Bevy committee raised in shares and grant money had to be supplemented with more begging and borrowing. The pub had no cellar, no toilets and almost no ceiling. Jones points out the beer garden tarmac that fell off the back of a lorry, the bar that was donated by a landlord who had closed his London pub, the logo that was designed for free by a local artist. Even now, if a toilet door is broken, someone coming in for a pint will fix it.

All those imperfections make it more, not less of a community pub. At the opening, Father John blessed the bar with holy water and pulled the first pint. When he left for a posting in Uckfield, the pub held a leaving do. After midnight, they decamped to the vicarage – until there was a punch-up at 4am. The fracas made it into his final Moulsecoomb sermon: “At last, I feel as if I have assimilated.”

As much as its beer, a pub can be measured by the quality of its banter, and so I went for a stroll with Iain Chambers, the general manager, and Bevy regular Jonathan Woolven. I’ll let them introduce each other. Chambers is a “dour fellow; he never looks happy”, according to Woolven. Whereas Chambers urges you to listen to Woolven’s “amazing” voice – “like if a grizzly bear could talk”. Chambers hails from Preston; Woolven was born in Paddington, London. Chambers went from running a renowned cafe, as recommended by the Guardian, to organising community businesses; Woolven went into the army in 1950 and served for almost a quarter of a century. Even though Chambers manages the pub and Woolven supposedly just drinks there, both men feel they have a big stake in it.

Outside the Bevy sits an old garage, now used by the local pigeon-fanciers’ club. They bring their birds along on a Friday, says Chambers, then “a lorry takes them off to Holland or wherever and they’re back by Saturday”. Woolven adds: “I give the pigeons a shopping list for Carrefour in Calais and they bring it back in time for the weekend.” A roar of laughter.

Behind it lies Woolven’s showpiece: former wasteland that he and half a dozen others have turned into a blooming garden. University rugby clubs terraced the lot and put down steps. “I did ask for a chairlift,” the 86-year-old joked. Another roar.

He is practically bounding around, showing off the old council bins, now filled with black earth and sprouting spring onions, rosemary and thyme, courgettes – all soon to end up on a Bevy chopping board. Higher up were raspberries, gooseberries, blackcurrants. In the corner were carrots. That giant plant straight out of Jack and the Beanstalk was corn on the cob. All over the other side of the pub were his flower baskets and planters. “It’s a good clean way of spending the day, isn’t it?”

‘A community pub rather than just a pub with a brewer in charge.’ Photograph: Linda Nylind/Guardian

From the peak, we squint into the sun towards the sheltered housing where Woolven lives, “just a five-minute stagger away”. What did he do before the Bevy was reborn? “I went thirsty.” More laughter. The old pub had been so rowdy that he avoided it. “It was a no-go area,” says Woolven. “We had to win back a lot of the neighbours.” We. I tried to imagine anyone feeling such ownership over their local tavern.

“Being a community pub rather than just a pub with a brewer in charge – it’s brought the whole community together,” Woolven declares.

Chambers’s team deliberately overlaps events that pull in very different crowds, so that Woolven and his green-fingered senior citizens sometimes hold a fruit and veg sale-cum-competition at the pub on a Saturday morning – just as the Parkrun joggers meet for breakfast. It breaks down boundaries. Woolven mentioned the builders, already congregating at the bar in their paint-encrusted overalls. “They’re now much gentler. They can see the pub’s changed – and it ain’t changing back.” Rather than stay inside staring at the walls, “I might pop out for a pint of an evening. I feel comfortable about coming here,” says Woolven.

Chambers couldn’t resist: “It’s been known for Jonathan still to be here at 10 o’clock of a Friday evening.”

But for Woolven and other local people, their world has opened just a little wider. “Before, it was just that dreadful pub up the road,” he remembers. “Now I’m proud of the Bevy.”

Running a community pub that serves the best interests of its working-class community and makes money is difficult . The activism that got it open isn’t necessarily suited to keeping it running. “Our management committee was bus drivers and midwives. We didn’t know anything about running a business,” says Warren Carter.

The pub used to have an elaborate food menu, before they realised that the regulars’ budgets only really stretched to pints. And more than three years after opening, the Bevy is only now making a profit – and relying upon the goodwill of people like Chambers to work long weeks for no extra pay. Yet from his new vicarage, Father John describes it as “a minor miracle” – and he’s the expert on such matters.

Woolven tells me what the Bevy means to him: “We’re a lot happier. Being old but being accepted so much by such a range of ages … I can come in here and I can mix with everyone here. You’ve got kids running around, people off building sites …”

“Students,” adds Chambers.

“Businessmen.”

“I’ve stopped being a boring old shit,“ continues Woolven. “I can talk about all sorts of things that I don’t know about. It all adds to your happiness.”

His simple words hang in the humid air. After the mandatory beat, Chambers pipes up: “He says that, but if the Harvey’s ever edges off top quality, he’ll be off into town.”

“Listen,” says Woolven, “I’ve been drinking Harvey’s bitter for 60 years and if it’s not right, it’s just not right.”

They are off again.

• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist