Places to explore near Brighton

George IV’s Indian-style seaside palace.

0.1 km N

England's longest inland waymarked trail, tracing Charles II's escape route from defeat at Worcester in 1651 to the ship waiting at Shoreham.

0.1 km SW · spans 14 counties

Chalk grassland local nature reserve on Brighton's eastern edge, home to a rare Neolithic causewayed camp and wide views over the city.

1.9 km E

A chalk ridge rolling from Winchester to the sea cliffs at Beachy Head.

2.4 km E

An unusual hexagonal smock mill rising from tiered barns in Hove, painted by Constable in the 1820s. Run as a small museum, open on selected Sundays.

4.3 km NW

A black-tarred smock mill on the cliff-top down above Rottingdean, long the village emblem.

5.5 km E

A restored walled garden in Stanmer Park, run as a horticultural training ground with ornamental borders, glasshouses and a kitchen plot. Free entry.

5.7 km NE

A Grade II* Art Deco lido of 1938 shaped like an ocean liner, saved by a community campaign and reopened in 2017.

7 km E

Dramatic dry valley on the Downs escarpment.

8.6 km NW

A pair of restored windmills on the Downs above Clayton; Jill, a white post mill, still grinds flour on open days.

9.3 km N

A weatherboarded cottage by the River Ouse, home to Virginia and Leonard Woolf from 1919

11 km E

Arts-and-crafts village of Tudor houses under Ditchling Beacon, once home to Eric Gill and the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic.

11.1 km N · East Sussex

Village museum tracing Eric Gill and the Guild of craftsmen, housed in a former school by the pond.

11.2 km N

County town of steep twittens and flint walls, a Norman castle above, Cluniac priory ruins below and Tom Paine's old house.

12 km NE · East Sussex

A scrap of Wealden common that never got enclosed or built on, now a country park of heath, grass and ponds

14 km N

Ruins of a Georgian tide-mill village beside the shingle, reached along the coast path east of Newhaven.

15.2 km E

A market town of timber-framed houses and a long high street, set below the Downs at the foot of the Adur gap.

15.2 km NW · West Sussex

Gage estate village under Firle Beacon, with a John Piper window in the church and Bloomsbury painters in the churchyard

15.9 km E · East Sussex

The Bloomsbury Group's Sussex home below Firle Beacon, its rooms and walled garden painted by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

17.9 km E

Chalk cliffs and dry valleys sheared off by the sea, linked by the switchback path between Seven Sisters and Beachy Head

18.1 km SE

Beachy Head's chalk face, the highest in Britain, with a lighthouse at its foot and downland walking either side

18.4 km E

White smock mill on Chailey Common, restored as a landmark and holding a small rural-life collection on summer days.

18.7 km NE

Wooded ridges, sunken lanes and deep stream valleys across the old iron country of the south-east

18.8 km N

Short steam line at restored Isfield station, with a signal box and model railway.

19 km NE

A restored open-trestle post mill of around 1750 on the Downs edge above Worthing, milling on selected open days.

19.2 km W

A prancing white horse cut in a single night in 1924, on Hindover Hill above the Cuckmere valley.

20 km E

Where the Cuckmere winds down to a shingle beach, with the Seven Sisters cliffs rising beyond

20.2 km E

Cuckmere-valley village with a green called the Tye, medieval timbered inns and a thatched Clergy House below the bare South Downs.

20.6 km E · East Sussex

A medieval hall house in Alfriston that was the very first building the National Trust ever bought

20.8 km E

Small countryside zoo near Alfriston with a narrow-gauge train, a long-running family day out.

21.1 km E

Standard-gauge steam railway from Sheffield Park to East Grinstead, with a large collection of preserved locomotives.

21.5 km NE

A long village street of timber-framed houses climbs from a pond to the church, often called the finest in Sussex.

21.6 km N · West Sussex

Capability Brown lakes ablaze in autumn.

22.4 km NE

Thirteen garden rooms filled with plant-hunters' finds around an Elizabethan mansion.

22.5 km N

A 70-metre outline figure holding a staff in each hand, cut into Windover Hill; one of only two human chalk figures in Britain.

22.9 km E

Chef's-table dining at a Victorian country-house hotel on the South Downs' northern edge.

23.1 km N

Downland village at the foot of the Long Man hill figure, with a ruined Benedictine priory and an ancient churchyard yew.

23.3 km E · East Sussex

Elegant 37-arch railway viaduct of 1841 striding across the Ouse valley near Balcombe, celebrated for the tunnel effect through its piers.

23.7 km N

Where Sir Edmund Loder bred his famous Loderi rhododendrons, with seven lakes and wild wallabies.

23.7 km N

The white chalk waves of the Seven Sisters, falling to the Channel.

23.9 km E

Hilaire Belloc's white smock mill, King's Mill, standing beside his former home at Shipley; a landmark on the Low Weald.

24.5 km NW

One path around a whole country — beach, clifftop and seawall the entire way round England's coast, opening stretch by stretch.

0.3 km S · spans 24 counties

The beach that helped invent the seaside holiday, and still a proper swim today

0.7 km W

Hillfort, the possible remains of a Romano-Celtic temple and a group of three bowl barrows at Hollingbury

3.8 km N

Coastal village east of Brighton, with a windmill, high street and links to Kipling.

5.1 km E · East Sussex

Forty-seven hectares of unimproved chalk grassland on the Downs between Lewes and Brighton, thick with wildflowers in summer

5.7 km NE

Village pub in historic Downs-edge Rottingdean.

5.8 km E

A hundred miles of chalk ridge from Winchester to the sea at Eastbourne, walkable in a week.

6.6 km NE · West Sussex, East Sussex & Hampshire

A Site of Special Scientific Interest in West Sussex.

8.2 km NW