The South Coast: from Dover to St Ives

Kent: the White Cliffs and the way to France

The coast begins where England comes closest to France. Above Dover the White Cliffs rise straight from the sea, and from the harbour below three operators, P&O Ferries, DFDS and Irish Ferries, sail to Calais, with DFDS also crossing to Dunkirk. A few miles west, at Folkestone, LeShuttle carries cars and their passengers through the Channel Tunnel to Calais in a planned 35 minutes.

Folkestone itself has found a second life around its old harbour: the Harbour Arm, reopened to the public in 2014, is now a pier of independent food and drink stalls with a champagne bar at the end by the lighthouse. Next door, Hythe is the starting point of the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway, which runs across Romney Marsh to New Romney and Dungeness.

Inland, near Canterbury, THE PIG at Bridge Place has made a hotel of a 17th-century manor, built around 1638 in the hotel’s own history, with a kitchen garden whose crops shape its menus.

Sussex: Rye to Worthing, with Brighton at the heart

Rye, on its hill near the Kent border, is a town of cobbled lanes and timbered houses. Hastings keeps its Old Town and its fishing beach below the cliffs; Bexhill-on-Sea has the De La Warr Pavilion, the Modernist seaside pavilion of 1935; and at Eastbourne the South Downs meet the sea at Beachy Head and roll west as the chalk cliffs of the Seven Sisters towards Seaford.

Brighton & Hove, about an hour from London by train, is the capital of the coast: the Royal Pavilion, the Lanes and the North Laine, two piers and a long Regency seafront. West of the city, Shoreham-by-Sea has the oldest licensed airport in the UK, in its own words, and Worthing a pier with Art Deco pavilions. Chichester, a little inland, has its cathedral, its Festival Theatre and the creeks of Chichester Harbour.

On our Brighton guide you will find all of these, with train times from Brighton, in East of Brighton and West of Brighton.

East of Brighton: Rottingdean to Rye →   West of Brighton: Shoreham to the New Forest →   The De La Warr Pavilion →   Eastbourne & the Seven Sisters →   The ULTIMATE Brighton City Guide →

Hampshire and the Solent: the Navy, the liners and the forest

From Portsdown Hill, the chalk ridge above Portsmouth, the whole Solent opens up below you: the harbour and its warships, Gosport across the water, the sail of the Spinnaker Tower and the Isle of Wight on the horizon. The hill is lined with Victorian forts; one of them, Fort Nelson, holds the national collection of artillery.

Down in the Historic Dockyard lie Henry VIII’s Mary Rose, raised from the Solent in 1982, Nelson’s HMS Victory and the Victorian ironclad HMS Warrior. A waterbus crosses to the Submarine Museum in Gosport, where you can board HMS Alliance, and the Gosport Ferry makes the trip across the harbour in about four minutes.

Southampton is the port of the great liners. Titanic sailed from here on 10 April 1912, and more than three-quarters of her crew gave a Southampton address; SeaCity Museum tells their story. Today five cruise terminals serve the ships that sail from the city. To the west, the New Forest, a National Park since 2005, runs down to Lymington, where Wightlink’s ferry crosses to Yarmouth in about 40 minutes.

Both Portsmouth and Southampton were heavily bombed in the Second World War, and both remember it: Portsmouth’s Guildhall was gutted by fire on the night of 10–11 January 1941, and Southampton’s Holy Rood Church, burnt out in November 1940, is now a memorial to the Merchant Navy.

Portsdown Hill →   Portsmouth and the Royal Navy →   Southampton, the liners and Titanic →   Portsmouth and Southampton in the Blitz →   Cruises from Southampton: the ULTIMATE Cruises Guide →

The Isle of Wight

The island has been a county of its own since 1974, and getting there is half the fun: Hovertravel’s hovercraft crosses from Southsea to Ryde in under 10 minutes, Wightlink’s FastCat runs from Portsmouth Harbour to Ryde Pier Head in about 22 minutes, and Red Funnel’s Red Jet reaches West Cowes from Southampton in about 28.

At East Cowes stands Osborne, the seaside home of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, with its own beach. At the western tip, the chalk stacks of the Needles end in a red-and-white lighthouse, with a Victorian fort on the cliffs above. And every summer since 1826 the Solent off Cowes has filled with sails for Cowes Week, which celebrated its bicentenary in 2026.

Crossing to the Isle of Wight →   Osborne →   The Needles and the Old Battery →   Cowes Week →

Dorset and the Jurassic Coast

Christchurch, where the great Priory has stood for over 900 years, opens the Dorset coast; then come the long sandy beaches of Bournemouth and the harbour at Poole, one of the largest natural harbours in the world, in the words of Poole Harbour Commissioners, and a protected haven for wildlife.

At Studland the Jurassic Coast begins. Its official name is the Dorset and East Devon Coast, inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2001: about 95 miles of cliffs between Studland and Exmouth whose rocks record some 185 million years of the Earth’s history, from the Triassic to the Cretaceous. Lulworth Cove and the arch of Durdle Door are its most famous sights, Weymouth its Georgian resort, and Lyme Regis, near the Devon border, its town of fossils.

Christchurch Priory →   The Jurassic Coast (official site) →

Devon and Cornwall: to the end of the line

Exmouth marks the western end of the Jurassic Coast. Around Tor Bay, Torquay, Paignton and Brixham form the English Riviera, a UNESCO Global Geopark since 2015, with the prehistoric caves of Kents Cavern. Up the river at Dartmouth, Britannia Royal Naval College, opened in 1905, looks down over the town and the moored boats of the Dart.

Plymouth is where the Mayflower sailed for America on 16 September 1620; a granite block on the Barbican marks the approximate site of the Mayflower Steps. Beyond the Tamar, Cornwall begins: Falmouth and its deep harbour, Penzance, the end of the line for the Night Riviera sleeper from London Paddington, and finally St Ives, its harbour, beaches and galleries lit by the clear light that has drawn painters for generations.

Great rail journeys: the ULTIMATE Rail Journeys Guide →

The coast road, east to west

For much of the way the A259 follows the shore from Kent through Sussex, past Rye, Hastings and Brighton. Beyond Chichester the A27 and the M27 carry you past Portsmouth and Southampton; the A35 crosses the New Forest and Dorset; and in the far west the A30 runs on through Cornwall towards Penzance.

Three stops make the drive: Saltdean Lido, the 1930s crescent by the sea just east of Brighton; Portsdown Hill, for the view over Portsmouth and the Solent; and a detour south to Dartmouth, on the river Dart. Allow several days rather than one: the coast rewards slow travel, and the trains connect most of these towns if you would rather leave the car behind.

Saltdean Lido: the back story →   Portsdown Hill →

How to use our guides along the coast

The ULTIMATE Brighton City Guide covers the coast from Rye to the New Forest in depth, with train times from Brighton, and the ULTIMATE London City Guide is about an hour away by train. For the ships that sail from Southampton, see the ULTIMATE Cruises Guide.

Our advice: base yourself in Brighton for Sussex, in Portsmouth or Southampton for the Solent and the Isle of Wight, and take the train west for Dorset, Devon and Cornwall.

The ULTIMATE Brighton City Guide →   The ULTIMATE London City Guide →   The ULTIMATE Cruises Guide →

Questions and answers