A TIMELESS TREASURE
Take the 51 bus to this quirky West Sussex seaside town and discover...
BRITAIN AT ITS BEST: SELSEY
UNTIL 1935, Selsey was connected to Chichester by a railway of sorts: the Selsey Tramway, one of a dozen ramshackle ‘light railways’ built on the cheap by maverick engineer Colonel Holman Fred Stephens.
There were no signals or gated road crossings, hence fairly regular collisions with cars. I arrived on the 51 bus from Chichester and got talking to some locals about Stephens. When I suggested he was eccentric, one woman said: ‘There’s a lot of that in Selsey.’
She mentioned astronomer Sir Patrick Moore, who cut up cars on his sit-up-and-beg bicycle around the West Sussex town. He lived in Selsey for its dark night skies, at the tip of the Manhood Peninsula.
But Selsey is more celebrated for its plenitude of sunshine than its darkness. ‘That’s the reason to come here,’ said the woman as she put on her sunglasses, ‘especially in winter’. The bus deposited me where the High Street ends and the sea begins.
To the west — and clearly visible on the great vista before me — lay the Isle of Wight, to the east, Bognor Regis. Selsey has two beaches; the west is more sandy, but the shingly East Beach holds more for the short-term visitor.
Walking that way, I came to the RNIB ‘flagship’ lifeboat station. An explainer indicated a beacon a mile out at sea, the Mixon Pole, which warns shipping of what lies beneath the waves: the stony iterations of Selsey between Roman times and the 1950s, when the present sea defences were built.
I returned to the High street’s parade of picturesque houses. Eighteenth- century Ivy Lodge was home to Colin Pullinger, the inventor of the humane mousetrap. Another house, with 17th- century origins, was previously a Barclays Bank, but is now an Italian restaurant, La Banca, where I ate an excellent dinner of Selsey crab linguine.
The chef, Robin, an exiled Londoner, described Selsey as ‘Everything London is not. I’ll take a Sunday morning walk on the sea wall and 30 people say hello.’
I slept well in the Coast Yard guest house, and my full English breakfast was wonderful. Then I headed east again, passing bungalows built around Victorian railway carriages, and a plaque commemorating Eric Coates who, inspired by the view across to Bognor, composed a slow waltz called By The Sleepy Lagoon (now the Desert Island Discs theme tune).
I came to Pagham Harbour, which is nothing of the kind. Today it’s a ghostly salt marsh haunted by birdwatchers. I collared one, who began rhapsodising about redshanks, curlews and terns, until distracted by a bird overhead. ‘What on earth is that?’ he said, raising his binoculars and forgetting about me.
Just inland from Pagham lies the faded settlement of Church Norton, where stands 13th-century St Wilfrid’s Chapel, which is merely the chancel of what once was Selsey Church. The rest of the building was dismantled in the 1860s and transferred to today’s Selsey High Street, where it forms St Peter’s. (Church Law says you can’t move a chancel.)
After my walk, I took the 51 back to Chichester, thoroughly invigorated by Selsey’s strangeness and sunshine.
TRAVEL FACTS
ROOMS at the Coast Yard start at £100 for a double, 01243 606899, thecoastyard.co.uk