Brighton

Rising like a fantastical mirage beside the Sussex sea, the Royal Pavilion is the Prince Regent’s (later George IV) pleasure palace turned architectural fever dream. Between 1815 and 1823, John Nash transformed a modest Marine Pavilion into an exotic confection of onion domes, minarets, and tented roofs inspired by Mughal India — an exterior that bewilders and delights in equal measure. Step through the portentous entrance hall into a Chinese interior of staggering opulence: the Banqueting Room’s 30-foot chandelier suspended from a silvered dragon, the Music Room’s lotus-leaf walls and gilded serpents, and the Great Kitchen’s pioneering steam-powered spits. It is a building that refuses categorisation, a Regency romp through ‘Hindoo’ and ‘Chinese’ fantasy that reflects both the Prince’s extravagant taste and the era’s fascination with the Orient.

England’s newest national park unfurls across Hampshire and Sussex like a green velvet cloak stitched with chalk cliffs and ancient droveways. The South Downs are a landscape of gentle grandeur: rolling hills that catch the light in ways that have inspired artists from Turner to Ravilious, dotted with bronze-age barrows and flower-rich grasslands that hum with rare butterflies in summer. The Seven Sisters cliffs — sheer white chalk faces marching into the Channel — provide the park’s dramatic crescendo, while inland, historic market towns like Lewes and Petworth anchor the scenery in deep time. This is walking country at its most quintessentially English, where the South Downs Way traces a hundred-mile ridge path above patchwork fields and secret valleys.

Jutting 1,722 feet (525 m) into the English Channel, Brighton Palace Pier is the quintessential Victorian pleasure pier, its lattice-iron girders painted a cheerful turquoise and white. Since 1899 it has weathered storms, fires, and the vagaries of seaside fashion, yet still delivers the simple joys of candy floss, arcade bleeps, and a helter-skelter that spirals above the deck. At sunset, thousands of LED lights trace the structure’s curves, turning the pier into a glowing ribbon against the darkening sea—a scene that has framed countless British holidays.