London to Brighton, and the parking problem at the far end

The first ten miles of this journey are the worst of it. The A23 runs through Brixton, Streatham and Norbury on an ordinary urban road with traffic lights, bus lanes and a great deal of local traffic, and it is slow at almost any hour between seven and ten.

Once you reach the M23 at Hooley the remaining forty miles take forty minutes. That imbalance is the reason the time range on this short route is as wide as it is, and the reason an early departure is worth so much.

Brighton has fewer parking spaces than it needs and a seafront with restrictions along most of its length. On a summer Saturday the central car parks are full by mid-morning and the residential streets behind them are permit-only.

This is the most practical argument for a car and driver on any route in the south-east, and it is entirely unglamorous. You are set down at the door and collected from the door, and the hour that a self-driven visit loses to the search simply does not happen.

Gatwick sits at junction 9 of the M23, roughly half way between London and Brighton, which makes this road one of the busiest airport corridors in the country at every hour including three in the morning.

It also means a Brighton journey and a Gatwick journey are the same road. Passengers flying out of Gatwick from Sussex, or arriving and going on to the coast, use the second half of this route and nothing else.

A good share of these journeys are evening ones: dinner on the front, a show at the Dome, a night in the Lanes. The train back to London runs late but not indefinitely, and the last service is earlier than most people planning an evening assume.

A car removes the clock from the evening. It also removes the walk from a restaurant to the station in February, which along an exposed seafront is a longer ten minutes than it sounds.

Everything that makes Sussex worth visiting beyond the city is off the railway. Devil’s Dyke, Ditchling Beacon, Alfriston, Firle, Charleston and the coast at Birling Gap are all reached by lanes from small towns.

For a day that takes in the Downs as well as Brighton, the car is not a preference. It is the only way to construct the day at all, which is why our Sussex tour page runs the same geography as an itinerary rather than a transfer.