David Stott and Clive James ‘nurture an atmosphere of repose and tranquillity, along with informality and laughter and the friendliest of warm welcomes’ at their restaurant-with-rooms beneath the South Downs.

Visitors to Lee and Katie Williams’s town-centre restaurant-with-rooms this year raved about ‘everything: the food, the accommodation, the location – all was perfect'.

‘We enjoyed the waterside location,’ write trusted readers this year, drawn back for a third stay at Sam and Janet Bakose’s 350-year-old inn overlooking Pagham Harbour with its reserve of mudflats and salt marsh.

A colonial-style veranda wraps round this ‘charming’ 19th-century restaurant-with-rooms in a picturesque village.

A few paces from the modernist De La Warr pavilion and seafront lies a small, well-designed hotel and restaurant in a Victorian building in the heart of this ancient town.