‘The enthusiastic welcome immediately made us feel at home again.’

‘We much enjoyed our stay,’ writes a reader this year, of this Edwardian country house hotel in ‘grounds of a sporty nature’.

Once a month a string quartet serenades afternoon tea at this Victorian seafront hotel nicknamed ‘The White Palace’.

On the edge of the Old Town, designer Nigel Copley has created a beautiful B&B in this Grade II listed Georgian-cum-Victorian rectory.

On the outskirts of a picturesque Sussex village stands this ‘handsome, extensively enlarged’ old farmhouse, run by ‘friendly, attentive staff’.

The ‘beautiful gardens’, ‘wonderful atmosphere’ and ‘pleasant rooms’ were highlighted by guests this year, who praised this ‘delightful’ B&B.

With Chichester in one direction, the pristine sands of West Wittering in the other, guests at Lloyd van Rooyen and Gavin Wilson’s smart, contemporary hotel have the best of both worlds.

Outwardly a Georgian coaching inn on the cobbled main street of the medieval town, Alex Clarke’s ‘absolutely lovely’ hotel is 16th-century in its bones – the timbers from an Elizabethan galley.

Priory Park, where WG Grace once wore whites, is a cricket ball throw away from this Georgian hotel inside the city’s Roman walls.

Modern flourishes blend with history and tradition at this 'wonderfully atmospheric' old builfing.

The shipbuilders, boozy sailors and notorious Tenterden smuggling gang that once formed the clientele of this 18th-century watering hole, have been replaced by peace-seeking travellers bent on finding a decent meal.

Connoisseurs and amateurs of every vintage find modern accommodation in Christine and Colin Munday’s impressively reconstructed traditional Sussex barn, part of a complex including a restaurant and a wine shop.

Steeped with Scandinavian cool, Mariella and William Fleming’s renovated village pub-with-rooms is a stylishly relaxed spot near the Chichester canal towpath.