A cathedral, Roman walls, and five hundred and sixty listed buildings later, Chichester does cathedral-city without performing it. The street plan is the one the Romans drew. The crime rate runs nearly twice the wider local-authority average. Most of what people actually live in went up after the war, not before. Not Winchester. Not Bognor Regis. Somewhere expensive enough to look smug and honest enough to admit, on the data, that it isn't quite either.
Most homes here are houses, with about a third being flats and a small fraction bungalows. The bulk of the stock went up between the early fifties and the early eighties, which is the part the postcards don't show you next to the market cross. Roughly six in ten homes manage an energy rating of C or better, which is decent for stock of this age. About one in nine sits at E or worse, which is what happens when a town has a thousand years of buildings nobody is allowed to insulate properly.
Typical sales over the last year came in at about £375,000 across roughly four hundred transactions. A flat goes for about £237,000, a terraced house about £367,000, a semi about £420,000, and a detached house about £625,000. Council tax sits most often in band C, with about a fifth of homes in bands A or B, which sounds reassuring until you remember those are the lower bands of an expensive area, not a cheap one.
Rent across the wider Chichester area runs at about £1,320 a month as a typical private rent. That is the local-authority figure, not the city's own, so treat it as the floor the cathedral postcodes sit on rather than the local quote.
Crime runs at about 151 incidents per thousand residents over the past twelve months, which is roughly eighty-seven per cent above the wider local-authority average. Chichester is dragging its own district numbers up on its own. A cathedral, a night-time economy, a rail interchange, a hospital catchment and a few thousand visitors a week will do that to a town's statistics, and the residents who only read the headline tend to discover that their actual street is quieter than the district average suggests.
Chichester Rail Station sits in the city itself, with Fishbourne Rail Station, Bosham Rail Station and Bognor Regis Rail Station filling out the line. About one in sixty residents commutes by train, which tells you what the rail offer is for. It is not a London commuter destination; it is a connect-to-the-coast option used occasionally rather than daily. About three in ten work from home, four in ten drive, one in six walks, and one in twenty cycles. The centre takes about nine minutes by car and nineteen on foot. Broadband is the strongest piece of infrastructure here: nearly every postcode has super-fast service, four in five have gigabit, and effectively nobody is stuck below the universal-service standard.
About one in twelve postcodes sits in the highest flood-zone tier, with almost one in seven inside the climate-adjusted version planners now use. About four per cent of postcodes have a recorded historic flood event, which is enough to read the report before exchanging and not enough to define the place. Green space, by contrast, is what Chichester actually trades on. The typical postcode is roughly 160 metres from a park or open space, with around thirty within a kilometre, and water under 300 metres away on average.
Five hundred and sixty listed buildings, sixteen of them Grade I, thirty-five Grade II starred, and the rest Grade II. Four conservation areas covering Chichester itself, Graylingwell, Fishbourne and Dell Quay. Fifteen scheduled monuments. Anyone buying here with plans to extend, re-glaze, re-roof or change the windows should factor in the conservation officer as a permanent line on the renovation budget. The compensation is that the city looks like Chichester. The cost is that the house you bought looks like Chichester whether you wanted it to or not.
About fifty-five per cent of households own their home. The median age is forty-two, which is older than the cities Chichester gets compared to and younger than most of West Sussex. Typical household income runs at about £58,000, enough to pay for a Chichester postcode without straining and not enough to make the parking ticket feel cheap. About four in ten households rent, which is more than the rural West Sussex average and less than the south-coast cities.
This page also covers Aldingbourne, Boxgrove, Eartham, East Dean, Eastergate, Fishbourne, Funtington, Nutbourne and Oving, which are the surrounding villages and hamlets sharing the postcode and the catchment without sharing the price tag of a townhouse near the cathedral.
It suits the retired professional who has done the city career and wants the cathedral, the Sunday drive to the harbour, the Goodwood weekend, and a high street that still has independents on it. It suits the London-leaver who wanted Winchester and quietly worked out they couldn't quite afford Winchester. It suits the couple trading down from somewhere bigger but not louder.
It does not suit anyone who wanted a sleepy market town and is going to be surprised by the crime line in this report. It does not suit the buyer with plans for a Grade II cottage that involve doing what they want to it. If Bognor Regis is what you settle for, Chichester is what you stretch for. Winchester is what you couldn't quite reach.
The historic-residents row matches the building stock for variety. William Juxon was born here in 1582, attended The Prebendal School before Oxford, became chaplain to Charles I, and was the last English cleric to hold both church and secular high office before ending up Archbishop of Canterbury after the Restoration. William Cawley, William Huskisson and Christopher Chataway show up on the city's name list, alongside the Victorian painters Richard Buckner, Heywood Hardy, James Hayllar and William Shayer. The Normans moved the cathedral from Selsey in 1075 after a council in London decided sees should be in cities, and Chichester has been organised around the institution ever since. Cathedral, court, paint and politics, in roughly that order.
The verdict, on the data, is that Chichester is an average place to live overall. That is what you get when the surroundings score the best mark possible and the safety scores the worst. The countryside, the green space, the harbour, the South Downs, and the view from almost any window are the five-out-of-five. The crime numbers and the conservation officer's tax on your own home are the one-out-of-five. Cheaper than Winchester, calmer than Salisbury, more wired-up than either.