Mostly water, sky and short hedges. About a quarter of the area sits inside Chichester Harbour Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The nearest patch of open water is about 200 metres from the average front door. The average postcode has six green spaces within a kilometre. The surroundings are doing the heavy lifting on what makes the place worth being in.
Open green space is closer here than it is in most coastal places. The typical doorstep sits about 350 metres from its nearest accessible green space, and six more lie within a kilometre of it. Blue space is closer still. The nearest water is about 200 metres from the average front door, and there are about forty bluespace features inside the same kilometre, which is the kind of number a peninsula with a tidal harbour delivers without trying. The walk to the water is shorter than the walk to most other things.
The Chichester Harbour Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty covers about a quarter of the area, pulling its boundary across the harbour-side end of the peninsula. The designation is the reason any new development takes years rather than months to land, and the reason the existing landscape has stayed legible rather than infilled. There are no Sites of Special Scientific Interest inside the area itself and no ancient woodland, which is consistent with a coastal peninsula reshaped by farming and grazing over the centuries rather than by a wooded inland landscape. Four conservation areas (Somerley, Earnley, West Wittering and West Itchenor) add further protection to specific village cores. One scheduled monument sits inside the area as well. The designations stack rather than substitute, which is what produces the sense that the surroundings have been preserved rather than allowed to drift.
Character is village-coastal rather than suburban-coastal. The settlement runs as two named villages, East Wittering and West Wittering, connected by road and surrounded by farmland that runs to the harbour edge on one side and the open sea on the other. The named landmarks are the kind that survive in places that resist heavy development. Cakeham Manor anchors the western end of the village. St Wilfred's Chapel sits at the southern coastal margin. About twenty pubs and eight restaurants are scattered across the wider area, and almost every food business on the published hygiene register sits at the top five-star rating. Around 180 holiday lets are recorded across the area, which is what a beach village with summer demand produces in its housing statistics, and the year-round residents have made peace with that as the price of the postcode.
Excellent. The harbour, the beach, the green space and the protection wrapped around them are most of the reason the prices and the safety figures look the way they do.