Adventures around Brightonwith PlusBus
With its seaside Regency terraces, its many museums and galleries, and its famous piers and pavilion, Brighton is packed with great places to visit. A PlusBus ticket, valid for the whole day on unlimited buses, can take you all over the city and beyond. You can reach hidden gardens, rural parks and urban icons, ruined castles and the rolling South Downs.
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1. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery
Buy your bargain PlusBus ticket for Brighton and Hove at the same time as your train ticket and you can travel all day all over the city. Five minutes from the station by bus, right next to the Royal Pavilion, the city’s museum is definitely worth a visit. It’s packed with cool exhibitions and quirky local finds. The stylish halls are home to everything from Ancient Egyptian mummy cases to contemporary LGBTQ+ fashion.
- How to get to Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: North Street bus stop is a couple of minutes’ walk away. Frequent bus 7 runs there from stop A outside the railway station. See Good Journey’s directions.
- The sea is nearby, just a short walk through the maze of shops known as the Lanes.
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2. The One Garden
An eighteenth-century manor house with a walled garden in rural Stanmer Park, to the northeast of the city, has become one of Brighton’s newest, most interesting oases. There are different areas of the walled One Garden, which has a cafe and a market. Nearby, there is a leafy local collective of organic and eco-therapy businesses, all among the woods and cattle-grazed slopes of Stanmer Park. Don’t miss the weekend Permaculture stall behind the church, selling fresh juice from fruit that would otherwise have been wasted. Once a month on a Sunday there’s a public tour of the Earthship, an ingenious off-grid house.
- How to get to the One Garden The one garden is a 20-min stroll through Stanmer Park from the gates of the park. Bus 25 runs every few minutes from Old Steine (Stop F), near the museum and pavilion, and stops at Stanmer Park gates. See Good Journey’s directions.
- The One Kitchen serves a seasonal all-day menu, lunch (including soups, stews and specials) and sweet or savoury cream teas.
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3. Bramber, the South Downs and the Greenwich Meridian Trail
The PlusBus ticket can take you a long way out of the city: eastwards along the coast to Newhaven and Seaford or westwards to Shoreham-by-Sea. Steyning and Bramber are far out to the north-west in the lovely South Downs.
- Bus 2 from Old Steine or central Churchill Square runs out to Bramber Castle every hour. It takes an hour to get there. But, on the way, the bus passes all kinds of interesting sights: first the elegant Regency squares and gardens of Brighton and Hove; then it runs through Shoreham-by-Sea and alongside the River Adur.
- Reaching Bramber, the bus stops outside St Mary’s House and Gardens. With a painted room and octagonal dining room, this half-timbered house is a hidden gem. The gardens include woods and water, flowers and topiary and even a little museum of rural life.
- A few minutes further along the road, behind the ancient church of St Nicholas, the ruins of Bramber Castle stand on the edge of the South Downs. You can follow the Monarchs Way up into the hills and connect with the South Downs Way. Chanctonbury Ring hill fort is about four miles along the South Downs Way from Bramber.
- Taking regular bus 12X along the coast from Brighton in the other direction, your PlusBus ticket can take you to Peacehaven, start of the Greenwich Meridian Trail. This 273-mile route runs roughly parallel with the line of the Greenwich Meridian from the South Coast all the way up to the Humber. This first section runs along the coast past a series of pubs to Telscombe Cliffs viewpoint (near Saltdean Lido) and then up onto the hill. Heading down into Saltdean, you can then get frequent bus 27 from Coombe Vale Top back to Brighton railway station.
- If you’re not ready to head home yet, hop off at Old Steine and have a stroll along the beach. In autumn, winter and early spring, look out for murmurations of starlings above the pier, especially around sunset when they swirl and settle, looking for a place to roost.
- For more car-free adventures around Brighton, see our Good Journey guide.
