PERHAPS it started more than two hundred years ago when the king built a giant Indo-Saracen party house in a seaside town and decorated it with ornamental dragons and palm trees.

Or maybe it really took off when Magnus Volk built a the "Daddy Long Legs" gauge railway running on stilts through the sea from Brighton to Rottingdean, an audacious dream soon foiled by the weather.

Whatever the alchemy of cause, effect, sea air, sunshine and salty water that made it so, the city's reputation for screwballs, kooks, off-beats and misfits is now pretty concrete.

"If you tipped England up, everything loose would roll down here," says the artist and writer Woodrod Phoenix, nodding affectionately to those who have made the city home – or get remade once they are here.

The Great Omani escapologist, eating flames in his local pub on his 90th birthday, England’s mother of modern witchcraft Doreen Valiente and white-gloved raver Disco Pete are just a sprinkling of the characters (two late, one living), to have animated the town.

The Argus:

“It is place that encourages people to express themselves,” says Brighton performer and artist Paschale Straiton.

“And because it is at the end of the train line and by the sea, there is something about the spirit of the place that is about being on the edge of things,” she added.

Brighton might have the biggest concentration of oddballs in Sussex (some might say being a regular Joe is the more eccentric to be here now), but it is far from alone.

From the artistic retreats in the South Downs to the out-and-out rebels at the Lewes bonfire parade, resistance has long been a trait in the county.

Eccentrics certainly know how to enjoy themselves (and research shows they might even be healthier for it) but the good news is they are also good for the rest of us who dare not draw attention, step outside the box.

“Commentators say embracing eccentricity in society is good for it,” says Ms Straiton. “People who are on the edge of things, tinkering with ideas and ways of living, help society to evolve.”

Or, to borrow from that famous eccentric Groucho Marx: “Blessed are the cracked, for they let in the light.”