Chichester named as one of the UK's smelliest places

Chichester District Council received a whopping 1,091 smell complaints from residents between 2015 and 2019.

The study, carried out by packaging solutions company Lifestyle Packaging, found that the city had 904 complaints per 100,000 people - with a population of about 120,000. As a result it placed fifth in the overall list, coming in behind first-place Bassetlaw near Sheffield, which had 1,604 complaints per 100,000 people.

Also featured in the top five were the City of London (1,344) North West Leicestershire (977) and Westminster (936). However, while the most common complaints for the top four areas were all based around either commercial, industrial or generally unpleasant odours, Chichester residents had an alternative reason to raise an issue. The most common smell to spark a complaint in the city was that of bonfires.

A spokesman for Lifestyle Packaging said: “Outside of smells that could not be categorised, the most common categories were domestic, agricultural, and bonfire smells. This suggests that Brits are more likely to complain about their neighbours’ homes and gardens than restaurants, sewage, or industrial smells.

“The council areas that mostly complain about agricultural smells are clustered around the Welsh border and East Midlands, though farming smells are a common complaint in rural Devon and Kent. The neighbouring cluster of council areas of Tunbridge Wells, Wealden, and Rother all mostly complain about animal smells such as dog faeces, as do large parts of the Welsh Valleys.”

But the study did not only unveil the vague nature of smell complaints in certain areas of Sussex.

In some cases, the responses Lifestyle Packaging received were delightfully specific.

Crawley residents previously complained about the “intense smell from a coffee bean factory” while someone living in Horsham encountered a similar problem, telling the council they faced an unpleasant “coffee roasting smell”.

Other examples from outside of Sussex included the “strong smell of cabbage” in West Dunbartonshire and “poop floating in the garden from next door’s blockage” in Tunbridge Wells.