They come along with their loud music and granny bikes holding all-night parties and bringing down house prices. But that's students for you, isn't it?

Well, not in Brighton and Hove.

The city is today named among the few university locations in Britain where the student population integrates fully with local people.

Undergraduates have, in the past, been identified as the scourge of towns and cities in studies blaming "studentification" for a string of social ills.

They include destroying respectable neighbourhoods by driving out families, triggering rat infestations, causing vandalism and forcing the closure of corner shops in favour of cheap off-licences.

But a study published by the University of Brighton found that undergraduates in Brighton and Hove had shunned the idea of "student ghettos", instead living all over the city as an integral part of the community.

Darren Smith and Louise Holt, of the university's school of the environment, found that residential concentrations of students in Brighton and Hove were limited.

Dr Smith said: "The city provides a valuable case study for other university towns in that, unlike cities such as Nottingham, Cardiff, Leeds and Birmingham, there is no evidence of a student ghetto."

The lecturers - who looked at students' postcodes - found most did not feel the need to live in a specific student area of Brighton and Hove to acquire a student identity.

Dr Smith said: "They feel at home alongside other social groups and do not restrict their shopping or social lives to student-oriented services and facilities."

The term studentification is meant to suggest parallels with gentrification, the social phenomenon of the Eighties when the middle classes took over and renovated run-down areas of big cities.

This resulted in the widespread sprucing up of the districts concerned but it also meant spiralling house prices and displacement of the original working-class inhabitants.

Studentification also results in some of these effects, Dr Smith and Dr Holt found.

Student numbers in Brighton and Hove have soared in the past 20 years but undergraduates have not followed the trends of almost every other big city in the country by living in "enclaves".

In Headingley, Leeds, students make up 52 per cent of the population, compared with an average of eight per cent in other parts of the city. Many vice-chancellors are now following Brighton University's example in developing better accommodation strategies.

In Brighton, students participate in the head leasing scheme, in which the university guarantees the landlord 12 months' rent and acts like a management agent.

This has resulted in students being relatively dispersed throughout the city.

The study also included a survey of what 350 Brighton and Hove students thought about their accommodation. Most said they were happy.

Kirsten Gillingham, the university's director of finance, said: "We're pleased to see such positive outcomes from this research and, in particular, its finding that students are integrating well into their local communities in Brighton and Hove.

"It will be important to build on the positive achievements of our accommodation services in meeting the needs and preferences of our students."

Brighton and Hove's native population is thought to be more tolerant of students than in many other cities.

Garry Nicholas, 32, of Lucerne Road, Brighton, said: "Students are all right really. I suppose some of them can be annoying, like anyone else, but they don't congregate in the big groups you see in other places.

"They tend to blend in a lot better than the exchange students you get all through the summer."

Rebecca Davies, 18, of Ditchling Road, Brighton, said: "I'm starting a gap year but then I'm hoping to go to Nottingham University and I think you do get problems there between the students and the locals.

"But Brighton is quite a progressive, cosmopolitan place so students fit in better in the pubs and clubs.

"Most of the time you wouldn't even know who was a student and who wasn't."