Meet Brighton - possibly the first baby to be named after Britain's best city.

Weighing in at 5lb, the tiny bundle of joy - who escaped the middle name Hove - was born to parents who live 500 miles across Europe in Germany.

But unlike David and Victoria Beckham's son Brooklyn, five-week-old Brighton is not named after the city of his conception.

In fact, his parents Carsten and Jeannette Lichtl have yet to visit the resort.

Brighton looks set to become an increasingly popular name in the land of lederhosen and leberwurst thanks to a character in a popular daytime soap The Nanny.

Carsten and Jeannette Lichtl, from Gross-Gerau, a small town on the Rhine near Frankfurt, said they hoped to take little Brighton on a pilgrimage to Sussex when he is old enough.

Carsten, 33, said: "It took a long time for my wife to get pregnant, but last year in December our doctor told her she was going to have a baby.

He said: "We were so very happy we started to think about first names straight away.

"We had no problem if the baby was a girl but finding a name for a boy was very difficult because we wanted a name that not many other children are called.

"On German television we sometimes watch a daily soap called The Nanny. One of the characters in this is called Brighton.

"We thought it sounded good and no one else we knew had a child with the name.

"Brighton is famous across Europe as a bathing resort and because of the political conferences.

"We often hear about it on the news, which means that even though it's an unusual name everyone will at least know how to pronounce it."