Chichester Park Hotel

The Chichester Park Hotel is a country-style hotel on Madgwick Lane, Westhampnett, just north of the A27 Chichester bypass. West Sussex County Council and Chichester District Council confirmed in autumn 2023 that the property was being considered as contingency accommodation for between 150 and 300 asylum seekers^[1]Press.

The decision to close the hotel to paying guests displaced a long list of pre-booked commercial events, including dozens of weddings. Commercial closures of this kind have become a recurring local-press theme around asylum hotels in the South East, where wedding-venue and conference trade is part of the year-round business model.

Chichester Park is one of the relatively small number of named asylum hotels openly reported as housing families with women and children rather than single adult men. A solidarity event held by local residents in 2025 was titled around “asylum-seeking women and children”, and Sussex Express coverage of the September 2025 rallies repeatedly described the hotel population in those terms^[3]Press. Coverage of this site should therefore be read with the demographic in mind: the population is not interchangeable with the single-male profile of, for example, Bell Hotel Epping or The New Bridge in Newcastle.

Sussex Express reporting describes a sustained pattern of weekend rallies outside the hotel beginning in autumn 2023, when residents and locals first organised against the proposed asylum use. Counter- rallies were attended by Stand Up to Racism Portsmouth, members of local trade unions, and the Bognor Regis and Littlehampton Labour Party^[1]Press.

The pattern continued and escalated through 2025. In September of that year, two significant rival rallies were held in Chichester on the same day, one protesting against the use of the hotel as asylum accommodation and the other welcoming refugee families^[3]Press. Photo coverage of related August and September 2025 protests records weekend gatherings outside the site that were largely peaceful but tightly stewarded by Sussex Police^[2]Press.

At the £170 per-person per-night Migration Observatory benchmark^[4], a site reported as housing 158 residents implies headline taxpayer exposure of about £26,860 per night and roughly £9.8 million per year. The May 2025 NAO contract review put the average per-hotel run-rate across the wider portfolio at about £5.84 million per year^[5]NAO, so the Chichester Park figure sits materially above the national average if local press headcounts are taken at face value.