Chichester Roadworks This Week: West St, then Stockbridge Rd

West Street is dug up from Monday 5 October, two weeks earlier than published. West Sussex County Council has redrawn its city centre programme for the second time in a week. The work now runs to Tuesday 22 December, nine days later than before, and it has picked up two streets that were not on the list: Little London and Chapel Street.

From Monday there is work in four streets at once. Tower Street, East Street and North Street are already dug up. West Street joins them on 5 October.

The A27 bypass is not booked to close this week. National Highways’ closure report for 29 September to 5 October has no Chichester entry, the third week running.

Then the road into town goes. Stockbridge Road shuts from Saturday 10 October to 27 November.

Everything below was checked on Wednesday 30 September 2026.

The Chichester roadworks and travel changes to know:

• Now. Tower Street, East Street and North Street are being dug up for the city centre mobile network project.
• To Friday 2 October. Late-night Southern trains are cut back between Brighton and Worthing, and the 22:52 Portsmouth Harbour to Brighton ends at Littlehampton.
• Thursday 1 October. West Sussex raises its on-street permit prices. The day before, it has still not published what they will be.
• Monday 5 October. West Street, west end, joins the street works, to 1 November.
• This week. No closure is booked on the A27 Chichester bypass.
• Saturday 10 October. Stockbridge Road closes to 27 November for gas main replacement. The Grosvenor Road bus stop is suspended.
• Sunday 18 October. Buses replace trains between Littlehampton and Barnham, Bognor Regis and Chichester.
• Monday 19 to Friday 23 October. Late-night trains to Chichester end at Barnham or Littlehampton, with buses on.
• Thursday 19 November. South Street and the east end of West Street start.
• Monday 30 November. Birdham Road goes under multi-way temporary traffic lights for about four weeks.
• Tuesday 22 December. The city centre street works are due to finish, in South Street.

Stockbridge Road closes for seven weeks from 10 October

This is the closure to plan around, and it is now ten days away. We re-read the notice on 30 September. Nothing in it has changed.

Chichester City Council has posted SGN’s notice for Stockbridge Road, published on 6 September and last edited on 9 September. SGN is replacing the gas main, and says it has “no option than to complete this work under a road closure”.

Phase one runs from Saturday 10 October for approximately seven weeks. The closure sits on Stockbridge Road, the A286, from the junction with the A27 roundabout to Grosvenor Road. What SGN’s own leaflet says will happen:

• No through vehicle access between those two junctions.
• Resident and shop vehicle access inside the closure is maintained by a diversion at the Grosvenor Road end. There is no access from the A27 end.
• Pedestrian and cycle access through the closure is maintained.
• Bus routes, including school buses, will be affected. SGN tells passengers to check with the operator.
• Bin collection days stay the same unless the council says otherwise.
• Emergency vehicles get through from the A27 end, with gatekeepers on site 24 hours.

Phase two starts on Monday 30 November and runs about four weeks. That one is on Birdham Road, between the junction with The Meadows and the junction with Strides Court, under multi-way temporary traffic lights rather than a closure.

The county council has now published its own page, with an end date and the diversion. Its SGN Stockbridge Road page shows the works record as 10 October to 27 November, 24 hours a day. The signed diversion is the A27 onto the B2145, then right onto the B2201 at the Sidlesham triangle, under temporary lights. The Grosvenor Road bus stop is suspended for the whole closure, with a temporary stop nearby. The detail, including the council’s funding for extra bus capacity, is in our Stockbridge Road closure story.

SGN’s reason, in its own words, is that the section being replaced is “a very old metal gas pipe that has had a number of emergency gas leaks”. It says the closure will be lifted early if phase one finishes inside the seven weeks.

It lands on top of the city centre works. From 10 October, West Street, North Street and Tower Street are all still dug up, and East Street until the 11th. Anyone coming into the city from Donnington, Birdham, the Witterings or Selsey loses their road into town in the same week.

The A27 bypass: nothing booked for a third week

National Highways publishes the programme on its South East maintenance schemes page as “A27 Chichester bypass roundabout resurfacing, 1 September to 8 October 2026”. It is resurfacing four roundabouts: Fishbourne, Stockbridge, Whyke and Bognor. Every closure has run 8pm to 6am.

The closure report has now gone three weeks without booking any of it. The live road closure report was last updated at 15:30 on 29 September and covers 29 September to 5 October. We read every A27 entry on all seven days. None is between Fishbourne and Portfield. The reports for the two weeks before were empty for Chichester too.

For the four weeks before that, the report booked the whole bypass, both directions, Fishbourne roundabout to Portfield roundabout, on every Monday to Thursday night.

The scheme page has still not changed. We re-read it on 30 September. It still lists:

• Monday 21 September to Thursday 8 October, excluding Fridays: A27 closed from Warblington to Stockbridge roundabout.

So one National Highways source says the bypass is being closed most nights until 8 October, and the other has booked nothing for three weeks. We cannot tell you which is right, and we are not going to guess. On the four weeks before, when the two disagreed, the closure report was the one that matched what happened on the road.

Two things are worth holding in mind before you read an empty report as an open road. The report lists closures only: an order that imposes a speed limit, a lane restriction or a lay-by closure without shutting the carriageway never appears in it. And closures can be added at short notice, which National Highways says itself. Check the report on the evening you travel.

Elsewhere on the A27 and A3 this week

The nearest booked closures are on the road to Portsmouth and on the A3 north of Midhurst:

• Wednesday 30 September, 10pm to 6am Thursday: A27 westbound from Harts Farm Way to Eastern Road, Portsmouth, closed.
• Wednesday 30 September, from 9pm: A3 northbound entry and exit slip roads at Liss closed, and from 10.30pm those at Liphook.
• Thursday 1 October, 9pm to 6am Friday: A3 southbound entry and exit slip roads at Griggs Green, near Liphook, closed.
• Monday 5 October, 9pm to 6am Tuesday: A3 northbound closed between the Longmoor exit and entry slip roads.

Weeknights are three times busier than the weekend

Counting every closure listed on the whole National Highways network, day by day, shows why an evening drive is a different proposition from a weekend one:

Close to 300 on a Tuesday night and 83 on a Sunday. If you have a choice about when to make a long evening drive on the trunk roads, the weekend is the quieter bet.

The city centre street works, phase by phase

The digging that will actually reach most people is in the main shopping streets. West Sussex County Council and Chichester District Council started installing mobile network infrastructure in the city centre on Monday 21 September. The programme published on the county council’s Chichester OpenDigital project page now runs to 22 December.

The programme has moved again. When we read the page on 27 September, it had West Street’s west end starting on 19 October and South Street finishing on 13 December. On 30 September it gave the dates in the table above. What changed:

• West Street, west end, starts two weeks earlier, on Monday 5 October.
• West Street, east end, shrinks from four weeks to four days, 19 to 22 November.
• South Street starts three days later and finishes nine days later, on 22 December.
• Two short phases are new: East Street with Little London, 2 to 4 December, and Chapel Street, 7 to 8 December.

The page carries no date or note saying when it was changed. It is the second redraw in a week: on 23 September East Street was due to start on 28 September and North Street on 5 October.

The phases overlap. From Monday 5 October there is work in four streets at once: Tower Street, East Street, North Street and West Street. What the councils have not published is which sections of each street are affected on which day, or what it means for deliveries and market trading. The page says only that timetables and milestone updates will be published there as they become available.

The full story, including what is being installed and what it is a precursor to, is on our city centre street works page.

Market Avenue and Basin Road: the gas main works

SGN’s contractors I&G Contractors Limited have been replacing the gas main on sections of Market Avenue and Basin Road since June. Chichester City Council published the programme as starting Monday 15 June for 13 weeks, which took it to around 14 September.

The phases, as published:

• Phase 1, from 15 June for two weeks: lane closure on Market Avenue, plus an overnight closure of the South Street junction, 8pm to 6am.
• Phase 2, from about 29 June for three weeks: eastbound closure of Market Avenue, with a signed diversion.
• Phase 3, from 13 July: Basin Road closed from its junction with Canal Wharf to the railway crossing.
• Phase 4: lane closures on the one-way section of Basin Road, from the railway crossing to Market Avenue, once phase 3 finishes.

Basin Road was given as eight weeks in total. Pedestrian access is maintained throughout, and access to properties inside a closure is maintained where it is safe. The council warned of a “major impact to bus routes”. The full notice is on the city council’s website.

The programme ran out more than a fortnight ago and nobody has said whether it was met. We re-read that notice on 30 September. It still carries no completion update, as it has not since it was posted on 16 June. The council’s news page has published nothing about Market Avenue since. So we cannot tell you the work has finished, and we are not going to imply it has.

We also could not list which bus stops are currently being missed, on Market Avenue or anywhere else. The Stagecoach service update page the council points readers to still loads as an empty shell for us, with no Chichester entries in it at all. That will matter more in October, when SGN itself says school buses are affected by the Stockbridge Road closure.

The standing lay-by orders on the A27

Two separate orders let National Highways close lay-bys on the bypass, which is why you will find them coned off when nothing appears to be happening.

• The Chichester bypass notice. Traffic notice NH/SE/2026/A27/63, published 6 August 2026, gives notice of 24-hour phased closure of the lay-bys on both carriageways between the Bognor Road roundabout (A259) and the Warblington interchange (A259). The Chichester bypass section was expected to take about three weeks from on or after Tuesday 1 September 2026, with the remaining sites between Fishbourne and Warblington taking about three weeks from on or after Monday 2 November 2026. The order came into force on 30 August 2026 and can run for up to eighteen months.
• The Area 4 order. A separate order covering the A27 between the Warblington interchange and Lancing came into force on 1 July 2026 and runs to 24 December 2027. It authorises closure of any lay-by on the route whenever maintenance needs it, with no diversion.

We still could not read the Public Notice Portal on 23 September. Its search results are drawn by the browser and returned nothing to us, so we cannot say whether a newer traffic notice has been published since, including the statutory order for the Stockbridge Road closure.

Trains

Three sets of Southern works touch the Chichester line in the next four weeks. We read each notice on National Rail on 30 September, and checked its full list of planned works for anything new up to 25 October. Nothing else touches the line between Barnham and Havant in that time.

• To Friday 2 October, late nights. Engineering work between Brighton and Worthing. From about 23:30, London Victoria to Worthing trains end at Brighton, with buses between Brighton or Hove and Worthing. The 22:52 Portsmouth Harbour to Brighton ends at Littlehampton, with a bus on to Brighton at 23:52. National Rail notice.
• Sunday 18 October, all day. All lines closed between Littlehampton and Barnham. Buses replace trains between Littlehampton and Barnham, Bognor Regis and Chichester. Trains still run between Chichester and Portsmouth Harbour, but no Southern trains run between Havant and Southampton Central; tickets are accepted on South Western Railway between Havant or Fratton and Southampton Central. National Rail notice.
• Monday 19 to Friday 23 October, late nights and early mornings. Work in the Chichester area. The 22:35 London Victoria to Chichester ends at Barnham and the 23:18 London Bridge to Chichester ends at Littlehampton, with buses on to Chichester. On the Tuesday to Friday mornings the 04:55 Chichester to Brighton starts from Barnham, with a connecting bus leaving Chichester earlier. National Rail notice.

National Rail’s forward list also has Littlehampton line work on 14 November and a Barnham notice from 7 December, which we will add when they come closer. Southern’s own planned engineering work page still loads as a “loading service updates” shell for us, so check National Rail before you travel.

Parking in Chichester

Chichester District Council runs the city’s car parks. All are open 24 hours a day and all take MiPermit as well as payment at the machine. Charges apply Monday to Saturday 8am to 8pm, including bank and public holidays, and Sunday 10am to 5pm. The long-stay car parks at Avenue de Chartres, Basin Road and Cattle Market charge to 6pm rather than 8pm.

The day before, the 1 October permit increase still has no published price. The council’s car parks page carries a notice that West Sussex County Council will increase on-street permit prices on 1 October 2026. That is on-street residents’ and visitors’ permits, not the district council car parks.

We followed the link again on 30 September, the sixth visit running. The county’s permit page is still stamped 28 October 2025, and its charges PDF, which the server still reports as last modified on 2 October 2025, is still headed “West Sussex On-Street Parking Charges 2025-2026 (Effective 1st October 2025)”. So the rates you are being told will rise are still these ones:

• Full day primary resident permit, Chichester: £63.00 a year, or £34.00 for six months. A low emission vehicle pays £48.00 and £26.00.
• A second permit at the same address costs double: £126.00 a year, or £95.00 low emission.
• Chichester Zone E is charged separately and much higher: £209 a year for a first resident permit, £157 low emission. A second Zone E permit is £260, or £195 low emission.
• Part-day permits in Chichester cost more than in any other West Sussex town: £49.00 a year against £35.00 in Billingshurst, Horsham and Worthing.
• Visitor permits: a book of 10 costs £6.00. A daily 8-hour visitor permit is £2.40, a weekly one £14.40, and a weekly 12-hour Chichester S permit £25.20.
• Non-resident permits: £380.00 a year, or £285.00 low emission.

Nothing on either council’s site says how much any of that goes up by, so we are not going to guess. If you are due to renew, today is the last day before the increase, so it is worth asking the county whether renewing now holds the current rate.

The signpost the council gives you does not lead anywhere useful either. Its car parks page tells readers to “visit the West Sussex County Council Traffic Regulation Order pages” for the increases. The link behind those words goes to the county’s permit charges section, which is the page still showing 2025-2026 rates. We also checked the county’s Chichester live TRO consultations page on 23 September. It lists no live consultations at all for the district, and is stamped 7 September 2026.

The car park tariffs below were last re-checked against the council’s own page on 20 September 2026 and are unchanged.

The gap between the tariffs is the single most useful thing to know about parking here. Four hours costs £10.00 in a central short-stay car park and £4.60 in a long stay. The car parks on the central short-stay tariff are Baffins Lane, Little London, Market Avenue and St John’s, all close to the Cross. A five-minute walk out to a long-stay bay halves the bill.

Three city car parks are worth knowing by name:

• Northgate (PO19 1BL), 907 spaces, the largest in the city, long stay, with 13 accessible bays and two electric vehicle bays.
• Cattle Market (PO19 1JW), 836 spaces, long stay, 10 accessible bays, height restriction 2.3 metres.
• East Pallant (PO19 1UF), 165 spaces, nine accessible bays and two electric vehicle bays. This is the nearest car park to the cathedral, which has no visitor parking of its own.

Florence Road (PO19 7PY), 20 spaces, is free at all times, maximum stay three hours, no return within three hours.

Market Road and the northern part of Orchard Street are season-ticket only Monday to Friday, and pay and display at weekends and on bank holidays. There is no park and ride in the district, so every drive into the city ends in a city-centre car park.

Parking out in the district

The council also runs the coastal and market-town car parks, and several have seasonal tariffs. The summer season rate at Bracklesham Lane and the other seasonal car parks runs 1 April to 31 October, so it has a month left.

• Bosham, Bosham Lane (PO18 8HT), 379 spaces. Charges 8am to 6pm every day. Two coach bays and a bus stop.
• Bracklesham Lane, Bracklesham Bay (PO20 8HP), 97 spaces. Seasonal charges all year, 8am to 6pm.
• Marine Drive, West Wittering (PO20 8HE), 65 bays plus about 150 on grass. Seasonal, 8am to 6pm. This is the council car park, not the beach car park run by the West Wittering Estate, which charges separately and more.
• Selsey East Beach (PO20 0SZ), roughly 181 spaces, height restriction 2.1 metres, seasonal charges all year.
• Midhurst Grange Road (GU29 9LT), 303 spaces, and Petworth Pound Street (GU28 0DX), 236 spaces. Both charge Monday to Saturday 8am to 6pm and Sunday 10am to 5pm.
• Crossfield, Fernhurst (GU27 3JL) and Sylvia Beaufoy, Petworth (GU28 0ET) are free at all times.

Why the A27 matters so much here

Chichester has one road that carries almost everything. The A27 bypass runs along the southern edge of the city, and every east-west journey through the district uses part of it. West to east, its junctions are the Fishbourne roundabout, the Stockbridge roundabout, the Whyke roundabout and the Bognor Road roundabout, then it continues past Westhampnett towards Boxgrove and Fontwell.

That single carriageway of dependency is why a closure at one roundabout reroutes the whole city rather than one street. It is also why the Stockbridge Road closure in October will be felt so widely. Stockbridge Road is the spoke that connects the Stockbridge roundabout to the city centre, and the peninsula villages south of the bypass have no other direct route in.

The long-term picture is that nothing large is funded. West Sussex County Council states plainly that the Chichester A27 scheme was cancelled in 2017, and that the Arundel, Worthing and Lancing schemes were cancelled in 2024. The county council is working with Transport for the South East to press the government to put A27 improvements back into the Road Investment Strategy, and in the meantime is pursuing small-scale improvements alongside new development. The capacity of the A27 was also one of the constraints the council put to the Planning Inspectors when it argued for a lower housing target, which is covered on the planning news page.

Local schemes in progress

A285 Chichester to Tangmere active travel corridor. West Sussex County Council approved this for its capital programme in May 2026. It will run from Chichester city centre out to Tangmere via St Pancras, Westhampnett Road, Church Road, Footpath 553 and Shopwhyke Lakes, in two phases. The plan includes a two-way cycle track on the north side of St Pancras with the road reduced to one traffic lane, a two-way cycle track on the south side of Westhampnett Road that removes around ten on-street parking spaces, bus priority at the Westhampnett Road and St James Road lights, and raised crossings on the side roads. The council is developing initial designs and expects to finish that stage by May 2027, with a design review in summer 2027. There is no construction date.

Chichester public realm improvements. This is the big one behind the street works now under way, and it has a date at last. West Sussex County Council’s scheme FAQs say the project is in detailed design, that a delivery partner will be sought over spring and summer 2026, and that construction is expected to start in February 2027. It will resurface North Street and East Street in York stone, extend the pedestrian zone to St Peters in the north and Little London and Baffins Lane to the east, and add trees, planting, seating and bins. The council puts the cost at £10.5 million, of which West Sussex County Council is contributing more than £7 million, with the rest from the Community Infrastructure Levy, the Lane Rental Surplus Fund, the city and district councils and the sale of reclaimed stone.

Getting out without the car

Chichester station has 202 parking spaces and a direct half-hourly train to London Victoria in 1 hour 36 minutes, with Gatwick Airport an hour away on the same service. Fares, season ticket prices and the full timetable are on the trains to London page.

Where to check before you set off

• National Highways road closure report for the next seven days on the A27, A3 and M27, night by night. This is the one to check before an evening drive, and on the evidence of this scheme it is more up to date than the scheme page. It lists closures only, not restrictions.
• National Highways South East maintenance schemes for the full phase dates and, where they exist, the signed diversions.
• Chichester City Council news for city-centre utility closures. This is where both the Market Avenue and the Stockbridge Road gas works were published, and it beat every other source to the October closure.
• Public Notice Portal for the statutory traffic orders covering the district, which give the exact extent of a closure and the diversion.
• West Sussex County Council roadworks and projects for local road schemes and the live roadworks map on one.network.
• Chichester OpenDigital project page for the city centre street works phases. This is the only place the street-by-street dates are published.
• Chichester District Council car parks for tariffs, spaces and MiPermit location codes.

More Chichester local information: house prices, trains to London, planning news, bin collection days and things to do in Chichester.