The £250m scheme's public exhibition runs 15 to 17 October at Selsey Town Hall. Opening hours here, and why the project's own site does not list it.

Selsey’s sea defence exhibition has dates at last, and a venue.

The public exhibition on the Selsey Coastal Scheme runs over three days at Selsey Town Hall:

  • Thursday 15 October, 3pm to 7.30pm
  • Friday 16 October, 1pm to 7.30pm
  • Saturday 17 October, 10am to 3.30pm

Members of the project team will be there to answer questions. The Town Hall is at 55 High Street, PO20 0RB.

This is the round of engagement Chichester District Council’s Cabinet approved on 1 September, when it endorsed sloping rock revetment as the leading defence option for six of the coast’s seven management units. What the scheme would build, and what it would cost, is set out in our report on the leading options.

Why these dates are worth writing down

The council says the results of the engagement “will help finalise the scheme by the end of this year”. That is the point of the three days. It is the last published chance to comment before the preferred options are settled.

The scheme is not a small one. The council estimates it at between £250 million and £294 million. It says the work would better protect 3,900 properties over 100 years, along about 4.5km of coastline.

Councillor Jonathan Brown, the district council’s cabinet member for environmental strategy, put the case for acting in the council’s announcement. He called it “a significant scheme that will help protect thousands of residents and businesses in the area”, and said that “if action isn’t taken then the risks will keep on increasing and threaten even more homes in the future”.

The dates are in one place only

The dates come from a Chichester District Council news release dated 15 September 2026, reference 4631.

On 23 September, eight days after that release and three weeks before the first session, we checked the two places a Selsey resident would most reasonably look:

  • Coastal Partners, the coastal engineering team running the scheme for the district council, has published nothing. Its Selsey Coastal Scheme latest updates page still ends at an August 2026 entry about the West Beach seawall refurbishment. It carries no mention of the exhibition, and no mention of the leading options Cabinet endorsed three weeks ago.
  • Selsey Town Council, which sits on the scheme’s stakeholder group, has nothing on its news page either. Its most recent items are a proposed EV chargepoint consultation and the same August seawall notice.

So the only published source for when and where to turn up is a district council press release. That is worth knowing if you are relying on the project’s own website.

The venue has changed

The previous two rounds of public events were held at The Selsey Centre, not the Town Hall. Coastal Partners records the attendance for both:

  • 24, 25 and 26 April 2025: 375 visitors over three days
  • 17 and 18 April 2026: 260 visitors over two days

The Town Hall is a smaller room. Selsey Town Council’s own description gives it a capacity of 85 seated at tables, or 120 as a seated audience. Those numbers do not compare directly with attendance at a drop-in exhibition. But it is a different and smaller space from the one 375 people used last year. Neither council has published anything about why the venue moved.

What it means for you

  • If you live or trade on the Selsey frontage, put 15, 16 or 17 October in the diary. The Friday session runs to 7.30pm and the Saturday one is the only weekend slot.
  • Turn up with your own stretch in mind. The coast is split into seven management units, and the leading option is not the same for all of them: six take a sloping defence, while Park Copse is proposed as a set-back vertical defence. Ours is the breakdown by unit.
  • The money is not secured. The scheme still has to pass two national business case gateways before any grant is confirmed, so the exhibition is about the design, not about a funded start date.
  • Check the day before you travel. Because the dates sit on a press release rather than on the project website, they are not somewhere that would obviously be updated if anything changed. The district council’s news page is the place to look.

Sources

More Chichester district information: roadworks and travel, planning news and bin collection days.