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This coastal U.K. town reclaimed by the young and trendy boasts Royals, museums, shopping, and surfing to intrigue families.

The Britain most of us know is London -- the crown jewels, the changing of the guard and that famous tower. But, there is more to Britain and, for something completely different, visitors might consider taking a train to the south coast to tour Victorian sewers and discuss catching waves with surfers. And for literary lions or lambs, how about a visit to the town and home of Rudyard Kipling, and an overnight stay at a luxury hotel that was once home to the poet Shelley?

And did I mention? Visiting magnificent gardens, touring countryside wineries that have gained new respect, taking courtly walks, and stopping at such offbeat places as a vegetarian shoe shop, a fast food vegetarian restaurant and visiting several oddball shops found in this part of the UK? This is the UK? This sounds like another country.

“Here’s my story, Alan,” I told a friend, Allen Littell, whose duties at the old New York Herald Tribune in Paris used to be editing a particularly prickly columnist named Art Buchwald. “You could almost skip London and just spend all your time, or maybe a week or so in Sussex,” I told him. Littell, who is now a spry 79-year-old freelance travel writer who has been to Sussex many times and is perhaps one of its most enthusiastic walkers, disagreed. He viewed that as an exaggeration, of course, and perhaps it is when you consider the vastness of London. So did the famed Samuel Johnson. “Sir,” he said. ”When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” But so what? My family could never get enough of London, but we can also appreciate country life in England.

British Air certainly makes it easy to skip London with direct flights to the smaller and far less congested Gatwick Airport from Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, and my own home airport in Orlando. Our destination was the mostly small villages in East and West Sussex, often visited by day-trippers from London but generally not well-known outside the famous city 60 minutes away by train.

Quirky Sites

Brighton and its sister city Hove have a combined population of 250,000 with a large concentration of young people, which helps explain why they have more restaurants per household in the UK than anywhere other than London. As for natural beauty, it should be enough to say it's set on the south coast and bordered by the English Channel and the rolling, green green hills of the South Downs.

We took the 30-minute train ride from Gatwick outside of London to Brighton Beach, which started out as a small fishing town, but in the late 1700s, a well-known doctor, Richard Russell, pronounced the healing benefits of seawater. Royalty came, followed by the masses. “They didn’t have penicillin or much medicine in those days, so you can imagine this was such good news everyone wanted to believe it,” said Glenda Clarke, a life-long tour guide whose jaunts include a walking tour of "Regency Brighton." The water treatment is no longer used but Brighton still draws a lot of tourists, eight million of them come each year to see the city by the sea, but not many of those are Americans, according to tourism officials who say that is perhaps one of the reasons the reception here is extremely welcoming.

Brighton is known today for its lively night life. But there are also less advertised underground attractions. Brighton’s sewers, for example, are the only ones in the country open to the public. They are held up as an example of imaginative Victorian engineering. If the idea of a trip conjures up images of murky, claustrophobic tunnels, not to mention rats scurrying under your feet, the reality is not as sordid, though tourists are issued protective hard hats and disposable gloves after viewing the introductory video.Visitors are taken down in groups of up to 25. There is a smell but it’s nothing you can’t get used to. Human waste does flow through here, of course, but so does a lot of other stuff in the murky, two-foot-high flow of water.The sewer tours are open from May to September and to learn more, visit www.southernwater.co.uk.