Chichester is the UK's second best city to spot Santa, according to latest light pollution data

With more than 78 per cent of the UK suffering from light pollution, it’s often difficult to see the stars when you look up at the night sky in an urbanised area, let alone Santa Claus.

But, with that in mind, and with Christmas creeping closer, the data team at Clear It Waste Clearances have looked to establish which city might give residents the best chance of seeing Santa’s sleigh in action.

With a total rating of 9.03 out of ten, Chichester came second in the country, only losing out to leading city Winchester by 0.4 points.

That means Chichester residents stand a better chance of seeing Santa Claus than those in Cambridge, Bath, Oxford and Exeter.

To calculate the data, teams at Clear It Waste Clearances, obtained a seed list of cities with populations greater than 100,000 residents and compared them using leading light pollution database lightpollutionmap.info.

Three sets of data per location were used: the Square meterage, an artificial lighting rating and a Bortle Scale measurement which indicates the brightness of the night sky. All measurements were taken from the centre of each location, to maximise fairness. The final rating reflects a summary of all three ratings.

Describing Chichester, a spokesperson said: “The diminutive city scores a respectable 19.85 on the Sky Quality Meter, and with both first and second place retaining their ‘5’ ranking on the Bortle scale, the top spot is closely fought. However, Chichester has a slightly worse artificial brightness score of 1070, meaning overall it comes in 2nd place.”

Read more

Rumours of new bar coming to South Street