Composer Claude Debussy, theatre impressario Ivor Novello and painter Edwin Landseer will be honoured by having buses named after them.

The trio will be among 18 people bestowed with the tribute for their notable contributions to Brighton and Hove or Sussex.

They will join more than 200 others who have now been honoured on Brighton and Hove Bus and Coach Company's vehicles.

The latest group has been selected by a panel including the company's chief executive and Argus correspondent Adam Trimingham.

They also include Brighton and Hove Albion player and long-serving groundsman Frankie Howard, The Beatles' solicitor David Jacobs, from Hove, and legendary bare-knuckle boxer Tom Sayers, who lived in North Laine, Brighton.

Managing director Roger French said: "We’ve been inundated with suggestions from members of the pubic and are enormously grateful for the huge interest shown in our bus names project.”

Frenchman Claude Debussy was given the honour because he was staying in Eastbourne when he wrote his orchestral work La Mer in the early 20th Century.

Ivor Novello was a composer, actor, singer and producer who died in 1951 and whose name has become synonymous with the songwriting award named after him.

He lived in Marine Parade, Brighton.

Edwin Landseer, who died in 1873, was the artist best known for sculpting the bronze lions in Trafalgar Square, London.

Landseer House, where he lived in Regency Square, Brighton, is now rented out to holiday-makers.

Others who will have their names on the new buses include businessmen Charles Cutress, who set up the Forfars bakery chain, and Kenneth Lane, who ran the KTM engineering firm which once employed almost 2,000 in Hollingbury.

Marie-Antoine Careme, the chef who cooked for King George IV at the Royal Pavilion, and Sarah Forbes-Bonetta, an African princess who married in Brighton in 1862, will also be honoured.

They will be joined by Romantic autor Jeffrey Farnol, social reformer Elizabeth Fry, missionary James Hannington and musical star Pat Kirkwood as well as aviation pioneer George Miles, feminist Hester Thrale, Methodist minister Leslie Newman and Arthur Newsholme, the man responsible for improving health in Brighton's slums.

Their names will appear on the front of a £3.25million fleet of double-deckers on the number five route from Hollingbury and Patcham, in Brighton, to Hangleton, in Hove.

First World War veteran Henry Allingham is the only living person to have been permanently honoured on a Brighton and Hove bus.