Shoreham-by-Sea: the back story

About Shoreham-by-Sea: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Brighton Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Shoreham-by-Sea grew up where the River Adur meets the sea. The Normans built a new port here and crowned it with a great church; the Victorians fortified the harbour mouth; film-makers came for the light; and the town still lives by its river, its port and its airfield.

Shoreham-by-Sea sits about fifteen minutes west of Brighton by train, at the point where the River Adur reaches the sea through a gap in the South Downs. It is a town of water: the tidal river, the shingle spit of Shoreham Beach and the working harbour beyond. Almost everything in its story comes back to that river.

Old Shoreham and New Shoreham

There are two Shorehams. Old Shoreham, a little way up the river, is the older settlement: its church of St Nicolas has a nave built by the Anglo-Saxons, and the church is recorded in the Domesday Book. After the Norman Conquest, as the river mouth moved and ships grew larger, a new town was laid out downstream. New Shoreham, the town you visit today, was built around a great church, St Mary de Haura, “of the haven”, begun in the second quarter of the twelfth century and paid for largely by the dues of its busy port.

Check opening times and trains on the official sites before you travel.

A port and its customs house

On the High Street stands Marlipins, a Norman building of the twelfth century with a flint-and-stone chequerboard front. It is believed to have served as a toll or customs house for the port and markets, storing valuable goods such as wine, spices and cloth, and it is now a museum of the town’s maritime history run by the Sussex Archaeological Society.

The harbour itself has always fought the shingle. For centuries the mouth of the Adur drifted east along the coast; in 1810 it lay almost opposite Aldrington church, near the Hove border. Only in 1816 was the entrance fixed between two piers, where it still is today, and trade grew once more. Shoreham Port was set up as a trust by Act of Parliament in 1760, and it still reinvests what it earns in the port.

A fort at the harbour mouth

In the 1850s, with tension across the Channel, the new harbour entrance was given a fort of its own. Shoreham Fort, also called Kingston or Shoreham Redoubt, was completed in June 1857 on the shingle spit just west of the harbour mouth, to command the entrance, its approaches and the beach. Of the many small forts and gun batteries built along the coast of southern England, it is one of only two to survive in anything like their original form; the other is at Littlehampton. Today the Friends of Shoreham Fort, a registered charity, look after it.

Lights, camera, Shoreham Beach

Around 1913 the scenic artist Francis Lyndhurst brought film-making to Shoreham, drawn, it is said, by the clean, clear light on the beach. His company’s first film, The Showman’s Dream, was shot in 1914 inside the walls of the fort, where the ramparts kept the wind off the painted canvas backdrops. From 1915 films were made in a great glass studio further along Shoreham Beach. The film-makers moved on, but the beach kept its holiday bungalows, and the river kept the houseboats that line its western bank today.

Shoreham today

Modern Shoreham is a small, lively riverside town. The Adur Ferry Bridge, a footbridge from the High Street, crosses to the beach; East Street, now pedestrianised, has independent shops, cafés and two monthly markets; and the Ropetackle Arts Centre brings concerts, comedy and films to the riverside. North of the town, Brighton City Airport, the oldest licensed airport in the UK in its own words, still flies from beside its Art Deco terminal of 1936, and on the hill across the river rises the Gothic chapel of Lancing College.

Our advice: come by train, walk the High Street to Marlipins and St Mary de Haura, then cross the footbridge to the beach and walk west along the houseboats towards the fort and the harbour mouth.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Shoreham-by-Sea: the back story before you go.