Worthing: the back story

About Worthing: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Brighton Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Worthing has been many things in five thousand years: Britain’s busiest flint-mining district, a Saxon settlement, a mackerel-fishing hamlet, a resort made fashionable by a princess, and the seaside town where Oscar Wilde wrote his most famous play. This is its story, from the chalk of Cissbury to the Art Deco pier.

Worthing sits on a narrow coastal plain between the sea and the South Downs, about 25 minutes west of Brighton by train. Its long shingle beach, its pier and its Regency terraces make it look like a town built for holidays, and for two centuries it has been one. But the story starts much earlier, up on the chalk.

Before the town

From around 4000 BC the Downs above Worthing were the earliest and largest flint-mining area in Britain. At Cissbury alone, Neolithic miners sank about 270 shafts, some of them twelve metres deep, to reach the bands of flint they shaped into axes. Thousands of years later the same hill was ringed with the ramparts of one of Britain’s largest Iron Age hill forts, which still crown it today.

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

The town’s name is Saxon. Its earliest known form, Wyrtingas, appears around AD 960; the Domesday Book of 1086 records it as Ordinges or Wordinges, and the modern spelling is first written down in 1297. For centuries after that, Worthing was a small hamlet whose people fished for mackerel off the beach.

A princess and a resort

The change came with the fashion for sea bathing. Wealthy visitors began to arrive in the 1750s, and in 1798 Princess Amelia, the youngest daughter of George III, stayed in the town. Where a princess went, society followed. Worthing was granted its charter as a town in 1803, and elegant streets went up to house the visitors: Park Crescent and Liverpool Terrace among them.

The Victorians brought the railway and the pier. Worthing Pier, designed by Sir Robert Rawlinson, opened on 12 April 1862. In 1890 the townships of Worthing and West Worthing joined, and the town became a borough.

Wilde’s summer

Oscar Wilde holidayed in Worthing in 1893 and again in 1894, and during the second visit he wrote The Importance of Being Earnest. Its hero, John Worthing, takes his surname from the town, so every performance of the play since 1895 has carried Worthing’s name around the world.

Those years were not all sunshine: a typhoid outbreak in 1893 cost lives and pushed the town to invest in new sewage works and better water pipes.

The twentieth century

The Edwardian and inter-war years gave Worthing many of the buildings people love today. The Kursaal, built on the seafront in 1910, became the Dome in 1915 and is still a working cinema. The pier survived a storm in 1913 that left only its seaward end standing (locals called it “Easter Island”), and a fire in 1933, after which it was rebuilt in the Streamline Moderne style that stands today. The Town Hall followed in 1933.

During the Second World War, Allied divisions, many of them Canadian, were stationed in Worthing as they prepared for D-Day, and a section of the pier was blown away so that it could not be used as a landing stage.

Worthing today

Today Worthing is a borough of about 113,000 people, and in 2019 the National Piers Society named its pier Pier of the Year. The restored Southern Pavilion at the end of the pier, the Dome, the Connaught Theatre and the Pavilion Theatre give the seafront a strong cultural life, and a new generation of restaurants, from Tern to BAUJI, has put the town on the food map. Above it all, Cissbury Ring and High Salvington Windmill still look out over the sea.

Our advice: start at the pier, walk west along the promenade to Marine Gardens, then take a bus or taxi up to Cissbury Ring for the view that explains why people have lived here for five thousand years.

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