Worthing’s remoteness from London and the major roads and coach routes of Sussex was alleviated in 1803, when a turnpike was opened between the seafront and West Grinstead via Findon. A tollgate stood near the present Teville Gate shopping centre between 1804 and 1845. Other tollgates in Goring, Heene and East Worthing served later turnpikes in those areas.

Until 1803, the nearest boarding point for stagecoaches was Steyning,  but coaches ran regularly to London soon after the turnpike opened. The initial service of three per week in summer only was upgraded to a daily service all year, leaving at 7.00am.  The journey took about seven hours and cost 11/- (£40 as of 2011)  for an uncovered seat.  Coaches also ran to Brighton and Arundel,  and by 1832 there were 24 departures and arrivals daily, serving destinations all over the south of England.

James Town, who was closely involved with the early 19th-century coaching industry, became Worthing’s leading horse-bus operator in the late 19th century,  after the success of the railway caused coaching to decline. Other businessmen provided competition, and by 1900 horse-drawn buses served all parts of the town. From 1904, motorised buses superseded these: the Sussex Motor Road Car Company and its successor the Worthing Motor Omnibus Company ran local and long-distance from garages near the railway station. By 1909, Worthing Motor Services Ltd had formed; their fleet was 15 strong. Southdown Motor Services, formed in 1915 and later nationalised, survived with that identity until deregulation in 1986, after which Stagecoach Group acquired its routes and fleet.

Worthing’s local bus services, and longer-distance routes to Midhurst, Brighton and Portsmouth, are still run by Stagecoach’s South Downs division.  Metrobus operate a route to Crawley; Worthing-based Compass Bus have routes to Angmering, Chichester, Henfield and Lancing;  and Brighton & Hove Bus and Coach Company operates evening and night services from Brighton.

West Sussex County Council and the South East England Regional Transport Board have proposed a rapid bus corridor with frequent services along the Sussex coast. The Coastal Expressway will have a priority section between Worthing and Brighton. If successful, the route would be extended westwards towards Portsmouth. Buses would have priority at traffic lights and major junctions.

Worthing Coaches, a division of haulage and travel company Lucketts Travel Group, is based in West Worthing.  Day trips and longer holidays by coach, and private hire of vehicles, are offered.

An experimental “tramocar” service was started in 1924. This used small single-decker vehicles manufactured by Shelvoke and Drewry. The first tramocars had solid wheels, open sides and a tiller instead of a conventional steering wheel; later models were fully enclosed and had pneumatic tyres. The initial service along the promenade was provided by two vehicles, but by the time Southdown Motor Services took over Tramocars Ltd’s operations in 1938 there were 15 tramocars and a network of routes across Worthing. The last vehicle was withdrawn from service in 1942.

A bureaucratic oversight meant that the borough council passed a bill to allow the development of a tramway network in Worthing. Between 1901 and 1903, The British Electric Traction Company sought permission to open tram routes between Hove, Worthing and Littlehampton. The council passed a bill to prevent this by ensuring that only they could authorise such a development, although they had no intention of doing so. The bill was never repealed

via Transport in Worthing – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Worthing, a town with borough status in the English county of West Sussex, has 212 buildings with listed status. The Borough of Worthing covers an area of 8,030 acres (3,250 ha) on the south coast of England, facing the English Channel. The town’s development in the early 19th century coincided with nearby Brighton’s rise as a famous, fashionable resort, and Worthing became a quiet seaside town with a large stock of Victorian buildings. Residential growth in the 20th century absorbed nearby villages, and older houses, churches and mansions became part of the borough. The Town and Country Planning Act 1947, an act of Parliament effective from 1948, introduced the concept of “listing” buildings of architectural and historical interest, and Worthing Borough Council nominated 90 buildings at that time. More have since been added, but others have been demolished. As of 2009, Worthing has three buildings of Grade I status, 11 listed at Grade II*, 196 of Grade II status and three at the equivalent Grade C.

In England, a building or structure is defined as “listed” when it is placed on a statutory register of buildings of “special architectural or historic interest” by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, a Government department, in accordance with the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 (a successor to the 1947 act). English Heritage, a non-departmental public body, acts as an agency of this department to administer the process and advise the department on relevant issues. There are three grades of listing status. Grade I, the highest, is defined as being of “exceptional interest”; Grade II* is used for “particularly important buildings of more than special interest”; and Grade II, the lowest, is used for buildings of “special interest”. Some Anglican churches are still graded according to an old system in which Grades A, B and C were equivalent to I, II* and II respectively.

History of listed buildings and conservation in Worthing

From its origins as a fishing village, Worthing grew into a seaside resort in the early 19th century on the strength of royal patronage, the positive effect of nearby Brighton, the excellent climate and new road links to London. Land was quickly sold for speculative developments such as Liverpool Terrace and Park Crescent individual residences such as Beach House and Warwick House, attractions like the Theatre Royal and churches such as St Paul’s and Christ Church. Until the postwar Labour government passed the Town and Country Planning Act in 1947, there was no official system governing the preservation of historically significant buildings, and the rapid expansion of the town from the late 19th century onwards resulted in urban decay affecting the old town centre and demands to allow the clearance of buildings considered “obsolete and derelict”.

Historically, despite the limited protection offered by listed status, the borough has had a poor record on conserving buildings of historic interest; architectural historian Ian Nairn described it as an “exasperating town … full of [architecturally] ignoble endings”. A 1947 plan by Charles Cowles-Voysey proposing the complete demolition and redevelopment of central Worthing was never implemented, but piecemeal changes since then (especially during the 1960s) have had a similar effect in removing many historically significant buildings. Indifference on the part of residents has been suggested: the demolition in 1970 of the old Theatre Royal—described as a “very precious survival” five years earlier—went ahead with no opposition. A conservation society was formed in 1973—much later than in similar towns; despite low levels of public support, it successfully saved Beach House from demolition in the late 1970s.

Listed buildings demolished or lost to redevelopment in Worthing include the old rectory at Broadwater, West Tarring’s original Church House, most of the Humphrys Almshouses, the old Theatre Royal and the adjacent Omega Cottage.

Houses and commercial buildings—in some cases converted to other uses—make up many of Worthing’s listed buildings, and several churches also feature. Other structures with listed status include an ornate cast-iron lamp-post—the only survivor of more than 100 installed when Worthing first received electricity, and saved from demolition in 1975; a K6 telephone kiosk in the Steyne, a seafront square; an 18th-century dovecote on a site where one has existed since the 13th century; and a recent addition: a 1989 sculpture by Elisabeth Frink consisting of four gigantic male heads cast in bronze and set on a stuccoed loggia.

Delistings and anomalies

One of Worthing’s earliest and most important hotels was Warne’s Hotel. It was built as a five-house block called York Terrace in the 1820s, reputedly by John Rebecca. It was listed at Grade II on 11 October 1949. In the 1870s, the hotel was enlarged when an adjacent terrace of houses was taken over. This was listed separately, also at Grade II, on 21 May 1976. The hotel closed in 1985, and efforts to conserve it were thwarted when it was gutted by fire in 1987. Both parts of the building were demolished in 1992. The 1870s corner block was delisted (removed from the statutory list) on 19 October 1998, but the main block has not been officially delisted.

Most of the houses in Warwick Place, a short street leading off the Brighton Road, are listed, but No. 3 Warwick Place has lost its status. The three-storey cobbled flint building’s structural features include a bay window and a cornice supported by a modillion. It was listed at Grade II on 21 May 1976 and delisted on 1 August 2000.

The town had an Odeon cinema between 1934 and 1988, when it was demolished. It stood at the head of Liverpool Terrace, and was built in the Art Deco style with a prominent belvedere. The 1,600-capacity building cost £40,700. It was listed at Grade II on 26 March 1987, after its closure, but was removed from the statutory list on 27 July 1987.

On Marine Parade, numbers 66 and 67—part of the former Trafalgar Terrace—were listed in 1974. The four-storey houses dated from the early 19th century, and were bow-fronted and stuccoed. They were subsequently demolished, and a modern block of flats now stands on the site. They have not been officially delisted.

St Mary’s Farmhouse in Durrington had two attendant barns, which were listed separately from the house (along with its front garden wall) to reflect their architectural value as a group. After the farmhouse was damaged by arsonists in 1978, it was saved from threatened demolition, but the barns were knocked down. One lay diagonally across the southwest corner of the farmhouse grounds; it was built mainly of flint and had a hipped roof of thatch. The other, of similar materials but with a partly gabled roof with a weatherboarded exterior, stood south of the house. An adjacent outbuilding, with a pentice roof, was included in its listing. Despite their demolition, they have not been officially delisted.

English Heritage’s former listing system for Anglican churches, in which Grades A, B and C were used instead of I, II* and II respectively, has not been eliminated completely. St Andrew’s (central Worthing), St Botolph’s and St George’s Churches are graded C instead of II. St Mary’s Church at Broadwater was originally listed at Grade B, but has since been upgraded to Grade I.

Castle Goring and its associated buildings are very close to the border with the neighbouring district of Arun. Castle Goring Lodge was incorrectly classified by English Heritage as being in the civil parish of Clapham in Arun, but Worthing Borough Council’s more recently updated listed building register correctly identifies its location as Worthing.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lying on the south coast of England, Worthing is situated on a mix of two beds of sedimentary rock. The large part of the town, including the town centre is built upon chalk (part of the Southern England Chalk Formation), with a bed of London clay found in a band heading west from Lancing through Broadwater and Durrington. There are no major rivers within the borough, however the culverted Teville Stream begins as a spring in what is now allotments in Tarring, runs along Tarring Road and Teville Road north of the town centre, passing to the east through Homefield Park and Davison High School before meeting the sea at Brooklands where the Broadwater Brook meets the sea. To the west and also in parts culverted, Ferring Rife rises in Durrington near Littlehampton Road, passing through Maybridge, then west of Ferring into the sea.

Being located in the South Coast Plain at the foot of the South Downs, some of the undeveloped land in the north of the borough is proposed to form part of the South Downs National Park. The west of the borough contains some ancient woodland at Titnore Wood. The development along the coastal strip is interrupted by strategic gaps at the borough boundaries in the east and west, each gap falling largely outside the borough boundaries. The southwest of the borough contains part of the Goring Gap, a protected area of fields and woodland between Goring and Ferring. To the east of Worthing lies the Sompting Gap, a protected area that lies between Worthing and Sompting. This area was formerly an inlet of the sea and it is here that the Broadwater Brook (also known as Sompting Brook) flows into Brooklands Park and on into the sea. Some of the reedbeds in the Sompting Gap at Lower Cokeham have been designated a Site of Nature Conservation Importance. The borough of Worthing contains no nature reserves: the nearest is Widewater Lagoon in Lancing.