House Share
Worthing West Sussex
Approximate Population: 99,600
Worthing is a large seaside town and a local government borough in West Sussex, England. Around 100,000 people live within the borough itself and 183,000 in the urban area. Situated in the centre of an 80 km (50-mile) wide bay on the Sussex coast, between Beachy Head and Selsey Bill, the borough of Worthing also lies at the foot of the South Downs, a proposed national park.
The area around Worthing has been populated for at least 6,000 years and contains Britain’s greatest concentration of Stone Age flint mines, which are some of the earliest mines in Europe. Lying within the borough, the Iron Age hill fort of Cissbury Ring is one of Britain’s largest. Worthing means “(place of) Worth/Worō’s people”, from the Old English personal name Worth/Worō (the name means “valiant one, one who is noble”), and -ingas “people of” (reduced to -ing in the modern name).
For many centuries Worthing was a small mackerel fishing hamlet until in the late eighteenth century it developed into an elegant Georgian seaside resort and attracted the well-known and wealthy of the day. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the area was one of Britain’s chief market gardening centres.