The Dome, 22a Marine Parade, Worthing - 01903 221066 tic@adur-worthing.gov.uk

Worthing is situated on the West Sussex coast in South East England, 49 miles (79 km) south of London and 10 miles (16 km) west of Brighton and Hove. It forms part of the Brighton/Worthing/Littlehampton conurbation along with neighbouring towns and villages in the county such as Littlehampton, Findon, Sompting, Lancing, Shoreham-by-Sea and Southwick. The area is the United Kingdom's twelfth largest conurbation, with a population of over 460,000. The borough of Worthing is bordered by the West Sussex local authority districts of Arun in the north and west, and Adur in the east. The town is dominated by the Downs to the north: Cissbury Ring, a Site of Special Scientific Interest, rises to 184 metres (604 ft) in the north of the borough. A further high point is at West Hill (139m) north-west of High Salvington.

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.

Lying some three miles off the coast of Worthing, the Worthing Lumps are a series of underwater chalk cliff faces, up to three metres high. The lumps are the best example of the unusual habitat and are home to rare fish such as blennies and the lesser spotted dogfish. The site has been declared a Site of Nature Conservation Importance (SNCI) (a site of county importance) by West Sussex County Council.

In the Neolithic period of the Stone Age, the South Downs around Worthing was one of Britain's chief flint mining areas, with four of the UK's 14 known flint mines lying within 7 miles (11 km) of the centre of Worthing. An excavation at Little High Street dates the earliest remains from Worthing town centre to the Bronze Age. There is also an important Bronze Age hill fort on the western fringes of the modern borough at Highdown Hill. During the Iron Age, one of Britain's largest hill forts was built at Cissbury Ring. The area was part of the civitas of the Regni during the Romano-British period. Several of the borough's roads date from this era and lie in a grid layout known as 'centuriation'. A Romano-British farmstead once stood in the centre of the town, at a site close to the town hall. In the 5th and centuries, the area became part of the kingdom of Sussex. The place names of the area, including the name Worthing itself, date from this period.

Worthing remained an agricultural and fishing hamlet for centuries until the arrival of wealthy visitors in the 1750s. Princess Amelia stayed in the town in 1798 and the fashionable and wealthy continued to stay in Worthing, which became a town in 1803. The town expanded and elegant developments such as Park Crescent and Liverpool Terrace were begun. The area was a stronghold of smugglers in the 19th century and was the site of rioting by the Skeleton Army in the 1880s. Oscar Wilde holidayed in the town in 1893 and 1894, writing the Importance of Being Earnest during his second visit. The town was home to several literary figures in the 20th century, including Nobel prize-winner Harold Pinter. During the Second World War, Worthing was home to several allied military divisions in preparation for the D-Day landings.

There are 213 listed buildings in the borough of Worthing. Three of these—Castle Goring, St Mary's Church at Broadwater and the Archbishop's Palace at West Tarring—are classified at Grade I, which is used for buildings "of exceptional interest, sometimes considered to be internationally important". Worthing Pier, Park Crescent, Beach House and several churches are also listed.

Since 1896, when Warwick House was demolished, many historic buildings have been lost and others altered. The town's first and most distinguished theatre, the Theatre Royal, and the adjacent Omega Cottage (the home of the theatre's first manager) were lost in 1970 when the Guildbourne Centre was built; Warne's Hotel and the Royal Sea House burnt down; the early bath-houses which were vital to Worthing's success as a fashionable resort were all demolished in the 20th century; Broadwater's ancient rectory rotted away after it fell out of use in and several old streets in the town centre had all their buildings demolished for postwar redevelopment.

Pale yellow bricks have been made locally since about 1780, and are commonly encountered as a building material. Flint is the other predominant structural material: its local abundance has ensured its frequent use. The combination of flint and red brick is characteristic of Worthing. In particular, walls built alongside streets or to mark out boundaries were almost always built of flint with brick dressings, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Boat porches are a unique architectural feature of Worthing. These structures surround the entrance doors of some early 19th-century houses, and take the form of an stuccoed porch with an ogee-headed roof which resembles the bottom of a boat. Historians have speculated that the cottages, examples of which are in Albert Place, Warwick Place and elsewhere, may have been built by local fishermen who used their boats as a basis for the design.

The Midsummer Tree, an oak, stands near Broadwater Green and is said to be around 300 years old. Until the 19th century, it was believed that on Midsummer's Eve skeletons would rise from the tree and dance around it until dawn, when they would sink back into the ground. The legend was first recorded by folklorist Charlotte Latham in 1868.

It was once believed that monsters known as knuckers lived in bottomless ponds called knuckerholes. There were several knuckerholes in Sussex, including one in Worthing by Ham Bridge (on the present Ham Road), close to East Worthing railway station and Teville Stream.

According to legend, a tunnel several miles long led from the now-demolished medieval Offington Hall to the Neolithic flint mines and Iron Age hill fort at Cissbury. It was said to be sealed, and there was treasure at the far end; the owner of the Hall "had offered half the money to anyone who would clear out the subterranean passage and several persons had begun digging, but all had been driven back by large snakes springing at them with open mouths and angry hisses".

In literature, Oscar Wilde wrote The Importance of Being Earnest while staying in the town in the summer of 1894. Salvington in Worthing was the birthplace of philosopher and scholar John Selden in 1584. In the 1960s, playwright Harold Pinter lived wrote The Homecoming at his home in Ambrose Place. Other literary figures to have lived in the town include WE Henley, WH Hudson, Stephen Spender, Dorothy Richardson, Edward Knoblock, Beatrice Hastings, Maureen Duffy, Vivien Alcock, John Oxenham and his daughter Elsie J. Oxenham. Jane Austen's unfinished final novel Sanditon is thought to have been significantly based on experiences from her stay in Worthing in 1804.

The history of film in Worthing dates back to exhibitions on Worthing Pier in 1896, and two years later William Kennedy Dickson—inventor of the Kinetoscope, a pioneering motion picture device—visited the town to film daily life. In the early 20th century, several cinemas were established, although most were short-lived.[139][140] Other former cinemas include the Rivoli (1924–1960), the 2,000-capacity Plaza (1933–1968) and the 1,600-capacity Odeon (1934–1986). The Kursaal was built in 1910 as a combined skating rink and theatre by Swiss impresario Carl Adolf Seebold. It was renamed The Dome in 1915 in response to anti-German sentiment during World War One. Seebold opened the 950-capacity Dome Cinema in place of the skating rink in 1922; it is still open, and is one of Britain's oldest operational cinemas. The Connaught Screen 2 cinema (formerly The Ritz, and before that Connaught Hall) was established in 1995.

Many films and television programmes have been filmed using Worthing as the backdrop including: Pinter's The Birthday Party (1968), Dance with a Stranger (1985), and Wish You Were Here (1987).

Theatre has been performed in Worthing since 1796. Thomas Trotter, the early promoter and manager at the town's temporary venues, was asked to open a permanent theatre in 1807; his Theatre Royal opened on 7 July of that year and operated until 1855. The building survived until 1870. The 1,000-capacity New Theatre Royal in Bath Place, run by Carl Adolf Seebold for several years, lasted from 1897 until 1929. Several other venues have been used for theatrical productions, but as of 2010 Worthing has three council-owned theatres: the Art Deco Connaught Theatre, the Baroque Pavilion Theatre and the Modernist, Grade II-listed Assembly Hall, which is mostly used for musical performances (including since 1950 an annual music festival). The Assembly Hall is home to the Worthing Symphony Orchestra and the Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra.

Worthing Museum and Art Gallery was built in 1908 as the town's museum and library. Alfred Cortis, the first mayor of Worthing, and the international philanthropist Andrew Carnegie funded the construction. West Sussex County Council built a new library in 1975 and the museum has had a chequered history ever since, fighting off closure in 2003 with the support of local residents.

In the visual arts, painter Copley Fielding lived at 5 Park Crescent in the mid-18th century. and more recently Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin created cult comic figure Tank Girl while at college in the town in the 1980s. The town has a famous work by sculptor Elisabeth Frink. Uniquely in England, Desert Quartet (1990), Frink's penultimate sculpture, was given Grade II* listing in 2007, less than 30 years from its creation. It may be seen on the building opposite Liverpool Gardens.

For three days in 1970 a field on the outskirts of Worthing was the site of the Phun City music festival, the UK's first large-scale free music festival.