Lost Buildings of Worthing: A Historic Town and its People

2016 | History & Politics

Demolition and redevelopment over the past seventy-five years have done much damage to Worthing, and few of the town's historic buildings survive. Lost Buildings of Worthing is a record of over thirty of the most interesting. In the first section, 'Lost on the Seafront', we travel from east to west along the seafront, visiting the Esplanade, where Oscar Wilde wrote The Importance of Being Earnest in 1894 ...Warne's, the famous hotel where Emperor Haile Selassie stayed after he was exiled from Ethiopia ...the house of Thomas Banting, rich and reclusive brother of the nineteenth-century royal undertaker ...and Roberts Marine Mansions, where members of the drapery trade came to convalesce. The second section, 'Lost in the Town', features buildings that stood in the centre of Worthing - from the slum dwellings of Cook's Row and the handsome houses in the High Street to Warwick House, owned two hundred years ago by Edward Ogle, the great entrepreneur of early Worthing on whom Jane Austen based one of the main characters in Sanditon.

Illustrated with 150 engravings and photographs, Lost Buildings of Worthing gives a vivid and anecdote-rich account of the town's old buildings and the people associated with them. Also included are three old maps of Worthing on which all the buildings are marked, enabling modern visitors to locate where they used to stand.

Antony Edmonds (Author)