In the summer of 1894 Oscar Wilde spent eight weeks in Worthing, during which he wrote his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest. This family holiday was a microcosm of Wilde’s complicated life during the three years between his falling in love with Lord Alfred Douglas and his imprisonment in 1895. While Constance Wilde, lonely and depressed, fell in love with her husband’s publisher, Wilde was spending his time with the feckless and demanding Douglas, and with three teenage boys he...

During her stay in Worthing in late 1805 Jane Austen became friends with Edward Ogle, who was the driving force behind the chaotic little town’s transformation into a well-ordered seaside resort. Then, in 1817, the year of her death, Jane Austen used Worthing as the background for her final, unfinished novel, Sanditon, one of whose main characters was based on Ogle. This book gives a detailed account of the town Jane Austen knew in 1805, and explores in full the close links between Sandito...

Demolition and redevelopment over the past seventy-five years have done great damage to Worthing, and relatively few of the town’s historic buildings survive. Lost Buildings of Worthing is a lavishly illustrated record of the most interesting and important of these vanished buildings. It is also a rich and detailed history – and social history – of Worthing, with numerous fascinating narratives and anecdotes about people associated with the buildings described. In the first section, ‘Lost ...