St Andrew's Church, West Tarring

St Andrew’s Church stands in the old village core of West Tarring, a parish that once stretched three miles from the South Downs to the sea. Built mostly in the 13th century of knapped flint and stone, it replaced an earlier wooden church recorded in the Domesday survey. The tall octagonal spire, added in the 16th century, is a local landmark visible across the coastal plain. The building mixes Early English nave arcades with Perpendicular chancel windows and buttresses added in the 15th century. A Victorian restoration in 1853 removed the west gallery, installed a new organ and recast the bells. The church has strong links to Canterbury and to St Richard of Chichester, who took refuge here in the 13th century while barred from his palace. John Selden, the jurist, was baptised in its font, and the church once served nearby parishes whose own buildings had fallen into ruin. Smugglers used the churchyard table tombs to hide contraband, and the Tapsel family’s bell foundry, based nearby, supplied many Sussex churches. The Henty family took the medieval font to Australia when they emigrated in the 19th century. Inside, the five-bay nave opens onto aisles and a clerestory lit by lancets. The south aisle holds a Victorian font beneath a painted canopy, while the north aisle leads to a vestry and a 15th-century rood screen. The chancel’s east window has a tall central light flanked by paired shorter lights and sexfoils above. William Butterfield’s 1885 mosaics line the aisles and tower arch, and stained glass by Cox & Barnard fills some windows. Outside, the lychgate marks the entrance to a churchyard where table tombs recall the smugglers’ past.