St Botolph's Church, Heene

St Botolph’s Church stands in Heene, a former coastal hamlet now part of West Worthing in West Sussex. The present building, designed by Edmund Scott in Early English Gothic style, was completed in 1879 with a nave, aisles, chancel and a tall west tower. It was built beside the ruins of a 13th-century predecessor, of which only scant fragments remain. The old church once served as a chapelry of St Andrew’s in West Tarring, holding a single 14th-century font that survives today. In the 17th century the medieval structure fell into ruin after years of depopulation and enclosure of common land. A new church was needed when West Worthing grew rapidly in the late 19th century as a fashionable seaside suburb. The church’s significance lies in its role during Worthing’s Victorian expansion and its Anglo-Catholic tradition. The Heene Estate Land Company donated the site in 1873, and Scott’s design used flint and red brick with stone dressings. By 1905 the south aisle and transept were enlarged by R.S. Hyde to accommodate the growing congregation. Eight bells cast by John Warner and Sons were installed in 1879, and a brick rectory was rebuilt in the 1950s. The advowson passed from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Diocese of Chichester in 1930, marking the church’s independence from its medieval ties. Visitors find the present church with its tiled roofs, red and pale brick interior and stained glass from the 1880s to the 1970s. The ruined chancel and nave walls of the old church lie east of the tower, weathered and fragmentary. The tower’s broach spire rises above the aisles, and the interior includes an altar designed by William H.R. Blacking in 1935. The grounds also contain the rebuilt rectory from the late 1950s. The ruins and the 19th-century church together tell the story of Heene’s rise, decline and rebirth.