Worthing Town Hall including Assembly Hall and Worthing Room

Worthing Town Hall stands in Chapel Road at the centre of Worthing, a seaside town in West Sussex. The building is a Grade II listed neo-Georgian structure designed by Charles Cowles-Voysey and opened in 1933. Behind it lies the Assembly Hall, completed two years later to the same design. To the south is the Worthing Museum and Art Gallery, once a Carnegie Library. The site had once belonged to Sir Timothy Shelley, father of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Before the town hall, Worthing’s commissioners met at inns on South Street and Market Street. The first purpose-built town hall opened in 1835 on South Street and served as a courthouse. The present town hall replaced an earlier building judged too small for civic needs. A war memorial by Joseph Whitehead and Sons stands on the site, unveiled in 1921 by Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson. The new hall cost £398,117 and was opened by Prince George in 1933. Its façade features a nine-bay portico with Ionic columns and the motto ‘Ex terra copiam e mari salutem’. Inside, the council chamber and mayor’s parlour contain fittings by Maufe of Heal’s and a map of Worthing painted by MacDonald Gill. The Assembly Hall foyer holds bronze panels by Laurence Bradshaw depicting figures above fish. Visitors enter through a symmetrical frontage of nineteen bays in red brick and ashlar. The central section projects slightly with a three-bay portico and a clock tower topped by a cupola. Inside, the entrance hall floor is by Gilbert Bayes and the mayor’s parlour displays the 1933 map showing glasshouses across the borough. The Assembly Hall has a proscenium arch and a foyer with Bradshaw’s sculpted panels. The building remains the meeting place of Worthing Borough Council and a venue for marriages and civil partnerships.