Iconic St Paul’s will is finally open again following its £1m transformation into a unique community and events space. Originally ‘the’ chapel in Chapel Road, St Paul’s was forced to close in 1995 due to dangerous structural problems. After 12 years’ hard fundraising by a loyal band of volunteers, along with legacies and other donations, it is finally ready to start its new life as a unique venue and meeting place.

The former ‘chapel’ in Chapel Road St Paul’s, opened in 1812, is the oldest of five Grade II* listed buildings in Worthing.

Respected Anglo-Italian architect
John Biagio Rebecca designed St Paul’s in a neo-classical Greek style.

He designed much of Georgian Worthing; little remains except his Grade 2* listed Beach House, 1820, in Brighton Road and St Paul’s

Built by Ambrose Cartwright who also built nearby Ambrose Place, St Paul’s has a Tuscan Doric portico with four columns and a bell cupola with a Greek frieze. The building’s distinctive yellow bricks were made from clay taken from ‘the Saltgrass’, Worthing Common which existed south of the current beach in the 19th century and is now covered by the sea.

Worthing was a small fishing village in 1798 when the youngest daughter of King George III, Princess Amelia visited to improve her health. In the following years Worthing developed as a fashionable seaside resort, with growing numbers of residents and visitors needing a nearer place for worship than St Mary’s, the parish church in Broadwater. St Paul’s was opened in 1812 as the Worthing Chapel of Ease, built by public subscription for its pews. Original Georgian pews remain in the internal upper balconies. At ground level, a remaining section of the original panelling with incorporated Georgian pews facing east, is surmounted by a new artisan-crafted dado rail echoing original architraving.

The chapel was upgraded to parish church status and dedicated to St Paul in 1893. The building was re-ordered then with the altar untraditionally now facing west, and extended with an impressive new chancel built in a Italianate-Renaissance classical style with columns, attached pilasters, moulded cornice, a keyed arch with panelled soffit, a panelled vault, tessellated floor, and alabaster and marble facings added in 1912. The chancel’s centrepiece painting is modelled on Rembrandt’s Christ on the Cross.

You enter St Paul’s through the portico entrance, the panelled double-doors with moulded architraves and Georgian fanlights were originally flanking doors to the central entrance. During the Victorian era re-modelling, that entrance was blocked in and converted to a stained glass window that has been tentatively identified as in the style of Edward Burnes-Jones the pre-Raphaelite artist.