A small shopping parade, St Leonards Church, The Dr. Johnson Pub and Langley Green Primary School formed the centre of the community.

Work started on Langley Green in the early 1950s with workers being brought down from London by train and living in huts on site.

After nine months workers were entitled to a council house, and many of the early population of Langley Green were builders by profession.

The first families tended to buy their own property and as these were limited at the time, the new immigrants concentrated in areas around Denchers Plat and Beckett Lane.

Whiting, who was born locally in 1959, was convicted of one of the most high-profile murder cases in Britain in modern times in December 2001; the murder of Sarah Payne, who went missing in Littlehampton on the West Sussex coast on 1 July 2000 and whose body was found near Pulborough 16 days later.