List of places of worship in Arun
There are 71 active churches, chapels and meeting rooms and one mosque serving the dense urban development on the English Channel coast and the mostly rural hinterland of ancient towns and villages; a further 21 former places of worship still stand but are no longer in religious use.
Littlehampton developed as a seaside resort in the 19th century; now, together with its eastern suburbs of Rustington, East Preston and Angmering (originally separate villages), it forms part of the Brighton/Worthing/Littlehampton conurbation.
[5][9] Further north, on the southern slopes of the South Downs, hamlets such as Madehurst, Houghton, Burpham and Poling have existed for hundreds of years, clustered around their churches.
[10] Until the coastal strip became heavily urbanised from the late 19th century, Arundel was the "main urban focus" of the area,[5][8] and it supported places of worship for several Christian denominations.
Simple Norman-era and early medieval buildings include those at Ford,[12] Burpham (whose cruciform design is uncommon in the area),[13] Tortington[14] and Pagham.
In Bognor Regis, a church dedicated to St John the Baptist was built speculatively in 1821; it was pulled down in favour of Arthur Blomfield's large, "uninspired" replacement of 1886.
[16] This was in turn demolished in 1972,[17] and the town's main Anglican church is now St Wilfrid's, a stone Gothic Revival building of 1910 by George Fellowes Prynne.
[16] Littlehampton's parish church, dedicated to St Mary, has medieval origins but was completely rebuilt in 1826 and again in 1935[18] (in an "eerie, disembodied Gothic Revival" style according to Ian Nairn and Nikolaus Pevsner).
Mission rooms—small, cheap chapels of ease in outlying settlements distant from their parish church—were opened in places such as Lidsey, Westergate[20] and Warningcamp.
[26] Congregationalists—predecessors of the current United Reformed denomination—found success in Arundel, where their chapel of 1838 (now a market)[27] thrived until the late 20th century and established daughter churches in nearby villages such as Yapton.
[11] Quakers in Littlehampton took over a former Penny School building as their place of worship,[28] and converted barns house Brethren in Felpham,[29] Evangelicals in Aldwick[30] and Baptists in Angmering (whose "strangely towered" former chapel[24] is now in residential use).
[36] Some other churches and chapels fell out of use before the English Reformation but survive in other uses—for example at Bilsham (now a house),[37] Nyetimber (part of a retirement home complex)[38] and Bailiffscourt (in the grounds of a luxury hotel).
Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism had a lower following in the district than in the country overall: in 2021, 6.73% of people in England were Muslim, 1.81% were Hindu, 0.92% were Sikh, 0.48% were Jewish and 0.46% were Buddhist.
[43] Those at Aldingbourne, Aldwick, Angmering, Arundel, Barnham, Binsted, Bognor Regis, Burpham, Climping, East Preston, Eastergate, Felpham, Ford, Lyminster, Madehurst, Middleton-on-Sea, North Bersted, Pagham, Poling, Rustington, Slindon, South Bersted, South Stoke, Walberton, Wick and Yapton, and the two in Littlehampton, are part of the Rural Deanery of Arundel and Bognor.
