Place:Goring by Sea, Sussex, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Goring by Sea, commonly referred to simply as Goring, is a former civil parish and now a neighbourhood in the Worthing District or Borough of Worthing in West Sussex, England. It lies about 2.5 miles (4.0 km) west of Worthing town centre. It was located in the Rape of Arundel until rapes and hundreds were abandoned as divisions of adminitstration; Goring has been part of the Borough of Worthing since 1929.

It is thought that the place-name Goring may mean either 'Gāra's people', or 'people of the wedge-shaped strip of land'. The town is usually known as "Goring", the "by-Sea" suffix has been added to differentiate it from the village of Goring on Thames in Oxfordshire.

The English Martyrs' Catholic Church, dedicated to the English-Catholic Martyrs, has a copy of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, painted by Gary Bevans. St Mary's, the Anglican parish church, was originally built in 1100AD as the Church of Our Blessed Ladye of Gorynge, and was rebuilt in 1837 by Decimus Burton.

The former village of Goring included Castle Goring, a country house built for Sir Bysshe Shelley, 1st Baronet (grandfather of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley) in the late 1790s.

Goring is served by Goring-by-Sea railway station and is thought to have been the inspiration for the name of the character Lord Goring in Oscar Wilde's play An Ideal Husband. Oscar Wilde stayed in a cottage in Goring in the summer of 1893, and in "De Profundis" mentions Goring as one of the places where he stayed with Lord Alfred Douglas.

The Goring Ward of the Borough of Worthing had a population of 7,556 in the UK census of 2011.

Research Tips

• The West Sussex Record Office is located in Chichester. Because it holds the records of the Church of England Diocese of Chichester, which covers the whole of Sussex, it has church records relating to both parts of Sussex.
• An on-line catalogue for some of the collections held by the West Sussex Record Office is available under the Access to Archives (A2A) project (a nationwide facility housed at The National Archives, Kew).
• West Sussex Past - database of 2 million records from West Sussex heritage organizations.
• The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies' Sussex Collection (PDF). This is a 9-page PDF naming the files relating to Sussex in their collection-a possible first step in a course of research.
• The National Library of Scotland has a website which provides maps taken from the Ordnance Survey England & Wales One-Inch to the Mile series of 1892-1908 as well as equivalent maps for Scotland itself. The immediate presentation is a "help" screen and a place selection screen prompting the entry of a location down to town, village or parish level. These screens can be removed by a click of the "X". The map is very clear and shows parish and county boundaries and many large buildings and estates that existed at the turn of the 20th century. Magnification can be adjusted and an "overlay feature" allows inspection of the area today along with that of 1900. The specific map from the series can be viewed as a whole ("View this map") and this allows the inspection of the map legend (found in the left hand bottom corner. Becoming familiar with the various facilities of these maps is well worth the trouble.

• GENUKI on Goring by Sea
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex does not cover the Poling Hundred.
• Maps of the local area are to be found on the page for Arundel Rape and on that for East Preston Rural District.