Heene Cemetery – West Worthing’s hidden graveyard

Heene Cemetery is a one-acre town-centre site in West Worthing that was open for burials between 1873 and 1977. It is now a ‘closed cemetery’ and a Sussex Local Wildlife Site cared for by a volunteer group, the Friends of Heene Cemetery, who also built and maintain this website.

Nearly 2,000 individuals are buried here, and a group of the Friends is researching their history and documenting their stories. Another group of the Friends volunteers throughout the year to care for this space, documenting and encouraging the biodiversity of what was originally old meadowland.

Bringing the past to life

Heene Cemetery is an often-overlooked window into the past. (The history of the cemetery and of the Heene area of Worthing is summarised in a timeline on the About page of the website.)

Our heritage research team has accumulated a wealth of detail about the nearly 2,000 people who have Heene Cemetery as their final resting place. These individual records are available on this website. They tell stories that range from the humdrum to the vivid and extraordinary, sometimes blighted by epidemic or war, sometimes exemplifying valour, scientific brilliance or business acumen. Whether you are looking for an ancestor or browsing with an interest in social history, you will find them worth exploring.

The ecology of an ‘old meadow’ community

Surrounded today by the residential neighbourhood of West Worthing, this closed cemetery and Sussex Local Wildlife Site hides its meadowland origins behind its Victorian brick and flint walls. The cemetery is the focus of an ongoing citizen-science project to identify species and record them all on this website. Over 700 species have been identified to date, and nearly all have been photographed in situ.

Various blog posts that help explain Heene Cemetery

Separate from burials and species records, there are many posts that detail Heene Cemetery’s special appeal. Richly illustrated, these posts often say more than any single story. Here are some of our most recent blog posts:

All this website's content—including its creation and maintenance—is the collective work of unpaid volunteers from within the local community.