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.

Heene Cemetery in August 2022

Heene Cemetery June 2022

Heene Cemetery June 2024

Heene Cemetery in May 2020

Heene Cemetery in May 2020

Heene Cemetery June 2024

(These photographs—and more—can be viewed in the photo gallery.)

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.

Robert Tucker (buried 1905)

Charles Harris (buried 1934)

William Paine (buried 1915) portrait photograph

Emily Wood (buried 1971)

Annie Wight (buried 1907)

Martha Teesdale (buried 1896) portrait

Sydney Nevile (buried 1969)

Katherine Wight (buried 1912)

William Lawson (buried 1922)

Frederick Evans

Frederick Gates

Frank Roberts photograph

George Mills (buried 1903)

Denys Ranson

Charles Joseph Hollis in 1922

(All burials can be viewed—and searched—in the burials section of the website.)

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 760 species have been identified to date, and nearly all have been photographed in situ.

The gingery-brown hairs and black abdomens are characteristic of this social Common Carder Bee.

The white flowers of the Wild Carrot appear in June, the centre flower of the umbel often being red.

This species forms clusters or mats of yellow-green turfs with erect unbranched stems, especially in disturbed habitats.

Myathropa florea is a common hoverfly, whose larvae feed on aphids. It is a wasp mimic.

This perennial of damp places rises like a Willowherb to nearly two metres in height, showing small, brown, gaping flowers.

Rose Campion as opposed to the rose-coloured hybrid between the red and white campion, is a native of southern Europe.

Male Marbled White have these more pronounced monochrome colouration. Females are creamier or even sandy.

The March flowering of our native primroses is a welcome sight in the countryside.

This is a roughly hairy, strong-smelling native plant, producing its white blotched purple flowers from June.

The lungwort in the cemetery is a cultivar, not one of our native lungworts, as revealed by its leaf shape.

This familiar native plant, with its all yellow flowers, flowers from June.

The flower of the Wall Lettuce has five yellow petals with flat ends serrated into five miniature triangles.

White Stonecrop is a creeping, perennial herb that forms mat-like stands.

Turkeytail is a colourful bracket fungus that appears to be made of concentric circles of banded colour, growing in tiered clumps.

This is the first sawfly seen in the cemetery. It is perhaps 9mm long. This species of sawfly is common throughout Britain.

(All species can be viewed—and searched—in the species section of the website.)

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 is a selection:

(All blog posts can be viewed in the blog section of the website.)

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