St Andrew's Church

St Andrew's Church is the Church of England parish church of Tarring, West Sussex, England. Founded in the 11th century in a then rural parish which had earlier been granted to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the church remained a peculier of Canterbury for many centuries thereafter. It served nearby parishes when their churches fell into disrepair, John Selden was baptised here, and the church became a base for smuggling. The present building is mostly 13th-century, and its tall spire is a landmark in the area. The church is a Grade II* Listed Building.

The parish of West Tarring is now part of the Borough of Worthing, but has ancient origins as a South Downs strip parish of about 1,200 acres . It ran for about 3 miles from its northern extremity at Bost Hill, on the track to Findon , to the English Channel coast in the south, and was much narrower apart from a thin strip of land extending westwards. Many coastal parishes in Sussex were this shape: many different soils and varieties of land would be included within the boundaries, from chalky downland in the north to marshy grassland near the coast. Two settlements developed, of which West Tarring was the larger and more central. Salvington, the other settlement in the parish, is high on the slopes of the South Downs.

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