Administrative Boundary of West Sussex

About West Sussex

West Sussex is a county in the South East of England. Covering approximately 1,991 square kilometres of chalk downs, the Weald, and a long coastline on the English Channel, West Sussex had a population of approximately 880,000 at the 2021 Census. The county contains the cathedral and Roman palace at Chichester, Arundel Castle, the magnificent Petworth House with its Turner collection, the South Downs National Park, and the internationally renowned Goodwood Estate. Chichester, the Cathedral and Fishbourne Roman Palace Chichester — the county town and a cathedral city — retains its Roman street plan remarkably intact: the four principal streets (North, South, East, and West Streets) follow the grid of the Roman city of Noviomagus Reginorum, established in the 1st century AD, and the city's four medieval gateways sit at the ends of these axes. The Roman city walls, substantially rebuilt in the medieval period, survive as an almost complete circuit. Chichester Cathedral — the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity — is a Norman building, substantially constructed 1091–1184 and extended throughout the medieval period; the west front, with its Perpendicular central tower and detached bell tower (one of the very few detached cathedral bell towers surviving in England), creates one of the most distinctive cathedral silhouettes in England; inside, the 12th-century carved panels of the Raising of Lazarus and the Arrival at Bethany (the "Chichester Reliefs") are among the finest Romanesque carvings in England. Fishbourne Roman Palace — discovered during construction work in 1960 and excavated by Barry Cunliffe — is the largest known Roman domestic building in Britain: an enormous courtyard palace with formal garden, constructed around AD 75 and containing the finest in-situ Roman mosaic floors in Britain. Arundel Castle and Petworth House Arundel Castle, seat of the Duke of Norfolk (the Premier Duke and hereditary Earl Marshal of England), is one of the most spectacularly sited and most visited castles in England, its towers and Gothic Revival buildings rising above the Arun valley. The castle's original medieval elements (the Norman motte and shell keep, the 13th-century Barbican) are interspersed with Victorian Gothic reconstruction by Charles Alban Buckler (1890–1903) for the 15th Duke of Norfolk. Petworth House (National Trust) — a late 17th-century baroque country house in a 283-hectare park — contains one of the finest art collections in any National Trust property: paintings by Turner (who was a frequent visitor and painted many views of Petworth), Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Blake. The Carved Room, with its extraordinary limewood carvings by Grinling Gibbons (or his workshop), is one of the most extravagant decorative interiors in England. Goodwood and the South Downs The Goodwood Estate, near Chichester, encompasses Goodwood House (the seat of the Duke of Richmond, containing important collections of Canaletto paintings and Sèvres porcelain), Goodwood Racecourse (one of England's most beautiful racecourses, high on the Downs), and the motor circuit that hosts the Goodwood Festival of Speed and Goodwood Revival — two of the most popular automotive events in the world. The South Downs National Park (designated 2010) covers approximately 1,627 square kilometres of chalk downland, the Weald, and river valleys across West Sussex, East Sussex, and Hampshire. GIS and Boundary Data The administrative boundary of West Sussex County Council is available for free download in GeoJSON and KML formats, sourced from the ONS Open Geography Portal (Crown copyright 2024). Compatible with QGIS, ArcGIS, Mapbox, and Google Earth, the dataset supports Roman heritage mapping, castle conservation, National Park management, art collection geography, and demographic analysis across the West Sussex local authority area.

📍 Administrative boundary of West Sussex county