Our estate
Captain Rowlands Coldicott bought the farmland here after the First World War and sold the first plots in Sea Way in 1920. He wanted a village rather than a development, spacious and informally laid out, with a greensward kept open to the sea and rows of beach huts along it.
A century later that is still recognisably what this is.
Where we are
Middleton on Sea sits on the West Sussex coast between Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, about six miles from Chichester and a mile off the A259.
The estate itself runs down to the sea between Middleton Road and the Greensward. Its private roads are Old Point, Sea Way, South Walk, East Close, West Close, Merry End and The Byway, together with the properties on Sea Lane and the nearer parts of Middleton Road.
The place
- History of the estate — how Middleton on Sea came to look the way it does.
- The village the sea took — the medieval Middleton, lost to the sea by 1849, and the poem about it.
- The Greensward — open land along the sea front, and a Site of Nature Conservation Importance.
- Beach huts — conditions, the waiting list, and the company that runs them.
- Coast and sea defences — erosion, the rock armour, and Arun District Council’s works.
- Words we use — twittens, greenswards and groynes, explained for anyone who did not grow up with them.
Protecting its character
- Village Design Statement — what makes the estate distinctive, and what we ask of new building.
- Conservation — briefing notes on conservation areas and estate infrastructure.