Worthing sits between the South Downs and the English Channel, and both do most of the work of making the town liveable. A national park sits on the northern edge. A coast sits on the southern edge. Green space is under two hundred metres from the average front door. The town itself is largely the strip in between.
Green-space access is the standout figure. The average Worthing home sits within about 200 metres of a park, common, sports ground, or similar green feature, and about 18 separate green spaces sit within a kilometre. That's a few minutes' walk to the nearest and enough choice within an easy loop that no household should have to fight for a bench. Water access is close too: the average home sits within about 660 metres of water, with a similar count of blue-space features inside the kilometre radius. The water is either the English Channel to the south or one of the culverted streams that thread the coastal plain on their way to it.
The physical geography breaks cleanly into two axes. Northward the ground rises into the South Downs, a national park; the borough's northern edge climbs the lower slopes at High Salvington and Findon Valley, and the highest point sits at Cissbury Ring, an Iron Age hillfort ringed by prehistoric flint mines. Southward is the English Channel, at an average distance of about 1.35 kilometres from the typical Worthing home, with about one in five postcodes sitting within 500 metres of the shore. Between the two, the coastal plain runs east and west as a mostly continuous urban strip. Worthing is the largest link in that chain, with Ferring, Goring-by-Sea, East Preston, Angmering, and Lancing running alongside, each carrying its own conservation-area boundary and its own opinion on where the next village begins.
The lived character of the area follows the geography. The seafront runs along the town's southern edge and gets used year-round by residents rather than seasonal visitors, which is the mark of a coastal town where the sea has been absorbed into ordinary life rather than saved up for the summer holidays. The Worthing parkrun uses the promenade as its course every Saturday. The bowls green at Beach House Park has hosted the Men's World Bowls Championship, which is the kind of fact that surfaces at quiz nights and nowhere else. The Downs to the north are open access for walking and cycling, and Cissbury Ring is a national-standard heritage site with its hillfort and flint mines. An ancient-woodland block sits on the borough's western edge near Ferring, one of the last surviving on the Sussex coastal plain, though for reasons of boundary technicality the borough itself records no ancient woodland cover of its own.
Rated excellent, five out of five on surroundings. A national park at one edge, an ocean at the other, a green space at every doorstep, and a coastal plain that has been used by people since long before it was called Worthing. The area around Worthing is what Worthing sells itself on. And on this dimension, the town is not overselling.