Window & Exterior Cleaning in Lancing

Lancing's coastline runs along a shingle beach that turns to sand at low tide, and South Lancing's seafront housing — much of it built up through the 20th century as the village's market gardens gave way to new streets — sits directly in the path of salt carried off the Channel. Alongside the beach, Widewater, a rare brackish lagoon with its own distinct ecology, adds a further source of damp, salt-tinged air to the immediate area. Between the two, render and glass on South Lancing's coastal streets need the same purified-water treatment as anywhere else on this stretch of coast, clearing salt residue without the streaking that ordinary water leaves behind.

North Lancing, the older of the village's two settlements, sits closer to the Downs than the coast, and its parish church, St James the Less, has genuine Saxon origins — a stone church stood on the site by the late 10th century, with traces of that original structure uncovered during repairs in 1994. The current building dates largely from around 1120, with a Transitional Norman south porch and a 13th-century nave, and carries a Grade I listing. Stone and flint construction this old calls for the same restraint as an old timber frame — no pressure washer, just purified water and a soft brush, gentle enough not to disturb centuries-old pointing or lichen-softened flint.

Lancing College Chapel, begun in 1868 and only finally completed in 2022 after 154 years of intermittent building, is the village's most visible landmark — a Gothic Revival structure in stone with the largest stained-glass rose window in England, visible from well out to sea and from the Downs above. It's not a typical residential client, but it's a useful marker of the flint and stone building tradition found across North Lancing's older core, in contrast to the render and uPVC of South Lancing's more recent coastal streets — two genuinely different sets of materials within the same village, needing much the same careful, low-impact method regardless of age.

Lancing Ring, a chalk downland nature reserve within the South Downs National Park, sits on the high ground immediately north of the village and is a well-known local landmark and viewpoint in its own right. Properties along North Lancing's northern edge, closest to the Ring, pick up more windblown chalk dust and pollen off the open downland than South Lancing's coastal streets do — a different kind of grime to salt spray, but one that leaves the same dull film on glass and solar panels if left unwashed.

Between the Downs rising behind North Lancing and the Channel along South Lancing's shingle beach, Lancing sits in a genuinely unusual position for a single village — most of the towns and villages we cover lean one way or the other, either coastal or downland, but Lancing gets a real dose of both. It's part of why exterior surfaces here can need more frequent attention than a village with just one of those conditions to contend with.

Lancing's original manor was divided at an early date into several smaller holdings, of which North Lancing and South Lancing became the two most significant — along with a third settlement, Pende, that has since vanished entirely. North Lancing, closer to the Downs, kept its historic core intact for centuries, while South Lancing, nearer the coast, stayed largely rural until the 19th and 20th centuries brought the growth that shaped the village into what it is today.

St James the Less, the parish church in North Lancing, carries a genuinely long history — a stone church is believed to have stood on the site since before the year 1000, and masonry evidence points to the current chancel dating from around 1120. Its south porch is Transitional Norman, the rest largely 13th-century with later window insertions, and it was awarded Grade I listed status in 1954, placing it among the most significant historic buildings in this part of West Sussex.

Lancing College was founded in 1848 by Nathaniel Woodard, at the time a curate in nearby Shoreham-by-Sea, as part of a wider effort to establish good, affordable schools for the middle classes. Its chapel, begun twenty years later in 1868 under architects R. H. Carpenter and William Slater, was dedicated to Saints Mary and Nicholas — named after the two ancient churches of Shoreham — and grew, in fits and starts across more than a century, into the largest school chapel in the world, finally completed with a new western porch in 2022. The school's alumni include the writers Evelyn Waugh and Tom Sharpe.

Lancing has a smaller, lighter claim to literary history too: Oscar Wilde stayed nearby in Worthing during the 1890s, and his original working title for The Importance of Being Earnest was Lady Lancing, before the play took the name it's known by today.

The railway reached Lancing in 1849, and the village grew steadily from there, with a particularly large wave of housing built after 1945 as the market gardens that had once covered much of South Lancing were gradually built over. We're based in Storrington and cover Lancing as part of our regular service area, reached along the coast road via Worthing.