Clapham is a rural village and civil parish in the Arun District of West Sussex, England. It lies on varying downslopes and escarpment of the South Downs National Park three miles (5 km) north of Angmering on the A280 road and north of the A27 crossroads. It is adjacent to the village of Patching. Geography The main part of the village is known simply as The Street, a single long dead-end road coming off the A280 and containing the majority of the village's housing. The Street is also home to the local school and, up a slight incline into the woods, the Church of St Mary the Virgin, a 12th-century building. The houses of The Street are a combination of 1930s council houses, much older original village cottages and post-Second World War bungalows in some of the new closes. A turn-off from the A280 a few hundred metres to the south of The Street leads into Brickworks Lane (although this name is not commonly used), named after the brickworks of the Clapham Common Brick & Tile Company which was based there from the early 20th century up until the 1970s, although the quantities of clay available meant that there had been brickmaking activity on the site since the 18th century. The site of the old brickworks is now occupied by a branch of the Travis Perkins builder's merchant's company, and at the end of Brickworks Lane there is a West Sussex County Council highways depot. Clapham Common itself turns off Brickworks Lane and is mostly made up of 1930s council houses. Both roads are also dead ends. The houses of the village are surrounded mostly by fields and woodland, but the increasing encroachment of housing and road-building into the area is decreasing this green belt. Arun District Council's local plan envisages that in the long term at least in the early 21st century Clapham and Patching will be slowly absorbed as conjoining suburbs of Durrington as more houses and retirement apartments become demanded. History Clapham is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086, where it is spelled Clopeham. The woods around the area made it an ideal location for the gathering of wood for timber and firewood, and led to the first Saxon settlements in the area. For many years much of the land around Clapham was owned by the Dukes of Norfolk and subsequently, after a land exchange, by