Things to do in Crawley.

Start at Tilgate Park. It is the reason most people come, and a morning covers the lakes, a play area and the walled garden maze without paying for anything but the car park. Add Tilgate Zoo if you have younger children, or Go Ape if you have older ones. Second, walk the Red Route at Buchan Country Park: 2.75km of waymarked woodland and heath, free to enter, free to park, and the single best hour Crawley offers outdoors. Third, and this is the one visitors miss, drive out to St Nicholas Church at Worth. It is Anglo-Saxon, largely original, and the oldest building in the borough by roughly nine hundred years. If the weather has collapsed, swap the third for K2 and its 50-metre pool.

Tilgate Park does the heavy lifting: two large play areas, a free maze in the walled garden, boating on the lake in summer, and a café. Tilgate Zoo inside the park is modest in scale, more an hour or two than a full day, with meerkats, lemurs, capybara and tapir. Go Ape suits from age four on the Treetop Adventure course, though the Treetop Challenge needs age ten and a metre forty in height, and children aged ten to fifteen need a participating adult for every two of them. K2 Crawley has a leisure pool and Playworld soft play. Buchan Country Park is free and beautiful but has no playground, so it works better for families who want a walk than for those who need equipment.

Buchan Country Park is the strongest free day out in Crawley: 170 acres of woodland and heath, Green Flag rated, free to enter and free to park, open 7am to 9pm every day of the year. Tilgate Park is also free to enter, with its play areas, lakes and walled garden maze all open to anyone, though you pay to leave a car there. Worth Park and its restored Victorian gardens are free and never close. Crawley Museum charges nothing for general admission, and St Nicholas Church at Worth is free and open daily. Ifield Watermill opens free on around eleven Sunday afternoons a year, and those dates are the whole proposition, so check before setting out.

K2 Crawley is the default: a 50-metre pool with a movable floor, a separate leisure pool, soft play and a sports hall, open from 6am on weekdays. Casual prices are not published online, so ring ahead. The Hawth runs matinees through much of the year alongside its evening programme. Crawley Museum is small, free and entirely indoors, but only opens Thursday to Saturday, which catches people out. Clip 'n Climb at Pease Pottage has 33 climbing challenges and a soft play area, with the significant catch that it closes Tuesday to Thursday during term time. County Mall covers shopping and lunch when everything else has failed.

Crawley is a New Town, designated in January 1947, and its own council describes the plan as merging the villages of Three Bridges and Ifield with the small market town of Crawley filling the gaps. That history is more visible than visitors expect. St Nicholas Church at Worth was built between about 950 and 1050, and its nave walls, three great arches and chancel are almost entirely original Anglo-Saxon stonework, with a chancel arch among the largest in Britain. Crawley Museum occupies The Tree, a timber-framed hall-house begun in the late 15th century and much extended since, and covers everything from an Iron Age settlement to the arrival of the New Town. Ifield Watermill has stood on its site since 1660 and is believed to be the only working watermill in West Sussex still driven by its original water source.

Crawley has two stations and the difference matters. Three Bridges sits on the fast Brighton main line: about 43 minutes to London Victoria and 30 to Brighton, direct. Crawley station is slower to London, around 50 minutes, but it is a five to ten minute flat walk into Queens Square, which makes it the better arrival point for the town centre. Gatwick Airport is roughly ten minutes from Crawley station. Note that Gatwick Express does not stop at Three Bridges, and that Brighton from Crawley station means changing at Three Bridges. Drivers come off the M23, which bounds the town to the east and south; four junctions serve Crawley and Gatwick. Kingsgate multi-storey on Queensway (RH10 1EN) is the main central car park, £2.50 for three hours and £9 for 24, with the Town Hall multi-storey (RH10 1UZ) cheaper at £5.50 for 24 hours. Maidenbower Parade and Broadfield Barton are free. For a half day, park once in the centre and combine Queens Square with Crawley Museum on the old High Street, remembering it only opens Thursday to Saturday. For a full day, give the morning to Tilgate Park and the afternoon to either the zoo, Go Ape or a drive out to Nymans, which is only about seven minutes away. Buchan Country Park works as a self-contained two hours at either end of the day, and parking there costs nothing. Bus 2 reaches Tilgate at weekends and on bank holidays; on weekdays it stops at K2, a 15 to 20 minute walk short of the park. Metrobus single fares are capped at £3.