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Ashtead is a village and civil parish in Surrey and has a railway station on secondary routes to Horsham and Guildford, formerly the Portsmouth Main Line. It is separated from Leatherhead by the M25 motorway, and from Epsom by Ashtead Common and Langley Vale. Its local administration is the Mole Valley District. Ashtead is on western slopes of the Mole Gap of the North Downs and is on the A24 where it is a single carriageway as is generally the case within the circuit of the M25 motorway. Ashtead parish covers 11.59 km2 (4.47 sq mi) and it had a population of 14,169 in the 2011 UK census. It was a part of Leatherhead Urban District between 1933 and 1974. [edit] History
[edit] Pre-historyThe earliest evidence of human activity is from the Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods. A backed blade made of flint, dating from 50,000 to 12,000 years before present (BP), was found during pipeline excavations in Lower Ashtead, near Barnett Wood Lane and tranchet axes, dating from 15,000 to 5000 BP, have been discovered in Ottways Lane and Glebe Road. During the demolition of Parsons Mead School in 2009, pottery from the Neolithic was found which contained charcoal that was radiocarbon dated to 3775-3659 BP. Bronze Age artefacts discovered in the village include a spearhead and pottery sherds. [edit] Roman and SaxonAshtead was the site of a major Roman brickworks in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. The site on Ashtead Common consisted of a corridor villa and kilns adjacent to a series of claypits. A bath house was also provided for the use of the workers. The complex was excavated in the 1920s and it is now protected by scheduled monument status. Bricks and tiles produced in Ashtead were most likely transported via a short branch road to Stane Street, the Roman road that runs to the south east of the village centre. Remains of a building close to St Giles' Church, suggest that Roman occupation of Ashtead continued into the 4th century. Although there is no archaeological evidence of Anglo-Saxon occupation in the village, Ashtead would have been administered as part of the Copthorne Hundred.[1] There may have been a small chapel, likely to have been controlled by a minster at Leatherhead, which was a royal vill. In 1984, an Anglo-Saxon cemetery was discovered on the site of the former Goblin factory in Ermyn Way, Leatherhead (now the location of the offices of Esso). Excavations uncovered the remains of at least 40 individuals and the artefacts found, including knives, buckles and necklaces, suggest that they were pagan burials.[1] [edit] MedievalAshtead appears in the Domesday Book as Stede and was held by the Canons of Bayeux from the Bishop of Bayeux. Its assets were: three hides and one virgate; 16 ploughs, woodland for seven hogs and of meadow. In total, it rendered £12 per year.[2] The de Warenne Family, the Earls of Surrey, held the manor in the 12th century. In the second half of the 13th century, it passed to the de Montfort family. During the Second Barons' War (1264-1267), Ashtead men are known to have fought on the side of Simon de Montfort. The de Montforts and their descendants continued to own the manor until the death of Baldwin de Freville in 1419, when it passed to his brother-in-law, Sir Roger Aston. Ashtead passed through several generations of the Aston family until 1543, when Edward Aston returned the manor to the Crown in exchange for land in Stafford and Derby. During the late 14th century, tile manufacturing was again taking place on Ashtead Common. Records from the Manor of Banstead indicate that a "Henry the Tyler of Asshstede" supplied over 10,000 roof tiles in 1372-3, and in 1384 the same individual also supplied the lord of the manor of Ashtead with tiles for "The Lord's Kitchen." It is possible that, during the 1290s, the tiles for the building of Pacchesham Manor, Leatherhead, were also manufactured on Ashtead Common. There is no mention of Henry the Tyler after 1400, and it seems likely that the medieval tileworks closed around this time.[3] The area now bordered by Barnett Wood Lane, Agates Lane, Ottways Lane and Harriots Lane, was formerly a separate manor called Little Ashtead, which was held by Merton Priory in the middle ages. Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the mid-16th century, the area was known as Prior's Farm. [edit] Early modernDocuments surviving from the mid-17th century, detail the organisation of the manor during the reign of Charles II: Two common fields, together totalling and representing around 30% of the cultivatable land in the village, were divided into strips of around 1 acre each. The strips were distributed between 52 families and the planting would have been regulated by the manor court. In 1656, 17 of these strips were held by the rector and provided an income for the parish priest. The remainder of the cultivatable land had already been enclosed and was either held by the Lords of the Manor or by other prominent individuals, including the Stydolf family of Norbury Park. Ashtead is mentioned twice in Samuel Pepys' diaries. Part of his reads:
For much of the early modern period, Ashtead was owned by the Howard family. Sir Robert Howard purchased the manor from his cousin Henry Howard, the 6th Duke of Norfolk, in 1680 and is credited with transforming the land into a Gentleman's country seat.[4] Sir Robert built a new mansion and also enclosed the surrounding park to create a formal garden.[5] The diarist, John Evelyn, visited the house shortly after it was completed in 1684, admiring the paintings by the Italian-born artist Antonio Verrio and remarking upon the "swete park upon the Downe." Celia Fiennes described the brick-built mansion as having "an abundance of pictures" and "very good tapestry hangings". Sir Robert's guests also included Charles II, James II and William III.
[edit] 19th centuryFor the first seven decades of the 19th century, Ashtead remained a predominantly farming community. The manor continued to be owned by members of the Howard family and was inherited by Mary Howard in 1818. Mary Howard was a major benefactor to the village and was responsible for founding St Giles' School. She endowed the almshouses and, together with her husband, Fulk Greville Howard, initiated a major redevelopment of the parish church.[6] In 1825 George Rennie and his brother, John, proposed the construction of The Grand Imperial Ship Canal, between Deptford and Portsmouth, to reduce the transit time from the capital to the south coast from 12 days to 24 hours and to avoid hostile waters in the event of war. The canal would have run across Ashtead Common, along the course of The Rye. The two common fields were enclosed in 1838, bringing to an end the open-field system in the manor. The land was divided into forty rectangular fields, each of around , which were leased to local farmers.[7] The glebe strips were taken over by the Howards and the rector was given land to the south of the village centre in compensation. In around 1850, the comprising the remaining core of Little Ashtead manor was sold for development, marking the start of a long period of housebuilding in the village. The railway line through Ashtead was built by the Epsom and Leatherhead Railway Company and opened on 1 February 1859. It was constructed as a single-track line and, on opening, Ashtead railway station had only one platform and trains only stopped by request. Initially all services were operated by the London and South Western Railway (LSWR) and, for the first two months, only ran as far as . The completion of the line through enabled these trains to be extended to from April of the same year. In August 1859, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LBSCR) began to run trains from Leatherhead to , but did not begin stopping at Ashtead until the following year. After the death of Mary Howard in 1877, much of the village was offered for sale. Ashtead Common was purchased by Thomas Lucas, who sold it four years later, in 1889, to the banker Pantia Ralli. The rest of the land, much of it farmland, was split into eight separate lots. Since the sale coincided with a period of depression in British agriculture, the land sold cheaply. The lot containing Ashtead Park and Home Farm was withdrawn from sale when it failed to meet its reserve price[8] and was acquired by Pantia Ralli in 1889. By 1887 the majority of the farms in Ashtead had been broken up and the land was in the hands of eight major owners and many smaller ones.[8] New houses began to be built on the east side of Woodfield Lane and to the north of Barnett Wood Lane. The area west of the station (including Links Road and Ashtead Woods Road) had been marked out for housing by 1894, but construction was delayed by difficulties in securing access over the railway.[9] Elsewhere building work was also slow[9] and the population of the village increased from 906 in 1871 to 1,881 in 1901.[8] [edit] 20th centuryDevelopment continued in the first decade of the 20th century and the population had reached 2,921 by 1911. Many of the new homes were in the west of the parish and housebuilding took place along Skinners Lane, Ottways Lane and Oakfield Road. By 1914, new houses had also appeared along Leatherhead Road, Woodfield Road and The Marld.[10] Many of the new residents were professionals who commuted to London by train.[10] During the First World War, several hundred men from the 21st Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers were billeted in the village and were responsible for constructing a convalescent hospital at Woodcote Park in Epsom. George V visited the village by train in October 1914 to inspect the troops. By January 1915, there were around 1500 soldiers based in Ashtead. The war memorial at St George's Church was dedicated in 1920.[11] The inter-war years saw the most rapid period of residential development, stimulated in part by the final breakup of the Ashtead Park estate, following the death of Pantia Ralli in 1924. The electrification of the railway line in 1925 also made the village more attractive to potential homeowners. The population increased from 3,226 in 1921 to 9,336 in 1939.
In September 1939, children were evacuated to Ashtead from Streatham and Dulwich. A unit of the Royal Norfolk Regiment was stationed in the village at the start of the war and, from 1941, Canadian soldiers were billeted locally. Land bordering Craddocks Avenue was taken over for war allotments and pigs were reared on vacant building plots on the Overdale estate. In 1940 a company of the Home Guard was formed. In 1940 and 1941, several buildings in Ashtead suffered damage as a result of enemy bombing during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, including St Andrew's School, which was almost completely destroyed.[12] In the final year of the war, two V-1 flying bombs landed in the village and a V-2 rocket landed to the south of Ashtead Park in February 1945. The 1944 Greater London Plan placed much of the land surrounding Ashtead in the protected Metropolitan Green Belt, which severely limited the scope for urban expansion. The northern half of Ashtead Park was threatened with development from the late 1940s and so it was purchased by Surrey County Council in 1957, before being passed to the ownership of the Leatherhead Urban District Council. In 1988, three conservation areas were designated in the village. [edit] Surrey Research Tips[edit] GovernmentAdministrative boundaries of the county of Surrey (Surrey History Centre. The centre has a website with a number of useful indexes--titheholders in various parishes, deaths at the county gaol, etc.)
[edit] Registration Districts
[edit] GENUKI provisionsThe website GENUKI provides a very comprehensive list of reference sources for the County of Surrey. It includes:
[edit] History
[edit] Maps
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