Chertsey

Chertsey is a town in the Borough of Runnymede, Surrey, England, southwest of central London. It grew up around Chertsey Abbey, founded in AD 666 by St Erkenwald, and gained a market charter from Henry I. A bridge across the River Thames first appeared in the early 15th century.
The River Bourne through the town meets the Thames at Weybridge. The Anglican church has a medieval tower and chancel roof. The 18th-century listed buildings include the current stone Chertsey Bridge and Botleys Mansion. A curfew bell, rung at 8pm on weekdays from Michaelmas to Lady Day ties with the romantic local legend of Blanche Heriot, marked by a statue of her and the bell at Chertsey Bridge. Green areas include the Thames Path National Trail, Chertsey Meads and a round knoll with remains of a prehistoric hill fort known as Eldebury Hill. Pyrcroft House dates from the 18th century and Tara from the late 20th.
Train services are run between Chertsey railway station and London Waterloo by South Western Railway. The town is within the M25, accessible via junction 11. It has a population of 15,967.

Toponymy

The first written mention of Chertsey is by Bede, in which he describes the location as Cerotaesei, id est Ceroti insula. The settlement appears in 13th-century copies of 7th-century charters as Cirotesige, Cirotesge and Cerotesge. The manor is recorded as Certesi in Domesday Book in 1086 and as Certeseye in 1129–30. Other later forms include Charteseye, Charsey and Chutsey. The first use of the modern spelling "Chertsey" is from 1559.
The first part of the toponym "Chertsey" is thought to refer to a Celtic individual, whose name was subsequently Latinised to Cerotus. The second part derives from the Old English ēg and means "island or well-watered land".

History

Chertsey is one of the oldest market towns in England. Its Church of England parish church dates to the 12th century and the farmhouse of the Hardwick in the elevated southwest is of 16th-century construction. It grew to all sides but the north around Chertsey Abbey, founded in 666 A.D. by Eorcenwald, Bishop of London, using a donation by Frithwald. Until the end of use of the hundreds, used in the feudal system until the establishment of Rural Districts and Urban District Councils, the name chosen for the wider Chertsey area hundred was Godley Hundred.
In the 9th century, the abbey and town were sacked by the Danes, leaving a mark today in the name of the neighbouring village, Thorpe, and refounded as a subsidiary abbey from Abingdon Abbey by King Edgar in 964.
Chertsey appears in the Domesday Book as Certesi. It was held partly by Chertsey Abbey and partly by Richard Sturmid from the abbey. Its Domesday assets were: 5 hides, 1 mill and 1 forge at the hall, 20 ploughs, 80 hectares of meadow, woodland worth 50 hogs. It rendered a larger than average sum for the book of manor and ecclesiastical parish entries, £22.
The abbey grew to become one of the largest Benedictine abbeys in England, supported by large fiefs in the northwest corner of Sussex and Surrey until it was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1536. The King took stone from the abbey to construct his palace at Oatlands Palace; the villagers also used stone for raising the streets. By the late 17th century, only some outer walls of the abbey remained. During this period until at least 1911 a wider area was included in Chertsey: Ottershaw was an ecclesiastical district; whose church-sponsored schools were built in 1870, so too was Addlestone.
Today the history of the abbey is reflected in local place names and the surviving former fishponds that fill with water after heavy rain. The nearby Hardwick Court Farm, now much reduced in size and cut off from the town by the M25, has the successor to the abbey's large and well-supported 15th-century tithe barn, mostly rebuilt in the 17th century.
The eighteenth-century Chertsey Bridge provides an important cross-river link, and Chertsey Lock is a short distance above it on the opposite side. On the south west corner of the bridge is a bronze statue of local heroine Blanche Heriot striking the bell by Sheila Mitchell^FRBS.
The summit of St Ann's Hill in Chertsey was a vital viewing point for the Anglo-French Survey, which calculated the distance between the Royal Greenwich Observatory and the Paris Observatory using trigonometry. A grid of triangles was measured all the way to the French coast, to join up with the French survey; St Ann's Hill was crucial for the link with the base-line of the English survey on Hounslow Heath.
In the 18th century, Chertsey Cricket Club was one of the strongest in the country and beat the rest of England by more than an innings in 1778. The Duke of Dorset,, was appointed Ambassador to France in 1784. He arranged to have the Chertsey cricket team travel to France in 1789 to introduce cricket to the French nobility. However, the team, on arriving at Dover, met the Ambassador returning from France at the outset of the French Revolution and the opportunity was missed.
The original Chertsey railway station was built by the London and Southampton Railway and opened on 14 February 1848. The present station, across the level crossing from the site of the original one, was opened on 10 October 1866 by the London and South Western Railway. The Southern Railway completed electrification of the line on 3 January 1937.
Samuel Lewis devotes one of his longest entries to the small town in his 1848 topographical guide to England:
Chertsey Regatta has been held on the river for over 150 years, which is in the non-Olympic regional sport of skiffing which has a club on this reach of river. Similarly the Olympic sport of rowing has an annual Burway Regatta above Chertsey Lock, an area of former flood meadow, reservoirs and golf course. The Burway was in the medieval period let out by the abbey as over of grazing pasture. The Burway faces Laleham Park, the largest municipal park of a neighbouring borough.
Chertsey was the home of Charles James Fox, who had wished to be buried there but instead is buried in Westminster Abbey. The nearby estate that is now the large Foxhills Golf Estate, Spa and Restaurant, close to Ottershaw and Lyne, was named in honour of him, but was not his home.
A long history of metal working exists, and from the 19th century a prosperous bell foundry, Eldridge, was in Windsor Street. Herrings, an iron foundry, flourished during the 19th century and was situated in Gogmore Lane.
The Chertsey troop of the Berkshire Yeomanry occupied the Drill Hall on Drill Hall Road since 1977. The unit has close ties with the borough and was granted the freedom of Runnymede in 2009. The Drill Hall closed at the end of March 2010 and the troop had to return to Windsor due to cuts in the Territorial Army in 2009–2010.

Geography

Location and topography

Chertsey is part of the London commuter belt in the outermost part of the Greater London Urban Area and is served by Chertsey railway station and separated from all adjoining settlements by the buffer of designated areas of Green Belt. Measuring from centre to centre, Chertsey is from London, from Addlestone, and from the county town, Guildford. The traditional, yet commercially important town centre is a conservation area, joined by an arcade to a medium-sized supermarket and car park to the south.
The character of this central area is that of a traditional small town, with relatively narrow building frontages set hard up against the pavement, so that they clearly define the public space. The centre of the town is richly endowed with listed buildings most of which date from the 16th and 17th centuries. In addition to the more than 56 numbered houses/shops nationally listed buildings, nine other buildings in the conservation area are locally listed. A further 11 buildings outside the centre are also nationally listed.
Elevation is generally low at 14m in the Town Centre and 11 m on the River Thames at Chertsey Bridge, making it the lowest place in Chertsey. The highest point is on the peak of wooded and inhabited St. Ann's Hill which reaches an elevation of 77 m, making it the second-highest point in Runnymede. Across Chertsey bridge, pictured, on the Middlesex side of the river is the Thames Path National Trail and Chertsey Lock.

Geology

Chertsey town centre lies on a floodplain terrace between the River Thames to the north and The Bourne to the south. Much of the terrace consists of river gravels deposited on the sandy Bagshot Beds, which in turn overlie the London Clay. The soil in this area is loamy and the water table is naturally high.
St Ann's Hill appears as an island of Tertiary strata, surrounded by river deposits. The hill is composed primarily of the Bagshot Beds, but is capped by Bracklesham Clays with a thick pebble bed. South west of the town centre, the chert and flint pebble deposits at Cockcrow Hill and Sandgates were probably deposited by an earlier course of The Bourne.

Economy

Aside from being a London "commuter town", Chertsey is home to the head office of Compass Group, and the UK head office and European headquarters of Samsung Electronics. Samsung moved there in 2005; previously the Samsung offices were in New Malden.
Thorpe Park, part of Merlin Entertainments Ltd, is on the northern boundary, connected by frequent buses from Staines-upon-Thames and Chertsey.

Landmarks

Chertsey Bridge

Chertsey Bridge is a Scheduled Ancient Monument and Grade II* listed structure that has a listed City Post at one end, and nearby milestones. It is predominantly of ashlar light stone with two white flagstone york stone pavements with a low weight limit and narrow carriageways inappropriate to HGVs, which have Staines Bridge, Walton Bridge or motorway alternatives to reach Spelthorne.
Samuel Lewis included it in his opening description of the town above: "... over which is a handsome stone bridge of seven arches, built in 1785, at an expense of £13,000, defrayed jointly by the counties of Surrey and Middlesex..." It was built in 1783–1785 by James Paine.