Shepperton
Shepperton is a village in the Spelthorne district, in north Surrey, England, around south west of central London. The settlement is on the north bank of the River Thames, between the towns of Chertsey and Sunbury-on-Thames. The village is mentioned in a document of 959 AD and in Domesday Book.
In the 19th century, resident writers and poets included Rider Haggard, Thomas Love Peacock, George Meredith, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who were attracted by the proximity of the River Thames. The river was painted at Walton Bridge in 1754 by Canaletto and in 1805 by Turner. Shepperton Lock and nearby Sunbury Lock were built in the 1810s, to facilitate river navigation.
Urbanisation began in the latter part of the 19th century, with the construction in 1864 of the Shepperton Branch Line, which was sponsored by William Schaw Lindsay, the owner of Shepperton Manor. Its population rose from 1,810 residents in the early 20th century to a little short of 10,000 in 2011. Lindsay had hoped to extend the railway via Chertsey to connect to the South Western Main Line, however the village station remains a terminus. The rise in population and passing trade led to small businesses lining most of its high street by the end of the 20th century.
Shepperton Film Studios is in the neighbouring village of Littleton, approximately to the north. The Swan Sanctuary and two SSSIs, one of which is managed by Surrey Wildlife Trust, are nearby.
Toponymy
The first written record of Shepperton is from a charter of 959, in which it appears as Scepertune. The name is thought to derive from the Old English scēp, hirde and tūn. The name is generally agreed to mean "shepherd's farm" or "shepherd's settlement".History
Early history
The earliest evidence of human activity in the local area is from the middle Neolithic. A henge, taking the form of a penannular ring ditch, was discovered in the late 1980s, close to the River Ash, to the north of Shepperton Green. The structure was around in diameter and is thought to have been constructed BCE. The main entrance to the henge was aligned with the position of the sun at sunrise on the summer solstice and lumps of red ochre had been placed inside the ditch to mark the position of the most southerly moonrise. The ditch appeared to have been refilled and re-excavated in the late Neolithic. Two burials were discovered at the site - a torso, probably male, and an almost complete skeleton of a female. Radiocarbon dating showed that the woman had lived in the late 3rd millennium BCE and analysis of the isotope composition of her teeth suggested that she had grown up in an area where lead-zinc ore was found, possibly Derbyshire, the Mendips or the North Pennines. A reconstruction of the face of the woman from the skull was created at the University of Manchester in 2004.Finds from the Iron Age include an inhumation of a woman in her 40s, found on Chertsey Road, and iron swords, discovered at Shepperton Ranges. Pewter plates, from the latter site, are thought to date from the late Roman period. Evidence of late-Iron Age and Saxon settlements was found at Shepperton Green in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Later history
Shepperton is recorded in Domesday Book of 1086 as Scepertone. It had a population of 25 households and was held by Westminster Abbey; it had eight hides, pasture for seven carucates and one weir. In total, the annual amount rendered was £6.The Church Lane and Church Square area, leading to and next to the river predates by several centuries the High Street as the village nucleus. When the Thames Valley Railway built in 1864 the terminus of Shepperton railway station, north, for the 12 initial years a single train and track running to and from Strawberry Hill, the village slowly expanded into its northern fields. Its coming which was largely due to contributions and permission of W. S. Lindsay the owner of Shepperton's manor.
The River Thames was important for transport from the late 13th century and carried barley, wheat, peas and root vegetables to London's markets; later timber, building materials such as bricks, sand and lime, and gunpowder, see the Wey Navigation.
While the village was wholly agricultural until the 19th century, there are originally expensive gravestones of the local minor gentry in the churchyard, two of which are dedicated to their naturalised black servants, Benjamin and Cotto Blake who both died in 1781. These bear the inscription "Davo aptio, Argo fidelior, ipso Sanchone facetior". During this long period since the conquest the wealth of the local rector and his bishop was great: William Grocyn was rector 1504–1513 and was an Oxford classical academic who corresponded regularly with Erasmus and Lewis Atterbury expended much of the large parish revenues on having the large tower rebuilt.
A large net income of rents and tithes of £499 per year was paid to the rectory belonging to S. H. Russell in 1848; this compares to £600 of poor relief, including for supporting its workhouse, paid out in 1829.
A change to secular council-administered rather than church-administered public services followed the establishment of poor law unions and Sanitary Districts and was completed with the founding, in 1889, of the Middlesex County Council and Staines Rural District from 1896. In 1930 on the rural district's abolition, Shepperton became part of the Sunbury-on-Thames Urban District until its dissolution into a reduced and reconfigured county of Surrey in 1965. Three districts of the historic county thus did not become part of Greater London: Staines Urban District also joined Surrey and Potters Bar Urban District joined Hertfordshire. In 1951 the civil parish had a population of 6060. On 1 April 1974 the parish was abolished.
In 2025, a new sand and gravel quarry, operated by Cemex, was opened in Shepperton.
;Use in semi-fiction and alleged hauntings
In semi-fiction, George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life telling the Sad Fortunes of The Rev. Amos Barton, gives a thinly veiled picture of Chilvers Coton's church and village in the early 19th century in which she uses the name Shepperton. If anything real is to be gleaned for its use, it is perhaps a passing similarity. Shepperton Manor by John Mason Neale was contemporaneously written in 1844 fifteen years after he had spent six years living in the village. Old parts of Shepperton are said to be haunted by the ghost of a headless monk. Battlecrease Hall is alleged by its owners and certain visitors to have poltergeists.
Conservation areas
Church Square in Old Shepperton
Leading to this is a short, since 1989 bypassed, winding lane from the High Street to Church Square, flanked by Shepperton Manor and the cricket ground, with some listed walls. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described the view looking towards the south-east of the square with its now listed buildings and river opening as "one of the most perfect village pictures that the area has to offer". It offers two pub/restaurants two hotels, the Anchor Hotel and the Warren Lodge Hotel. In this little square there is also the King's Head public house.The riverside manor, late 18th century,, features a room painted and rendered to look like a tent or draped damask. Also Grade II* listed is the c. 1500 timber framed Old Rectory refronted in the early 18th century, and including a reception hall built in 1498. Its front cladding has mathematical tiles.
Listed in the same high category of listed building is the parish church, St Nicholas' – its dedication is as with the ancient riverside churches of Thames Ditton and Chiswick. Also architecturally Grade II* is restored half timbered Winches Cottage on the west side of the lane which is 17th century.
Lower Halliford
The village includes the neighbourhood of Lower Halliford, formerly a near but separate hamlet, which historian Susan Reynolds places at the eastern end of a reduced, river bend-consumed half of the early medieval village, east of the Old Shepperton Conservation Area due to erosion.This area is typified by a small number of detached classical three-storey 18th century riverside houses high on the riverside road on the outside of the river bend; the bend being flanked by riverside meadows with small boat moorings, low rise chalet-style houses to the south west, the Las Palmas Estate, named after the land once being that of the Spanish Ambassador; further west by the wooded Shepperton Cricket Club and by the village Green, Bishop Duppas Park to the east, formerly Lower Halliford Common and in a small part owned by the Old Manor House.
From the 1760s—1860s a ropery was an industry here then from the 1860s—1870s brick clay was extracted.
Halliford Manor, confusingly also called The Old Manor, dates to at least the 13th century and ownership became royal, being held by Elizabeth I and the wives of Charles I and Charles II. The Bishop of Winchester, Brian Duppa owned the waterside meadows adjoining to the south and was also an important landowner in Croydon's history, see Duppas Hill. Wealthy writers built or expanded homes here in the 19th century, primarily as summer residences, such as Rider Haggard, Thomas Love Peacock, George Meredith and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The Old Manor became yet another rebuilt Georgian house. The house which features a modillioned eaves cornice and glazing-bar sash windows to the first floor. Halliford School in the centre of this area was the 18th–19th century home of Emma Hamilton, mistress of Admiral Nelson.
The 21st century fully renovated hotel and restaurant, Harrison's with river views is here beside the shorter Red Lion public house which in turn has a narrow, secluded south-facing public house picnic area overlooking the relatively narrow, non-tidal river Thames. It is for this reason a bridge and ferry was recorded here from 1274 to 1410.
The tern is applicable also to the mostly riverside homes and public park almost surrounded by the River Thames, south of the road from Kingston to Chertsey including next to Walton Bridge by Walton on Thames. The main park is Bishop Duppas Park and almost surrounds completely the Old Manor.
There is mention of Halliford in 962 and there was a settlement there by 1194. However the division into Upper and Lower Halliford does not appear until the late 13th century. Upper Halliford is a large hamlet in the parish of Sunbury, but Lower Halliford was almost certainly the main settlement of the manor. The creation of Desborough Cut diverted the main navigation of the Thames away from the Lower Halliford and Shepperton loop, rendering flooding far less common.
The poet Thomas Love Peacock lived at Elm Bank House here from 1822 until his death in 1866.