Early history gold
quarter stater coin, found in Guildford in 1974 The earliest evidence of human activity in the Guildford area is from
St Catherine's Hill, where
Mesolithic flint tools have been found. There may also have been
Bronze Age and
Iron Age settlements on the hill. Traces of a 2nd-century
villa were discovered at
Broadstreet Common during an excavation in 1998.
Anglo-Saxon period There is thought to have been an
Anglo-Saxon settlement in the Guildford area by the early 6th century, although its precise location is unclear. Excavations in the 1930s revealed a Saxon cemetery at Guildown at the east end of the Hog's Back. Burials took place at the site up to the mid-11th century, but the oldest skeletons were buried in the late 6th century. of King
Harthacnut, minted at Guildford in 1036 or 1037 The first written record of Guildford is from the will of
Alfred the Great, dated to around 880, in which the settlement was left to his nephew,
Aethelwold. Although it does not appear in the
Burghal Hidage, compiled , by the end of the 10th century the town was sufficiently important to be the location of a
Royal Mint. Coins were struck at Guildford from 978 until at least 1099. Aetheling was arrested by
Godwin, Earl of Wessex and his men were killed. Many of the skeletons showed evidence of a violent death and the skulls of two were between their legs, suggesting that they had been executed by decapitation. Aetheling was taken to
Ely, where he was blinded, and he is thought to have died there in February 1036. Its location, on Quarry Street, may indicate that, at the time of its construction, the High Street had either not been laid out or was not the principal road. There is no significant archaeological evidence of human activity in the modern town centre before the 11th century and it is possible that, for the majority of the Saxon period,
Stoke next Guildford, to the north, was the primary area of settlement.
Governance In
Domesday Book of 1086, Guildford appears as
Gildeford and is divided into seven parts, all of which were the property of
William I. Two of the areas were held by
reeves and four were held by
lesser tenants, one of whom was
Ranulf Flambard. The land directly controlled by the king included 175 homagers (heads of household), who lived in 75
hagae. Flambard's holding included three
hagae that accommodated six homagers and, in total, the town provided an annual income of £30 for the king. Guildford remained a property of the Crown throughout the Middle Ages and several kings, including
Henry II and
John are known to have visited regularly.
Henry III granted the town its first borough charter in January 1257, which permitted it to send two representatives to parliament. In August of the same year, he designated Guildford as the location of the Surrey County Court and
Assizes. In 1366,
Edward III issued a
fee farm grant, enabling the town to become partially self-governing in exchange for a yearly rent of £10.
Henry VII was responsible for granting Guildford its coat of arms in 1485 and, three years later, he awarded the charter of incorporation, which placed the administration of the borough in the hands of a mayor and burgesses, appointed from the merchants' guild. The modern system of local government began to emerge in the 1830s. Under the
Municipal Corporations Act 1835, a democratically elected council replaced the mayor and burgesses, and the borough expanded beyond the medieval town boundaries. A year later, the Guildford Poor Law Union was formed, with responsibility for a total area of stretching from
Godalming to
Woking. As a result of the
Local Government Act 1888, several responsibilities were transferred from the borough to the newly formed
Surrey County Council. The borough boundaries were extended again in both 1904 and 1933. The final enlargement took place in March 1974, when the present local authority was created from the merger of the borough with the Guildford Rural District.
Guildford Castle Guildford Castle is to the south of the modern town centre. Although it is not explicitly mentioned in Domesday Book, it is possible that it was included in one of the areas of land held by Ranulf Flambard. A polygonal stone
shell keep was built in chalk and flint rubblestone around the top of the motte in the early 12th Century, the remains of which are still visible. The square
keep, known as the Great Tower, was constructed in the mid-12th century from
Bargate stone. Originally built with only two floors, it was a "solar keep" and functioned primarily as a private residence, rather than as an administrative centre. At an unknown later date, a third storey was built directly on top of the crenelations, to bring the structure to its present height. The castle ceased to be a royal residence in the
Tudor period and it was leased from the Crown by Francis Carter in the reign of
James I. A Parliamentary survey in 1650 noted that the keep was still habitable, although the associated outbuildings are thought to have been ruinous by this time. In 1885, the borough purchased the castle grounds and opened them to the public three years later.
Guildford Friary The Guildford Black Friary was a community of
Dominicans, founded by
Eleanor of Provence, wife of Henry III, around 1275. It occupied a site of around beside the River Wey, to the north of the Town Ditch (now North Street). Excavations in the 1970s revealed that the original buildings were arranged around three sides of a central cloister, with a church to the south,
chapter house to the east and kitchen to the north. In 1630, John Annandale purchased the friary grounds and built a house there. The property passed through a series of private owners until 1794, when it was bought by the War Office. It was used as a barracks until the end of the Napoleonic Wars and then demolished in 1818. The grounds are indicated on an 1841 map of Guildford as the "Barrack Field" and shortly afterwards the area was divided into plots and sold for housebuilding. In 1956, the brewery merged with the
Meux Brewery of
Nine Elms to form Friary Meux. Brewing ceased in December 1968 and the site was sold to the developer,
MEPC plc. The brewery was demolished in 1974 and, after archaeological investigations had been concluded, construction of the Friary Centre began in 1978.
Transport and communications The eastwest route along the
North Downs has been in use since ancient times. In the late 19th century it was dubbed the
Pilgrims Way, but there is no convincing evidence of its use by pilgrims. The route consists of multiple parallel tracks and
hollow ways running along the top of and beneath the North Downs escarpment and is typical of other
ridgeway routes in the UK and Europe. Similarly, the path alongside the River Wey, running broadly northsouth, is also likely to have been used since antiquity. By the Tudor period, this route had become an important military supply line, linking London and
Chatham to
Portsmouth. A
turnpike road through Guildford, between London and Portsmouth, was created in 1749 and nine years later the roads across the Hog's Back and towards Leatherhead were also turnpiked. The present Farnham Road was built . The most recent major change to the local road network was the opening of the
A3 Guildford Bypass in 1934. The River Wey has been used for navigation since ancient times and during the Medieval period, there is thought to have been a wharf at Millmead. The
River Wey Navigation was authorised by
Act of Parliament in 1651. Twelve
locks (including two flood locks), and of new
cuts were constructed between the
River Thames and Guildford, and the waterway opened in 1653. The navigation had a positive impact on the economy of west Surrey. By the end of the 17th century,
timber was being transported via the river from the county boundary with
West Sussex and in 1724,
Daniel Defoe wrote that corn from Farnham was being sent by barge to London. The Act also allowed passengers to be transported via the Wey and the maximum one-way fare was capped at 1s, which was raised in 1671 to 1s 4d. Four locks were built as part of the works and the Town Bridge was altered to allow barges to pass beneath it. The period of the
American War of Independence (17751783) was particularly profitable for the two waterways, and a total of 17,000 tonnes of cargo was transported in 1776. (1958) The first railway to be constructed in Surrey was the
London to Southampton line, which opened in stages from May 1838.
Woking railway station, was built on the south side of the tracks for the convenience of those travelling by stagecoach from Guildford and quickly became the
railhead for the western half of the county.
Guildford railway station opened in 1845 as the terminus of a branch from Woking. Four years later, the line was extended to and the
Reading, Guildford and Reigate Railway opened at the same time. The final railway line, the
line from Surbiton via Effingham Junction was opened in February 1888, with a new station to the northeast of the town centre, which was later named .
Commerce and industry It is unclear when the first market took place at Guildford, but by 1276 one was being held in the High Street every Saturday. In the 1530s, there were three markets each week, for corn (the most profitable), for cattle, and for general produce and household items. In 1561, a market house was built "beneath the Gild Hall", but by 1626 it was no longer suitable to store the "graine accustimablie sold there" and the corn market was moved to the Tun Inn on the south side of the High Street. A purpose-built
Corn Exchange was erected there in 1818. In 1865, the market was relocated to North Street and in 1895, it moved to Woodbridge Road. Guildford's early prosperity was founded on the
wool trade. The North Downs provided good
grazing land for sheep, there were local deposits of
Fuller's earth in Surrey and the Wey provided a source of both water and power for
fulling mills. The town specialised in the manufacture of
kersey, a coarse cloth,
dyed and sold as "Guildford Blue". The Italian merchant,
Francesco di Marco Datini, is known to have purchased cloth from Guildford in the late 14th century and by the end of the 16th century, there were at least six dye works in the town. After the death of their father in 1882, brothers Charles Arthur and Leonard Gates took over the running of his shop, which held the local distribution franchise for
Gilbey's wines and spirits, and also sold beer. However, in 1885, the brothers were persuaded to join the
temperance movement, and they poured their entire stock into the gutters of the High Street. Left with no livelihood, they converted their now empty shop into a dairy. Using a
milk separator, they bought milk from local farmers, and after extracting the cream and whey, sold the skim back to the farmers for pig feed. In 1888 three more of the Gates brothers and their sons joined the business, which led to the formal registration of the company under the name of the
West Surrey Central Dairy Company, which after the development of its
dried milk baby formula in 1906 became
Cow & Gate. In 1900, the
Dennis Brothers company constructed what was probably the first purpose-built car factory in the country, on Bridge Street. This is now known as the
Rodboro Buildings, after a later occupant. The company soon outgrew the site, and between 1905 and 1913 production was gradually moved to a new factory near Woodbridge Hill.
Guildford in the World Wars At the start of the Second World War, 2500 children were
evacuated from southwest London to the Guildford area and in June the following year, evacuees arrived from Brighton. The borough council built 18 communal
air raid shelters, including the shelter at Foxenden Quarry, capable of accommodating 1000 people. In late 1940, six
British Restaurants were opened in the town and, in May the following year, the first
nursery school for children aged between two and five was opened, enabling their mothers to participate in war work. Over the course of the war, seven people were killed in the town as a result of enemy bombing, three of whom died when a
V-1 flying bomb landed in Aldersey Road in August 1944. learning to fire the
Bren Gun at Guildford in 1939 At the start of the war,
Stoughton Barracks became a training centre for army recruits and
George VI visited twice in late 1939. The defence of the town was the responsibility of the 4th Battalion of Surrey Home Guard and defensive installations included
dragon's teeth close to London Road station, numerous pillboxes and an
anti-tank ditch that was dug across Stoke Park. Local factories were rededicated to the war effort: The Dennis works produced
Churchill tanks, water pumps, bombs and aircraft parts, RFD in Stoke Road produced life rafts and
flotation aids for the
Royal Navy and Warner Engineering produced
tank tracks and brass bomb noses.
Cathedral and University The
Diocese of Guildford was created in 1927 out of the northern part of the
Diocese of Winchester.
Holy Trinity Church, the largest church in the town, became the cathedral. However, by May of the following year, it was obvious that it was too small to hold the status permanently and the Diocesan Conference resolved to build a new cathedral in the town. In November 1927,
The Earl of Onslow offered of land at the summit of Stag Hill as the site. The foundation stone was laid in 1936, but by the outbreak of the Second World War, only the
choir had been completed. The crypt was finished following the end of the war and was dedicated in 1947. Construction work finally ceased in 1965. A year later, the
Robbins Report recommended that all
colleges of advanced technology should be given the status of universities. In May 1963,
Edward Boyle, the
Secretary of State for Education, announced that the Battersea College would relocate to Guildford as the University of Surrey.
Guildford pub bombings On the evening of 5 October 1974, the
Provisional Irish Republican Army detonated two
gelignite bombs at two
pubs in the town. The venues are thought to have been chosen as they were popular with off-duty military personnel from
Aldershot Garrison. The first bomb exploded at the Horse and Groom in North Street at 8:50 pm, killing two members of the
Scots Guards, two members of the
Women's Royal Army Corps and one
civilian. The second exploded around 35 minutes later at the Seven Stars in Swan Lane, injuring six members of staff and one customer. In early December 1974,
Surrey Police arrested three men and a woman, later collectively known as the
Guildford Four. A few days later, seven further individuals were arrested who became known as the
Maguire Seven. The Guildford Four were
convicted for carrying out the bombings in October 1975 and received
life sentences. All four maintained their innocence and, after a campaign of almost fifteen years, their convictions were quashed in October 1989.
Modern Guildford In the 21st century Guildford still has a High Street paved with
granite setts, and is one of the most expensive places to buy property in the UK outside London. The town has a general street market held on Fridays and Saturdays. A
farmers' market is usually held on the first Tuesday of each month. There is a Tourist Information Office, guided walks and various hotels including the historic Angel Hotel which long served as a coaching stop on the main London to
Portsmouth stagecoach route. ==Geography==