Early history The earliest evidence of human occupation in Weybridge is from the
Bronze Age. A number of weapons, including socketed
axe heads, a
rapier, and a
palstave, were retrieved from the River Wey close to the Wey Bridge in 1912. At least fifty
cinerary urns dating from the same period were found in the area in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A
copper-alloy bucket, now held by the
British Museum, was discovered during the construction of the Brooklands racetrack in 1907. It is thought to have originated in northern Italy in the late Bronze or early
Iron Age and similar vessels have been found in Austria, Belgium and Germany. During the Iron Age, there was a
fort on St George's Hill. It covered an area of around and was protected by a rampart and ditch. Most traces of the fort were destroyed by housebuilding in the first half of the 20th century. There is not thought to have been a significant
Roman presence in Weybridge, but 68 bronze
coins of the late 3rd and early 4th centuries were found at Brooklands in 1907. Much of the
hoard, which included
nummi from the reigns of
Diocletian (284–305 CE),
Maximian (286–305),
Constantius I (305–306) and
Galerius (305–311), was donated to the British Museum.
Governance There are three separate entries for Weybridge in Domesday Book. The first area of land described was held by
Bishop Odo of Bayeux as tenant-in-chief and Herfrid of Throwley as
lesser tenant. It included of meadow and woodland for five swine with a value of £5 per annum. The other two entries list areas belonging to
Chertsey Abbey, totalling a further 16 acres of meadow, land for four swine and ploughland for 1½ plough teams. None of the entries records a church or a mill in the settlement. There are only sporadic surviving references to Weybridge in the following centuries. A chapel is mentioned in a
papal bull issued by
Pope Alexander III in 1176 and a later document shows that Chertsey Abbey had sold the
advowson to
Newark Priory by 1200. By 1262, the Priory had obtained a license that confirmed its rights to appoint a priest, to hold church property and to collect
tithes from the local residents. In 1284 the village was held by Geoffrey de Lucy as a lesser tenant of Chertsey Abbey. Following the
dissolution of the monasteries, Weybridge was held by the Rede family for three years, before passing to the Crown in 1537. In June of the same year,
Henry VIII began to construct
Oatlands Palace by expanding an existing late-medieval manor house located to the north of the town centre. Some of the stone used in the construction of the foundations was taken from the demolition of Chertsey Abbey. Henry had intended that the palace would become the residence of his fourth wife,
Anne of Cleves, but the marriage was annulled after six months. Following Henry's death the palace remained a possession of the Crown until the
Commonwealth, when the contents were sold and the buildings demolished. Only a side entrance gate and adjoining sections of walls, which date from , remain. The Weybridge vestry oversaw the distribution of
poor relief and the maintenance of local roads. In the 1840s, responsibility for poor relief was transferred to the Chertsey Board of Guardians of the Poor. Local drainage and highways boards were established in the 1860s and in the 1870s a burial board was created to purchase land for new cemeteries. The
Local Government Act 1888 transferred many administrative responsibilities to the newly formed
Surrey County Council and was followed by an
1894 Act that created the Weybridge Urban District Council (UDC). Initially the council met at the
National school, but moved to Aberdeen House at the junction of High Street and Baker Street in 1908. As a result of the
Local Government Act 1929, the UDCs of Weybridge and Walton were combined in 1932. In 1951 the
civil parish of Weybridge had a population of 8083. On 1 April 1974 the parish was abolished. The
unified council was merged with the
Esher UDC to form
Elmbridge Borough Council in 1974. The structure was rebuilt in 1808 on 13 wooden arches. The present bridge dates from 1865 and is constructed from brick, iron and stone. A second bridge, downstream of the first, was completed in 1945 and now carries the A317. In 1537, materials for the construction of Oatlands Palace were transported to Weybridge by river. Thames Lock was rebuilt in concrete in the 1930s, but like all the locks on the Wey, it was originally turf sided. The earliest locks on the upper Thames were built in the 17th century, following the establishment of the
Oxford-Burcot Commission. However, efforts to improve the stretch of the river through Weybridge did not start until the following century. In 1789, a
flash lock was installed at
Sunbury, but was replaced by a
pound lock in 1812.
Shepperton Lock opened the following year. The construction of the locks regulated the flow of the river and increased its depth, facilitating navigation and maintaining an adequate head of water to power
mills. The River Thames through Weybridge was further improved when the
Desborough Cut was opened in 1935. The navigable channel bypasses a meander and was primarily designed to increase the flood capacity of the river. Construction of the cut created the Desborough Island, the entirety of which is in Weybridge. Initially the station had two platforms and was in a deep
cutting between St George's Hill and Weybridge Heath. The typical journey time to London was around an hour and, by 1841, a
mail train was stopping daily. A junction was created to the west of the station in 1848, when the line to was constructed. and 1902. The lines through the station were
electrified in 1907, although
steam locomotives continued to haul long-distance
express services through Weybridge until 1967. An arson attack in January 1987, resulted in the destruction of the 1904 station building. A manual telephone exchange opened in Weybridge in 1912 and was replaced in 1954 by an automated facility in Heath Road, which had sufficient capacity for 2500 lines.
Residential development Although Weybridge was still only a small village in the early 18th century, a high proportion of the residents were members of the aristocracy. In 1724 the
rector noted that it was increasingly becoming a place for "gentile retirement" and recorded eighteen upper-class families living in the area. The settlement was dominated by two estates: Portmore Park, to the north west of the centre, was the seat of the Colyear family, the
Earls of Portmore; Oatlands Park, to the east, had been built on the former
deer park belonging to Oatlands Palace and was purchased by
Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, in 1790. houses at the north end of Hanger Hill, constructed in the late 1990s Towards the end of the 18th century, Weybridge was beginning to expand beyond its medieval footprint. In 1800,
Weybridge Heath, an area of
common land to the south east of the village centre, was
enclosed. The
Byfleet and Weybridge Inclosures Act 1800 (
39 & 40 Geo. 3. c. lxxxvii) enabled the Duke of York to purchase almost the whole of St George's Hill and to add it to the Oatlands Estate. Four years later, Hanger Hill, one of the roads running across the heath, was laid out and plots alongside it were sold for
housebuilding. The Duke of York sold Oatlands Park in 1824, but the new owner,
Edward Hughes Ball Hughes, was forced to lease the house and the surrounding to
Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere, three years later. The remainder of the Oatlands estate was sold in stages between 1828 and 1846. Housebuilding began almost as soon as the land was released, stimulated in part by the opening of Weybridge railway station in 1838. The majority of the houses in Oatlands village were completed by 1859. Oatlands Park House was sold to the developer
Walter George Tarrant in 1909. The estate, approximately covering the area between the High Street and the River Wey, had been established by
Henry Howard, 6th Duke of Norfolk in the 1670s. It was purchased by the Locke King family in 1861, who sold the land for residential development in the final decades of the 19th century. St George's Hill was developed by W. G. Tarrant, who bought of land from the Edgerton family in 1911. A year later he began the construction of the Tennis and Golf Clubs and published a series of promotions in the
Surrey Herald to advertise the houses that he intended to build. Strict
covenants were imposed on the development and the minimum size of each property was fixed as . Construction was interrupted by the First World War, but resumed shortly afterwards, continuing until the start of the
Great Depression in the late 1920s. The first
council housing in the town was built by the Weybridge UDC between 1923 and 1927, when 160 houses were constructed on the Old Palace Gardens estate. Following the end of the Second World War, the Weybridge and Walton UDC built over 1000 houses in the two towns.
Brooklands Brooklands, the first purpose-built motor-racing
circuit in the world, opened in 1907. Constructed on farmland to the south of Weybridge, the concrete track was designed by
Capel Lofft Holden and had a total length of . The first races for motorcars took place in July 1907 and for
motorcycles in February the following year. Both attracted a large number of entrants from across Europe and by 1911, the
British Automobile Racing Club had established a programme of regular race meetings. Motor racing ceased for the duration of the First World War and did not resume until 1920. The first two
British Grands Prix took place at the circuit in
1926 and
1927. The
JCC 200 Mile race also took place at the circuit from 1921 to 1928, and again in 1938. In the early 1930s, Malcolm Campbell developed the
Campbell-Railton Blue Bird, his final
land speed record car, at Brooklands. Racing ceased for a second time at the outbreak of the Second World War. Brooklands also played a key role in the development of the British aeronautical industry. In 1907, the aviation pioneer,
A. V. Roe, performed the first flight by a British-built aeroplane at the circuit shortly after it opened in 1907. By 1912, several
flying schools had been established at Brooklands and the
Vickers company began manufacturing aircraft in 1915. The
Sopwith Camel was among several aircraft developed at Brooklands during the First World War. Aircraft manufacture continued during the 1920s and 1930s. Among those working at the Vickers factory was
Barnes Wallis, who was involved in designing the
Wellesley and the
Wellington bombers. The
Hawker Aircraft company opened a factory at Brooklands in 1935 and began building prototypes of the
Hurricane fighter. Aircraft manufacture intensified during the Second World War and new factories, warehouses and hangars were rapidly built, encroaching onto the racing circuit. The track was breached near Byfleet to improve access for deliveries to the site and a large workshop was cut into the concrete at the north end. Following the end of hostilities in 1945, the track was considered to be in such poor condition that a resumption of motor racing was ruled impossible. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the manufacturers based at Brooklands started to transition towards the production of civilian
airliners. Vickers began producing the VC series of aircraft with the
VC1 Viking in 1945. The
VC10 was launched in 1964, by which point the company had been nationalised as the
British Aircraft Corporation (BAC). Increasingly BAC began to refocus manufacturing at Brooklands to the production of aircraft parts, with final assembly elsewhere. Components of the British-built
Concordes were manufactured at the site in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1977, BAC merged with
Hawker-Siddeley to form
British Aerospace Commerce and industry Although no mill is mentioned in the Weybridge entries in the Domesday book, watermills appear to have played an important role in the economy of the area since at least the
early modern period. The earliest record of a mill in the town is from 1693, when a paper mill was built at the confluence of the Wey and Thames. Ironstone was quarried from Weybridge Heath and St George's Hill, although the dates of these workings are uncertain. A mill for grinding malt was built on the Wey upstream of Thames Lock in around 1819, but had fallen into disrepair by 1830. In 1842 a new mill for extracting
vegetable oil from seeds was built on the same site For much of the 20th century, Weybridge was a centre for the
aerospace industry. The Lang Propeller Works was established on Whittet's Ait in 1913 and, in 1915, the Vickers company took over the
Itala motor works at Brooklands. The circuit was also the base for several other aircraft manufacturers including
Avro,
Sopwith and
Blériot. As of 2021, the European headquarters of
Sony and the UK headquarters of
Procter & Gamble are at Brooklands.
Weybridge in the world wars At the start of the First World War, Weybridge became a training base for the 244 Motorised Transport Company, an army unit of mechanics and drivers operating as part of the 19th
Divisional Supply Column. The company served throughout the war in the
Gallipoli and
Balkans campaigns. There were two military hospitals in Oatlands. Barnham Lodge opened as a 35-bed hospital in 1915 and, by 1917, a small operating theatre was in use and the facility was being run by the
British Red Cross. Oatlands Park Hotel was requisitioned in 1916 as a hospital for the
New Zealand Expeditionary Force and was primarily used to treat "medical & tuberculosis cases and limbless men". Ethel Locke King, the chair of the
Chertsey branch of the Red Cross, was instrumental in establishing 15 hospitals in the local area during the First World War. She also organised a rest station for troops at Weybridge railway station. The defence of the town was coordinated by the 3rd Surrey Battalion of the
Home Guard and five platoons of the C company were stationed at Brooklands. The local civil defence headquarters were established at the UDC offices in Aberdeen House and the council built a large
air raid shelter at the Churchfields Recreation Ground. Serious bombing began in the local area in August 1940 and by December of that year 97 residents had died and 1300 houses had been damaged. A bomb landed on the floor of the factory, but failed to explode. Five men of the
Royal Canadian Engineers successfully removed the bomb from the building before it exploded.
Lieutenant John Patton was subsequently awarded the
George Cross for his role in the incident. Later in the war, 19
V-1 flying bombs landed in the Weybridge and Walton area. ==National and local government==