Surrey

• 1. Introduction

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  Surrey sits in South East England as one of the most densely wooded counties in the country, with 22.4 percent of its land under tree cover compared to a national average of 11.8 percent. But woodland cover is only one of Surrey's many distinctions. This is a county where H. G. Wells imagined Martians laying waste to northern England. Where Magna Carta was sealed on a meadow beside the Thames. Where Alan Turing spent much of his early life, and where cricket first appears in written history.

  The chalk ridge of the North Downs divides Surrey nearly in two, separating a densely populated north from a quieter, more rural south. That geological fault line runs through everything here: ancient and modern, rural and urban, local and cosmopolitan. How did a county whose soils were too poor for serious farming become one of the most prosperous corners of England? What made its western border towns into gunpowder mills, and its riverside meadows into a stage for constitutional drama? And why does Surrey, with all its size and population, have no clubs in the top 92 of English football?

  The answers reach from Roman occupation to Formula One, from Saxon sub-kings to Nobel laureates, and from the golden age of Elizabethan theatre to the birth of the world's first public art gallery.

• 2. A Land Divided by Chalk

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  Leith Hill near Dorking rises 295 metres above sea level, the highest point in Surrey and the second highest in all of southeastern England, beaten only by Walbury Hill in West Berkshire at 297 metres. From that summit the geology of the county stretches out in almost textbook clarity.

  The chalk escarpment of the North Downs runs broadly east to west across the county. To the north lies a flat lowland built on London Clay in the east and Bagshot Sands in the west. To the south, sandstone Surrey Hills give way to the plain of the Low Weald, rising toward the High Weald in the far southeast. The rivers Wey and Mole pierce the chalk ridge, both tributaries of the Thames, which historically formed the northern boundary of the county before modern boundary changes brought part of its north bank inside Surrey.

  That chalk also concentrates an unusual resource. Deposits of fuller's earth, a rare mineral composite critical to finishing woollen cloth, are found around Reigate and Nutfield. In the later Middle Ages these deposits anchored a cloth trade centred on Guildford, which gave its name to a variety called gilforte, exported widely across Europe and as far as the Middle East. Guildford's cloth would eventually be outstripped by more dynamic production regions elsewhere in England, but the fuller's earth deposits represent why Surrey's economy developed in the specific directions it did.

  Much of Surrey falls within the Metropolitan Green Belt, which helps explain why 22.4 percent of the county remains wooded today, a coverage Surrey holds as the highest of any English county. In the west, sandy soils host England's principal concentration of lowland heath. The Surrey Hills and Thursley, Hankley and Frensham Commons form an extensive heathscape. Box Hill, Leith Hill, Frensham Ponds and Newlands Corner are among the most visited landscapes in southeastern England. In 2020 the Surrey Heath district recorded the highest proportion of tree cover of any local authority area in England, at 41 percent.

• 3. Contested Territory

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  Before Roman forces arrived in AD 43, the area now called Surrey was probably controlled by the Atrebates tribe, centred at Calleva Atrebatum in modern Hampshire, though eastern parts may have been held by the Cantiaci of Kent. The Atrebates allied with Rome during the invasion, but the tribal landscape was already shifting. Around AD 42 King Cunobelinus of the rival Catuvellauni died, triggering war between his sons and the Atrebates' King Verica. The Atrebates were defeated, Verica fled to Gaul, and their lands fell to the Catuvellauni.

  During the Saxon period, from the 5th and 6th centuries, the area was settled by newcomers who left their names in the landscape. The Godhelmingas gave Godalming its name; the Woccingas lived between Woking and Wokingham. The name Surrey itself derives from Suthrīge, meaning "southern region," suggesting it was once the southern portion of a broader Middle Saxon territory. By the 7th century that Middle Saxon kingdom had dissolved, and Surrey became a frontier zone contested by the kingdoms of Kent, Essex, Sussex, Wessex and Mercia in turn. It was absorbed permanently by Wessex in 825, following King Egbert's victory over the Mercians at the Battle of Ellandun.

  Chertsey Abbey, founded in 666 under the patronage of King Ecgberht of Kent, remained the county's most important religious institution throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. In 673-675 a local sub-king named Frithuwald, ruling under the sovereignty of Wulfhere of Mercia, gave further lands to the abbey. A decade later King Caedwalla of Wessex took control of Surrey and founded a monastery at Farnham in 686. The 9th century brought the Vikings. In 851 a Danish fleet of about 350 ships, carrying over 15,000 men, crossed the Thames into Surrey after sacking Canterbury and London, only to be slaughtered by a West Saxon army under King Æthelwulf at the Battle of Aclea. Kingston later served as the coronation site for Æthelstan in 924 and for Æthelred the Unready in 978.

• 4. Norman Castles and Radical Ideas

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  Following the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the Norman army swept west through Surrey, defeating an English force at Southwark and burning that suburb before crossing the Thames at Wallingford to descend on London from the northwest. By the time the Domesday survey was conducted in 1086, the native ruling class of Surrey had been virtually eliminated. Only one significant English landowner, the brother of the last English Abbot of Chertsey, remained. The largest holding in the county now belonged to the expanded royal estate, with the second largest going to Richard fitz Gilbert, founder of the de Clare family.

  Guildford Castle, one of the many Norman fortresses built to hold the newly conquered country, was rebuilt in stone and developed as a royal palace in the 12th century. Farnham Castle was constructed as a residence for the Bishop of Winchester in the same century. At Runnymede near Egham in June 1215, King John sealed Magna Carta. The following year, when John tried to reverse the concession and war reignited, Prince Louis of France was invited by the English barons to take the throne; he advanced across Surrey occupying Reigate and Guildford castles along the way.

  Centuries later Surrey became a laboratory for political radicalism. In October 1647, at Guildford, the elected representatives of army regiments drafted The Case of the Armie Truly Stated, the first manifesto of what became the Leveller movement. That document combined soldiers' grievances with wider demands for constitutional change based on popular sovereignty. It became the template for the more systematic Agreement of the People, drafted the same month. Both fed into the Putney Debates, held in the Surrey village of Putney where the army had established its headquarters, where signatories argued with Oliver Cromwell over England's future constitution. Two years later, in 1649, the Diggers under Gerrard Winstanley established a communal settlement at St. George's Hill near Weybridge, putting egalitarian ideals of common ownership into practice before being driven out by local landowners.

• 5. Industry, Theatre and the Railway

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  Bankside in Southwark stood outside the jurisdiction of the City of London, and this legal gap made it Surrey's territory and England's entertainment capital. By 1600 Southwark, considered separately from London, was the second largest urban area in England. The relative weakness of Surrey's local authority over Bankside compared to the City's own magistrates created space for the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre to flourish. William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and John Webster all had their work performed in Bankside's playhouses.

  The actor and impresario Edward Alleyn founded the College of God's Gift in Dulwich with an endowment that included an art collection. That collection was later expanded and opened to the public in 1817, becoming Britain's first public art gallery. In Guildford, George Abbot, the son of a cloth worker, served as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1611 to 1633 and founded Abbot's Hospital, an almshouse still operating today, in 1619. His brother Maurice was a founding shareholder of the East India Company who became its Governor and later Lord Mayor of London.

  Surrey's valley of the Tillingbourne, southeast of Guildford, became an industrial corridor. Watermills originally built for the cloth trade were repurposed for paper and gunpowder manufacture, and for a time in the mid-17th century Surrey mills were England's main producers of gunpowder. The Wey Navigation, opened in 1653, was among England's first canal systems. A glass industry on the southwestern borders collapsed by 1630 as coal-fired works in other regions outcompeted Surrey's wood-fired glasshouses.

  The railways transformed everything. Arriving in the late 1830s, they enabled prosperous Londoners to settle across Surrey while commuting daily to the capital. New towns like Woking and Redhill grew beside the lines. In 1849 Brookwood Cemetery near Woking was established to serve London's population, connected to the capital by its own railway service; it grew into the largest burial ground in the world. Woking was also the site of Britain's first crematorium, opened in 1878, and Britain's first mosque, founded in 1889. In 1881 the town of Godalming became the first in the world to have a public electricity supply.

• 6. Motorsport, Cricket and Unusual Firsts

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  Brooklands, between Woking and Weybridge, opened in 1907 as the world's first purpose-built motorsport racing circuit. The McLaren Formula One team's headquarters are in Woking. James Hunt, who won the 1976 Formula 1 World Driver's Championship, was born in Belmont, Sutton, then part of Surrey, in 1947.

  Cricket's written history begins in Surrey. The earliest known reference to the game being played appears in records of the Royal Grammar School, Guildford, in the 16th century. Mitcham Cricket Club, formed in 1685 and the oldest documented club in cricket's history, was within Surrey's borders until 1965. Surrey County Cricket Club, founded in 1845 and based at The Oval in Kennington since its formation, has won the County Championship 19 times outright and once jointly, more than any other county except Yorkshire.

  Epsom Downs Racecourse hosts the Derby, which has been held there most years since 1780. Surrey also contains Lingfield, Kempton and Sandown Park racecourses, an unusually high concentration for a single county. The All England Lawn Tennis Club, venue for the Wimbledon Championships, and the headquarters of the Lawn Tennis Association were both within Surrey until 1965, when boundary changes placed them in Greater London.

  In June 1972, British European Airways Flight 548 crashed near Staines just after taking off from Heathrow Airport. This remains the worst air accident in UK history. Croydon Airport, which served as London's main airport from its opening in 1920, was superseded by Heathrow after the Second World War and closed in 1959. Gatwick Airport, where commercial flights began in 1933, was transferred from Surrey to West Sussex in 1974.

• 7. Writers, Architects and Scientists

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  Surrey's roster of writers who lived and worked in the county stretches from John Donne, who lived in Pyrford in the early 17th century, to Kazuo Ishiguro, who grew up in Guildford. William Cobbett was born and raised in Farnham, later returned to die there, and gave Surrey a prominent place in his Rural Rides. Lewis Carroll spent much of his time at his sisters' home in Guildford, where he wrote Through the Looking-Glass and where he died. George Eliot wrote most of Middlemarch while living in Haslemere. Arthur Conan Doyle lived in Hindhead and served as deputy lieutenant of Surrey; the county forms a setting for several Sherlock Holmes stories. H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds while living in Woking, setting the opening on Horsell Common and laying waste to much of northern Surrey in the course of the novel.

  In architecture the county's influence was substantial. Edwin Lutyens grew up in Thursley and was shaped by Surrey's traditional building materials and forms. His early work, produced largely in the county and often in collaboration with garden designer Gertrude Jekyll who lived near Godalming, helped define a vernacular revival architecture associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement that would influence domestic building far beyond England. Surrey's prominence in this movement peaked in the 1890s.

  William of Ockham, the scholastic philosopher whose name gives us Occam's Razor, came from the village of Ockham. Thomas Malthus, the pioneer of demography, was born and raised in Westcott. Ada Lovelace, the mathematician, lived at East Horsley. Alan Turing, the mathematician and pioneer of computer science, lived for much of his early life in Guildford. Eadweard Muybridge, the photographer whose sequential motion studies helped lay the groundwork for cinema, was born and raised in Kingston, then part of Surrey. Ralph Vaughan Williams, the composer, grew up at Leith Hill and later lived in Dorking, a connection the county still marks.