Our village, our history

Written village history is only one part of the picture. Archaeological records for the local area include Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age material from gravel pits around Charlton Village in the Shepperton Ranges area. Spelthorne’s planning evidence also identifies linear and ring-ditch cropmarks east of Charlton Road.

These finds show that people used this landscape long before the Domesday survey. They do not, by themselves, prove an unbroken village settlement on the same site. They offer a much older backdrop to the named community recorded in 1086.

Charlton Village appears in the Domesday survey of 1086 as Cerdentone, in the historic county of Middlesex. Spelthorne Borough Council includes it among the settlements recorded in the medieval Hundred of Spelthorne. The familiar village name therefore reaches back more than nine centuries in the written record.

The wider Thames valley has a much longer human history, but a regional archaeological discovery should not automatically be treated as evidence for a settlement on this exact spot. Domesday gives us a firm starting point for the named village; it is not a claim that village life began in 1086.

Before the Norman Conquest, two brothers held Charlton Village’s land under Archbishop Stigand and Earl Leofwine. Domesday records Roger de Rames in 1086. Denise of Charlton granted the manor to John Vautort in 1232; in 1267, a John Vautort granted the manor to the Prior of Merton.

Merton Priory’s connection with Charlton Village was as the holder of its medieval manor. The priory was based in Merton, and its priors held Charlton Village’s manor from 1267 until it was surrendered to the Crown in 1538. The accompanying photograph shows the priory’s surviving remains and illustrates this part of Charlton Village’s landownership history.

The Crown granted it to Sir John Mason in 1550. It passed through Nicholas Thorp and his son George, Matthew Paleson in 1615, and George Cole in 1620. A later George Cole sold to John Grice in 1676. Thomas Grice held it in 1775; his widow, later Mrs Margaret Edwards, retained it into the nineteenth century.

Samuel Dendy held the manor in the 1830s, followed by Arthur Dendy. Arthur’s daughter married Sir John Seale, recorded as lord in 1901–1905. Edith Simpson, J. C. H. Seale and H. D. Seale were joint lords in 1906; Simpson and J. C. H. Seale remained recorded in 1933. Manorial lordship does not establish ownership of every modern house or plot.

Charlton Village’s older parish connections were with Sunbury, and residents looked to St Mary’s there for worship. This helps explain why family historians may find village baptisms, marriages and burials among Sunbury records. The surviving parish collection at The London Archives begins in 1565. St Mary the Virgin’s present building replaced its medieval predecessor in 1752 and was extensively remodelled in 1857.

Nearby St Mary Magdalene in Littleton has its own distinct history. The church’s account dates its foundation to 1135 and links it with Benedictine monks from Chertsey Abbey. Its fabric reflects many centuries of change: medieval aisles and furnishings, a Tudor tower subsequently heightened, and later additions. The church celebrated its 850th anniversary in 1985.

St Mary Magdalene now serves Charlton Village as well as Littleton, Shepperton Green and southern Ashford Common. The two churches belong in our village story without confusing their separate histories.

The Harrow’s whitewashed walls and thatched roof are among Charlton Village’s most recognisable features. Historic England dates the timber-framed building to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century and records its Grade II listing.

Its life as a pub came later. Local historian Nick Pollard identifies 1852 as the year it became licensed, with William Lock as the first licensee. Lock also worked as a market gardener—a reminder of how closely village businesses and the surrounding land were connected.

Pollard’s illustrated account shows the building during Edwin Carter Unsted’s tenancy in the early twentieth century, when a separate cottage still occupied part of the same roofline. The old postcard offers a glimpse of a village before piped water and electric light became ordinary comforts.

Much of the landscape around Charlton Village was agricultural, with farmhouses and cottages rather than today’s residential roads. Charlton Village stood on the edge of Sunbury Common. Open fields lay to the south, including Charlton Field between Charlton Road and Upper Halliford Road.

Enclosure in 1803 reorganised the common and open fields into individual holdings and helped establish the later road pattern. Farming remained important, with market gardens and glasshouses also characteristic of the wider parish.

The Victoria County History describes relatively little new building in the western part of the parish before the 1950s. By its 1959 revision, many new houses were being built at Charlton Village, alongside gravel working and industrial development. The village’s transition was therefore gradual: an older farming settlement became part of a changing suburban landscape, while farms and open land survived alongside new homes.

Manor Farm at 126 Charlton Road preserves clues to the working landscape that once surrounded the village. Spelthorne’s local heritage list describes a mid-nineteenth-century red-brick farmhouse, a group of barns or stables, and a raised granary dating from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Its stone supports helped protect stored grain. These buildings were locally listed in 2004.

The remembered pig farm is supported by a local history account of the watersplash. Describing the River Ash crossing photographed in 1968, Village Matters places Manor Farm’s piggery at the Charlton Village end. Farming was part of everyday village experience, from the sounds and smells to a tractor called on when a car became stuck in the ford.

A later chapter appears in the council’s planning register: an application to change land and buildings at Manor Farm into an equestrian training centre was approved, with conditions, on 1 February 1995. That documents the move towards equestrian use; it does not establish the exact date every part of the older farm stopped operating.

Harrow Farm is another important name in Charlton Village’s farming landscape, distinct from Manor Farm. A history of Josiah Clarke’s dairy business, published by Twickenham Park Residents Association, identifies Harrow Farm, Shepperton, as a source of milk for the expanding Richmond and Twickenham business and names George Gait as its manager.

This account connects local farming with the daily needs of a growing London population: milk produced beyond the town travelled into a network of shops and households. The account’s suggestion about Gait’s family relationship is tentative, so we have not treated that relationship as established fact.

More recently, Harrow Farm remains identified by name on council planning maps alongside Charlton Road. Its precise founding date, sequence of farming families and changes in livestock or crops deserve further work with maps, directories and family records. If your family worked there, your memories or photographs could help fill those gaps.

The ground beneath and around Charlton Village also became a working resource. The Victoria County History records nineteenth- and early twentieth-century brickearth digging in Sunbury parish, followed by extensive gravel extraction around Charlton Village, Halliford and Sunbury Common. Work was still continuing at Charlton Lane in 1959. Mixed farming survived around Charlton Village at the same time.

Extraction left pits and pools and changed how some parcels of land could be used. A 2022 Spelthorne site assessment describes land north of Charlton Lane, between the M3 and the railway, as former gravel workings subsequently backfilled with inert material and used for grazing. This is evidence for that particular site, rather than a claim that every village street stands on a filled pit.

The pits also exposed older traces of human activity. Local archaeological finds remind us that gravel working sometimes revealed evidence of the landscape’s much earlier inhabitants.

The old house associated with the Walnut Tree Road area appears on historic Ordnance Survey mapping as Charlton Court. It stood west of Charlton Road, in its own grounds, with a curved drive and a lodge beside the road. The map preserves a view of this estate before the later residential streets.

Lewis George Leverson appears at Charlton Court in a surviving Kelly’s directory. Sidney J. Pocock, later Sir Sidney, is also documented as a resident: a report dated 19 June 1908 gives his address as Charlton Court, Middlesex. These are records of residence; a complete sequence of legal owners and the house’s construction date still needs confirmation.

Council application SUN/FUL/3850J authorised 34 houses and garages on the Charlton Court Estate on 28 December 1960. Its associated properties include Almond Close and Walnut Tree Road, confirming the connection with today’s neighbourhood. The permission does not establish the exact demolition date.

The colourised photograph shared by Elad Hiles in The Grapevine is labelled 1916. We reproduce it with permission and credit; its colours are a later interpretation. The historic map elsewhere on this page shows the house and grounds before the modern estate. Family photographs and memories could help fill the remaining gaps in its story.

The reservoir changed this corner of Middlesex on an enormous scale. Work on the project, originally known as Littleton Reservoir, began in 1915. Wartime demands interrupted construction; work resumed after the First World War. Geological difficulties forced changes to the design and the enlarged footprint displaced much of old Littleton.

Steam excavators, temporary railway tracks and painstaking clay work created a vast raised basin. Water brought from the Thames at Laleham was pumped into storage for London’s supply. King George V and Queen Mary opened the completed reservoir on 13 June 1925, giving it the name we know today.

For Charlton Village it became a defining neighbour: the high grassy embankment marks the edge of the village landscape. Today water supply sits alongside sailing, wildlife and the continuing story of the communities around it.

Queen Mary Reservoir changed more than the skyline. Beneath its footprint was an older inhabited landscape. Historic England's record for Astleham Manor Cottage describes Astlam—another spelling of Astleham—as a village covered when the reservoir was built. This was land taken into a planned water-supply scheme, with buildings cleared or moved before the reservoir filled.

The effects reached neighbouring Littleton too. Local historian Nick Pollard describes how changes to the reservoir design removed a substantial part of old Littleton and much of its green. A road from Squire's Bridge towards Ashford Common was diverted to become New Road, where replacement houses accommodated displaced villagers. That is different from saying every house was moved intact: new housing and the rescue of an individual old building were separate responses to the upheaval.

Astleham Manor Cottage offers a remarkable surviving connection. Chiltern Open Air Museum traces its origins to a sixteenth-century timber-framed hall house, later enlarged and altered. In 1913, owner Sir Richard Burbridge had it dismantled and rebuilt roughly a quarter of a mile south to make way for the reservoir. Historic England also records the reuse of original materials.

The museum identifies Mr Ferris, Burbridge's gamekeeper, as an early resident after the move; his family remained associated with the cottage for decades. In the 1990s, after vacancy and vandalism, nearby gravel extraction threatened it again. It was rescued for a second time and re-erected at Chiltern Open Air Museum, where the museum's office moved in during 1998. The building is used for staff and volunteer facilities rather than as an ordinary open-to-visit cottage.

A little local folklore: the bell beneath the water

According to a local tale, a bell from the lost village church can still be heard when strong winds sweep across Queen Mary Reservoir—or even glimpsed when the water is low. It is a wonderfully eerie image: perhaps the reservoir has its very own ghost story!

For clarity, this is folklore. There is no reliable historical evidence for a church bell surviving beneath Queen Mary Reservoir, or for one becoming visible or audible in these conditions. Local historian Nick Pollard’s account of the reservoir’s construction describes the site being cleared before work proceeded. We include the tale for its local colour and amusement; it should not be read as a factual account of what lies beneath the water.

For Charlton Village and its neighbours, this story gives the reservoir a human scale: homes, familiar routes and working lives changed to supply water to a growing London. A surviving cottage lets part of that lost landscape remain tangible today.

The nearby Littleton Park estate became the setting for Sound City in the early 1930s, the beginnings of what we now know as Shepperton Studios. Film production grew around an existing country house and its grounds, adding a new working life to a landscape previously shaped by estates and farming.

Pinewood’s studio history celebrates Shepperton’s tradition of independent filmmaking and films including Oliver! and Alien. A major expansion completed in late 2023 and early 2024 added 17 sound stages, with new facilities leased to Amazon MGM and Netflix.

For Charlton Village, this is the history of a close neighbour as well as a famous name on screen. Memories of local people who worked in sets, costumes, transport, catering or other studio trades could add a valuable community chapter to the better-known film history.

The reservoir’s wartime danger is visible in the photographic record. Thames Water’s archive holds two glass negatives dated 1940, both catalogued as air-raid damage showing a bomb crater in the south bank of Littleton Reservoir—the earlier name for Queen Mary Reservoir. Their reference numbers are ACC/2558/MW/GP/02/140/006 and ACC/2558/MW/GP/02/140/005, with the originals listed at London Metropolitan Archives, now The London Archives.

The photographs preserve a direct record of damage to the raised bank during wartime bombing. They bring this chapter of local life into view, while leaving questions for further research: the public catalogue does not give the exact day, number of bombs or full repair history.

The colourised view shared by Elad Hiles in The Grapevine brings this damage into focus. We use his supplied version with the permission confirmed by CVRA and retain his credit. Its colours are a later interpretation. The links below also let you examine the two original archive records.

On 27 April 1943, two pilots of No. 316 (Polish) Squadron lost their lives in a training collision. They were Sergeant Jerzy Janusz Gierczycki and Sergeant Antoni Stefan Plenkiewicz. The loss records identify their aircraft as Spitfire Vb AR382 (SZ-W) and Spitfire Vb EP108 (SZ-B), and place the crash at Manor Farm, Shepperton.

Aircrew Remembered describes a camera-training exercise from RAF Northolt. The accounts concern two separate single-seat fighters colliding in training, rather than one shared aircraft being shot down in combat. The published sources do not establish a precise present-day impact point in Charlton Village.

Their names give a human meaning to this local wartime story. Remembering them also recognises the dangers faced during training by Polish airmen serving alongside the RAF. The linked records contain further biographical information and portraits of the men.

The reservoir had a less obvious wartime role as a place to test secret equipment. Thames Water records trials in 1943 of small submersible craft nicknamed Sleeping Beauty. A familiar local expanse of water was part of a much wider story of wartime invention.

That connection was remembered in 2010 when Prince Philip visited and a modern replica was unveiled. The reservoir’s engineering heritage therefore reaches beyond water supply to the experiments carried out here during the Second World War.

A 1968 photograph preserves Charlton Village’s watersplash: the ford where Charlton Road crossed the River Ash beside a footbridge. It is a reminder that a familiar journey once meant meeting the river at water level.

The M3, opened here in 1974, changed that route. The old road was divided, with the Shepperton end becoming Old Charlton Road and the village end becoming Nutty Lane. The watersplash scene now lies within the motorway corridor.

Nearby footpaths still connect the area, while Splash Meadow and Nutty Wood form Ash Link Nature Reserve. The old and new names help us read the landscape: a river crossing, a motorway and pockets of green space each mark a different chapter.

Charlton Village’s history belongs to the people who live here as much as to old buildings and archive records. Farm names, the Harrow, the reservoir bank and the routes we walk all carry traces of earlier village life. Houses and roads have changed the setting, but the wish to know our neighbours and care for our surroundings continues.

CVRA brings that work into the present: representing members, listening to ideas, supporting village activities and helping protect the character and future of Charlton Village. This page is a growing community record, with room for family photographs, memories of working life and stories still waiting to be told.

Continue exploring with Spelthorne Museum’s collections and online features, and the local history articles in Village Matters. The museum’s publications include Lost Houses of Sunbury and Shepperton and studies of local pubs, useful starting points for further village research.