Historic Beginnings

Bust of Queen Elizabeth I, Charter Walk

Haslemere is a town with very old foundations. Prehistoric hunters lived on Black Down and there were Celtic and Romano-British settlements in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. The first known habitation was not recorded until AD 1180 when a chapel was built at Piperham, where the Parish Church of St. Bartholomew now stands.

A weekly market, confirmed by Charter in 1394 by Richard II, was held in front of the Town Hall where the High Street broadens, with rights being granted to hold an annual fair, now held biennially on what is referred to as Charter Fair Day. Elizabeth I laid the true foundations of the town by granting the right to elect two members of Parliament. In 1596 she confirmed the charter for a weekly market and increased the annual fairs to two.

Haslemere High Street

In 1732 James E. Oglethorpe, an army General and MP for Haslemere, who lived at Town House, crossed the Atlantic and founded the Colony of Georgia, USA. Oglethorpe assisted many people in England who suffered under oppression to start a new life in the colony. The links with the city of Savannah, Georgia, remain to this day and in 1999 Haslemere’s Town Mayor received the Freedom of Savannah.

The oldest part of Haslemere centres around the High Street where there are several buildings dating back to the 14th and 15th centuries. These include Half Moon House, opposite and south of the Town Hall; Tudor Cottage, adjoining the Georgian House Hotel; and the three-gabled building that is Lloyds Pharmacy. If you enter this shop and look up to the left, an old inscription dated 1613 can be seen engraved into a beam near the ceiling.

Shepherds' Hill

The main streets in the town are arranged in a T-shape with the High Street running south to north from the Town Hall which was built in 1814. Petworth Road, known as East Street in the 18th century, was originally called Cow Street as it was along this road that cattle were brought from farms in Sussex to be sold at the town market in the High Street. Similarly, Shepherds’ Hill was so named because sheep from the Sussex Downs came to the market along this road. The third part of the “T” is completed by Lower Street. This led to the Pyle Well, one of the two main public sources of water in the town.

Penfold Post Box

On the western edges of Haslemere there were flourishing tanneries where leather was prepared in the 18th century; this is now called Tanners Lane. The adjacent Town Meadow, on the corner of Lower Street, is a pleasant spot to relax. Across the road, a stone wall encloses the garden of the house where John Wornham Penfold lived. Mr Penfold was an architect who designed and altered a number of buildings around Haslemere during the latter part of the 19th century. He is remembered as the designer of the octagonal letter boxes introduced by the Post Office in 1866 – these were originally green in colour (letter boxes were not painted red until 1874) and there is a replica Penfold Box in the High Street under the old chestnut tree which was planted in 1792.

After the formation of the Surrey Constabulary in 1851, Haslemere became an outpost of Godalming with a resident force of two officers based at the Market House.

Annual gathering in memory of Inspector Donaldson, at the Town Hall

The most significant event to affect the development of the town was the opening, in 1859, of the railway connecting Haslemere with London, Guildford and Portsmouth. During the building of this railway Police Inspector William Donaldson of the Surrey Constabulary was killed outside the Town Hall whilst controlling a group of railway construction workers who were attempting to release one of their friends locked up in the Market House (now the Town Hall). An annual gathering of people meets at the Town Hall on the last Sunday in July to honour the memory of Inspector Donaldson.

Haslemere Railway Station

Haslemere’s first cottage hospital, built at the top of Shepherds’ Hill in 1897, was a gift to the town from John Penfold and his sisters to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. In 1922 the hospital in Church Lane was opened with two wards to replace the original cottage hospital, which had only six beds.

Aldworth Gardens

Change at first was quite slow with a number of large new houses being built nearby, more especially on the higher and drier heaths around Hindhead. A number of well known people settled in the area. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate to Queen Victoria, lived at his country retreat, Aldworth in Haslemere, until his death in 1892. He was known to walk from Aldworth to Grayswood where a small stream is said to be ‘The Brook’ of his poem of that name.

Town House

George Bernard Shaw wrote Caesar and Cleopatra when he lived at Hindhead and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote some of his Sherlock Holmes stories while living at Undershaw, built in 1897. George Eliot lived at Shottermill where she wrote Middlemarch.

Artists attracted to the area included Walter Tyndale, who lived in Hill Road, and Josiah Whymper (whose son Edward was the first person to climb the Matterhorn in 1865), who lived in Town House. Helen Allingham often painted in and around the town, although she lived at nearby Sandhills, Witley, from where she may have travelled on the new railway to sketch some of Haslemere’s prettier tile-hung cottages.

Arnold Dolmetsch

While new development was taking place at the beginning of the 20th century, Haslemere played an important part in the Peasant Art Movement and the town became home to a number of craftsmen and women including spinners, silk weavers, furniture makers and metal workers. At Hammer Vale an art pottery was opened in 1901 by J. Radley-Young and Haslemere Ware was made there until 1911.

Haslemere has also enjoyed a long association with the Dolmetsch family arising from Arnold Dolmetsch, who was one of the key pioneers in presenting early music. Sir Yehudi Menuhin confirmed “He is the man no musician should ever forget”. Indeed 2008 commemorated the 150th anniversary of Dolmetsch’s birth with a celebration of his music.