Chertsey


 * For the municipality in Quebec see Chertsey, Quebec
 * For the town in New Zealand see Chertsey, New Zealand

Chertsey is a town in Surrey, England, on the River Thames and its tributary rivers such as the River Bourne. It is in the Greater London Urban Area. It can be accessed by road from junction 11 of the M25 London orbital motorway. It shares borders with Staines-upon-Thames, Weybridge, Shepperton, Addlestone, Woking and Egham. It lies within the Godley hundred, 29 km southwest of Central London, close to the M3 and the M25.

The town is part of the London commuter belt, and is served by Chertsey railway station. It is located on the Chertsey branch of the Waterloo to Reading Line which is currently operated by South West Trains as part of the UK state-owned National Rail network. The town is home to the head office of Compass Group and the UK head office of Samsung Electronics. Thorpe Park is also in the town, including frequent buses from Staines-upon-Thames and the car park. Elevation is generally low at 14m in the High Street and 11m on the river Thames where the Boat House and Kingfisher restaurants are located, making this the lowest place in Chertsey. The highest point is St. Anne's Hill in the forest, which peaks at around 77m, making it the second highest point in Runnymede. Across the river Thames from Chertsey Bridge on the Middlesex side of the river is the Thames Path National Trail, and Chertsey Lock.

History
Chertsey is one of the oldest towns in England. It grew around Chertsey Abbey, founded in 666 A.D by Eorcenwald, Bishop of London. In the 9th century it was sacked by the Danes and refounded from Abingdon Abbey by King Edgar of England in 964.

Chertsey appears in the Domesday Book as Certesi. It was held partly by Chertsey Abbey and partly by Richard Sturmid from the abbey. Its Domesday assets were: 5 hides, 1 mill and 1 forge at the hall, 20 ploughs, 80 hectares of meadow, woodland worth 50 hogs. It rendered £22.

The Abbey grew to become one of the largest Benedictine abbeys in England, supported by large fiefs in the northwest corner of Sussex until it was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1536. The King took stone from the Abbey to construct his palace at Oatlands; the villagers also used stone for raising the streets. By the late 17th century, only some outer walls of the Abbey remained.

Today the history of the abbey is reflected in local place names and the surviving former fishponds that fill with water after heavy rain. The nearby Hardwick Court Farm, now much reduced in size and cut off from the town by the M25, retains the abbey's impressive 15th century tithe barn.

The eighteenth-century Chertsey Bridge provides an important cross-river link, and Chertsey Lock is a short distance above it on the opposite side. On the south west corner of the bridge is a bronze statue of local heroine Blanche Heriot by Sheila Mitchell, F.R.B.S.

In the 18th century Chertsey Cricket Club was one of the strongest in the country and beat the rest of England (excluding Hampshire) by more than an innings in 1778. The Duke of Dorset, (who played cricket for Chertsey), was appointed Ambassador to France in 1784. He arranged to have the Chertsey cricket team travel to France in 1789 to introduce cricket to the French nobility. However, the team, on arriving at Dover, met the Ambassador returning from France at the outset of the French Revolution and the opportunity was missed.

The original Chertsey station was built by the London and Southampton Railway, opened on the 14th of February 1848. The present Chertsey station across the level crossing from the site of the original station was opened on the 10th of October 1866 by the London and South Western Railway. The Southern Railway energised the electrified line using the third rail on the 3rd of January 1937.



Chertsey Regatta has been held on the river for over 150 years.

Chertsey was the home of Charles James Fox, who had wished to be buried there but was not.

The Chertsey troop of the Berkshire Yeomanry occupied the Drill Hall on Drill Hall Road since 1977. The unit has close ties with the borough and was granted the freedom of Runnymede in 2009. The Drill Hall closed at the end of March 2010 and the troop was forced to return to Windsor, following severe cuts suffered by the Territorial Army in 2009-2010.

Museum
Chertsey has an admission-free museum on Windsor Street, which provides considerable information about the history of Chertsey. It features clocks by two local makers, James Douglass and Henry Wale Cartwright. (Note however that there were three successive watchmakers called James Douglass (or Douglas) in the Douglas family, the latter based in Egham) The Black Cherry Fair is an annual event which the Museum hosts. It includes live music and refreshments in the museum garden.

Hospital
St. Peter's Hospital, originally intended to serve casualties of the Second World War, formally came into being on 12 September 1939. It now has 400 beds and a wide range of acute care services. Hospital Radio Wey has been broadcasting to the patients and staff of St Peter's Hospital since 1965 and now also broadcasts on the internet as RadioWey.

Sport and leisure
Chertsey has a Non-League football team Chertsey Town F.C. who play at Alwyns Lane.

Education
Schools in Chertsey include;
 * St Anne's Roman Catholic primary school
 * Salesian Catholic Secondary School (split site)
 * Pyrcroft Grange Primary (former split site)
 * Stepgates Community School
 * Sir William Perkins's School, independent girls' school

Salesian School
The Salesian School has been located in Chertsey since the 1920s. The school has a Sixth Form Centre based at the Highfield Road Site. The original site is in Highfield Road; it contains the former boarding school where pupils once lived during term. The newer site is located in Guildford Road. It serves around 1,200 pupils. The school successfully merged the two sites at the beginning of the year starting in September 2008; years 7 - 11 are at Guildford road and years 12 - 13 are at the former sixth-form site in Highfield Road. The school has introduced a new timetable with 5 modules a day. In 2008 It was not clear whether the school will keep the original site. However looking at the school web site in August 2012 it seems that there are still two active sites to the school.

The school has had a long standing 'old boys' football team that was established in the early 1970s and still enters a number of teams in leagues around South West London

Religion
St. Anne's Church is a Catholic church in Eastworth road. Salesian School is a Catholic Primary, Secondary and Sixth Form school located in Highfield and Guildford Road. St. Peter's Shared Church is an Anglican church located in Windsor Street in Central Chertsey. Beacon Church is a Community Church located in Heriot Road in central Chertsey. The International Community Church of Surrey, a nondenominational, international congregation, meets at Chertsey Hall each week.

Notable residents

 * Lord Brabazon of Tara, Britain's first licensed pilot, lived at 'Grangewood', Longcross near Chertsey in the early 1950s.
 * Mark Stephens (solicitor), Lawyer, mediator, broadcaster, educationalist and philanthropist of the visual arts lived in Chertsey from 1962-1982.
 * Justin Hawkins, lead singer of The Darkness rock group, singer-songwriter, was born in Chertsey in 1975.
 * Musician Doug Walker and the England cricketers Ashley Giles and Richard Johnson were born in Chertsey in the 1970s.
 * Keith Moon, drummer with rock band The Who, lived in the town in that decade.
 * Vivian Stanshall and his wife Ki Longfellow lived on a houseboat moored on the Thames beginning in 1977
 * England and West Ham United footballer Robert Green was born in Chertsey in 1980.
 * Rufus Hound born in Chertsey in 1979.
 * Chesney Hawkes lives in Chertsey with his wife and three children.
 * English glamour model Charmaine Sinclair is originally from Chertsey.
 * Vince Clarke of pop bands Yazoo, Depeche Mode and Erasure lived in Chertsey and recorded much of the Erasure material in the studio adjacent to his home.
 * Steve Rushton from pop band Son of Dork with James Bourne was born in Chertsey in 1987; he now lives in L.A and works as a singer/songwriter for Disney.
 * *H E Sir Seretse Khama Ian Khama (born 27 February 1953 at Chertsey) is a Botswana politician who has been the President of Botswana since 2008; he is also the Paramount Chief of the Bamangwato tribe. After serving as Commander of the Botswana Defence Force, he entered politics and served as Vice-President of Botswana from 1998 to 2008.
 * Robert Green, the Queens Park Rangers and England goalkeeper, was born in Chertsey.
 * Bobby Whitlock, keyboardist with Derek & the Dominos lived in Chertsey in the 1970s.

Literary connections

 * In William Shakespeare's Richard III, Act I, Scene 2, Chertsey is mentioned as the burial place of Henry VI. Lady Anne says, 'Come now towards Chertsey with your holy load'.
 * Abraham Cowley, the 17th-century poet, lived in Chertsey after his return from exile. The Abraham Cowley Mental Health Unit of St Peter's Hospital was named in his honour.
 * After his father's death, the future novelist Thomas Love Peacock and his mother lived with her father Thomas Love in Gogmoor Hall, Chertsey, for about twelve years.
 * Charles Dickens visited Chertsey to make notes for his novel Oliver Twist (1838), in which Oliver is forced by Bill Sikes to take part in the attempted burglary of a house in Chertsey.
 * Albert Smith, born in Chertsey in 1816, wrote the play Blanche Heriot, or The Chertsey Curfew (1842) and the short story "Blanche Heriot: A Legend of Old Chertsey Church" (1843).
 * John Maddison Morton was living in Chertsey when he wrote Box and Cox (1847), which The New York Times in 1891 called "the best farce of the nineteenth century".
 * The poem "Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight", written in 1867 by the American poet Rose Hartwick Thorpe, was also based on the legend of the Chertsey heroine Blanche Heriot.
 * In H.G Wells' book The War of the Worlds, Chertsey was destroyed by attacking Martian fighting-machines in the early afternoon of 8 June 1902.
 * Antony Trew, decorated naval officer and author of seventeen novels and a volume of short stories, resided in Surrey for many years and died in Chertsey in 1996.

Television and film

 * The final series of the TV series Public Eye (1965–1975) was filmed in and around Chertsey.
 * The TV series Moving Wallpaper (2008–2009) was filmed and set in Chertsey.
 * Chertsey made a fleeting appearance in the 1964 classic film First Men in the Moon with the old town hall playing the role of Dimchurch town hall.
 * Other films partly shot in or around Chertsey include The Italian Job (1969), Scream and Scream Again (1970), The Dark Knight (2008) and 13 Hrs (2010).
 * Wellers Auctioneers in Chertsey Town Centre has been featured in many daytime television programmes such as Flog It.

Chertsey Television
Chertsey Television is a channel on the YouTube platform which shares and celebrates local culture and broadcasts local events in and around Chertsey. It is an opportunity for Chertsey to show its culture and community. Chertsey Television mostly broadcasts local events such as the Black Cherry Fair and various parades across town. It also gives information about local upcoming events.