Prehistory & Roman Walton
Walton's oldest story is also its least provable: the tradition, first proposed by the Elizabethan antiquarian William Camden, that Julius Caesar forded the Thames near the present Cowey Stakes during his second invasion of Britain in 54 BC. Iron-shod wooden stakes were reportedly pulled from the riverbed in the eighteenth century and sold to the Earl of Sandwich, but Elmbridge Museum is careful to note that the evidence rests on conflicting early accounts rather than independent confirmation. It remains a genuinely good piece of local tradition, told honestly rather than oversold.
Domesday & the Saxon Parish
Walton appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Waletona, held by Edward of Salisbury and Richard de Tonbridge, with six hides, a church, two mills worth £1 5s and a fishery worth 5s. That church is St Mary's, which still stands at the top of Church Street and still contains Saxon material within a structure substantially built up in the twelfth century. Walton lay within the ancient Elmbridge hundred, the administrative unit whose name the modern borough later inherited.
Tudor & Stuart Walton
The parish church again carries most of Walton's Tudor and Stuart story. A 1587 brass at St Mary's commemorates John Selwyn, keeper of the royal park at nearby Oatlands, shown with his wife and eleven children, and the church displays a reproduction of a seventeenth-century scold's bridle, later made locally famous by Jerome K. Jerome's mention of it in Three Men in a Boat. The timber-framed Old Manor House on Manor Road is traditionally associated with John Bradshaw, the judge whose signature headed Charles I's death warrant in 1649; Bradshaw is said to have leased the property rather than owned it, but the local tradition has stuck firmly enough that the house is still sometimes known locally as Bradshaw's house. Everyday Stuart Walton survives too, in a much smaller object: Thomas King's 1668 halfpenny trade token, a piece of private local currency struck during a national shortage of small change, with a matching example held by the British Museum.
Georgian Walton
The eighteenth century gave Walton its first serious river crossing and one of its best artistic connections. The first Walton Bridge opened around 1750 and was painted by Canaletto in 1754; its 1788 replacement was later painted by Turner. The same period saw Ashley Park at the height of its life as a great estate, home to Richard Boyle, 2nd Viscount Shannon, whose 1755 monument by Roubiliac remains one of the finest objects inside St Mary's. Near the southern end of the High Street, Elm Grove is a red-brick house of disputed age (local history dates it to the late eighteenth century, Historic England to the early nineteenth) that later hosted a future tsar of Russia and a century of council use.
Victorian Walton
The railway reached Walton in the nineteenth century and reshaped the town more thoroughly than any single building could, pulling growth away from the old church-and-river core and out towards the station. A third, more solidly Victorian Walton Bridge replaced the Georgian crossing in 1864, a girder bridge on stone piers whose brick flood-plain viaduct still stands today. By the century's end, Walton had grown from a river parish into a recognisably suburban Surrey town, connected to London in a way its Georgian residents would not have known.
The Film Era
In 1899, Cecil Hepworth leased a house on Hurst Grove and built one of the first serious film studios in Britain, a site that would operate under three names for over sixty years. The studio released the first film version of Alice in Wonderland in 1903, and by 1914 was one of only three major film studios in the country. Hepworth's 1923 bankruptcy saw the receiver melt down around two thousand of his original negatives for scrap value, commonly cited as accounting for a large share of the era's heavy losses of British silent film; the site continued as Nettlefold Studios and later Walton Studios, closing for good in 1961. The studio's old power house later became the Playhouse and the Walton Hop, one of Surrey's longest-running teenage discos, and Walton's relationship with film and television production has continued ever since, from Monty Python to Ashes to Ashes.
Wartime Walton
Both world wars left a mark on Walton. During the First World War, the New Zealand military hospital at Mount Felix treated around 27,000 men, and those who died there are still remembered every year, when St Mary's Church flies the New Zealand flag, and in the name of New Zealand Avenue. During the Second World War, Walton's proximity to the aircraft works at Brooklands made it a target: the Victorian girder Walton Bridge was damaged in bombing in 1940, and Flight Sergeant Charles Sydney died when his Spitfire crashed in Station Avenue that same September. The full story of both wars is told in our guide to Walton in wartime.
Post-war Walton
Walton Studios closed in 1961, its equipment moving to Shepperton, and the site was eventually redeveloped for housing, but the town's twentieth century kept producing notable names, from Julie Andrews, born on Rodney Road in 1935, to a list of admirals, songwriters and diplomats that reads far more varied than most towns Walton's size can claim. Near Walton Bridge, HWM built its own Grand Prix cars and gave Stirling Moss his start in top-level motor racing. More recently, the redevelopment of The Heart brought retail, housing and the library together in the town centre, and the current Walton Bridge, the sixth crossing on the site, opened in 2013.
Researching Walton
This site aims to be a genuinely useful gateway into Walton's history, not the last word on it. For primary sources and deeper research, Elmbridge Museum holds the borough's principal local history collection and is the first port of call for verifying any specific claim. Surrey History Centre, in Woking, holds the county's archival records, including parish and estate documents relevant to Walton. The Victoria County History for Surrey provides the standard scholarly account of the county's development, parish by parish. For historic mapping, the National Library of Scotland's collection of digitised Ordnance Survey maps covers Walton across multiple editions and is freely searchable online, and is one of the best ways to see exactly how the town's streets and fields have changed since the Victorian period.
For the history of the neighbouring village, see a history of Hersham.