The Secret History of Guildford, England

Today’s guest post comes from writer Andrea Kirkby, who has been uncovering the secret history of an English town.

Andrea writes on behalf of Radisson Edwardian Guildford, among others, which is her preferred choice among hotels in Guildford* with arguably one of the best restaurants in Guildford* and a convenient base for exploring the town.

The Georgian History of Guildford

At the beginning of the eighteenth century Guildford still hadn’t changed much since the Middle Ages. By the start of the nineteenth, it had become a thriving, elegant Georgian community with paved streets, running water and street lighting.

One of the major factors in this change was the fact that Guildford was about half way from London to Portsmouth on the main road. As Portsmouth became increasingly important as a naval dockyard, Guildford became an important staging post on the road, with a number of coaching inns.

The Angel, the Crown, the White Hart, Red Lion and White Lion, the Three Tuns and the George supplied hospitality and fresh horses – and made Guildford a wealthy town.

Only one of these inns, the Angel, now remains, still proudly proclaiming its status as a ‘posting house’ in big letters on its Georgian façade. If you go into the yard, you can still see the crane that supplied the hayloft. Lord Nelson stayed here, as did Jane Austen and Byron (not together, though what they would have made of each other – the respectable lady and the wicked lord – is an interesting thought).

At number 151, the Crown Inn dated back to 1476; it’s now a NatWest bank but you can still see a replica of the Crown Inns sign. At 148-150, Sainsbury’s stands where the White Hart once was, but a plaque recalls the inn. Other inns have disappeared without trace – even the Angel was nearly demolished in 1989. Once the railway reached Guildford in 1845, the coaching inns were living on borrowed time: you could reach Portsmouth in a single day and didn’t need to stop here.

Guildford even has a Georgian church, Holy Trinity. It had to be rebuilt in the 1750s after the tower fell down, though it preserves a medieval chantry chapel, a neat little appendage with a black-and-white checkerboard of flint and ashlar that contrasts with the brick of the more recent building.

A local nobleman, Lord Onslow, provided the clock that bears the message ‘festina lente’ – a Latin tag which translates as ‘more haste, less speed’, so very appropriate for a clock. But if you’re of a certain frame of mind, you could also translate it as ‘on, slow’ – a truly tortuous pun which shows the patron’s love of the cryptic.

Guildford’s existing houses were mainly timber framed buildings, many of them of only one or two storeys. This wasn’t good enough for Georgian householders; some were cheapskates and simply put a ‘classical’ façade on top of their older building, but others built completely new houses in the suburbs, away from the bustle and the busy trade of the High Street.

Westbury House in Quarry Street is one of these – a symmetrically-planned brick façade, with large, evenly spaced windows, showing the qualities of calm reason you’d find in Jane Austen; Castle House takes up the fashionable Palladian style and dates from about 1740.

Among other mod cons, Guildford got itself a bank – then quite a new feature of English life. William Haydon, a draper, had a reliably solid safe and looked after other shopkeeper’s cash overnight for a fee – until eventually he found that banking paid better than drapery*, and in 1765 he built the charming Guildford Old Bank, now a Lloyds TSB.

Haydon remembered his roots, though. All the little mouldings on the bressumer are in the shape of buttons.

The other dignitary of Georgian Guildford I’ve discovered is Dr James Price and though there’s no memorial to him in the town, his story is intriguing enough to deserve a mention. He was originally a Londoner but bought a house in the village of Stoke just outside the town, where he created an alchemy laboratory.  In 1782 he told the Royal Society that he had found how to transmute mercury into gold. Even King George III was shown the miraculous nugget. However, when the Royal Society demanded proof of the process, he could not comply and committed suicide by taking prussic acid, dropping dead in front of the Society’s investigators. He was only thirty-one.

Photo Credit: Richard Cocks