Molesey

The earliest documentary evidence of a settlement in Molesey appears in a 7th-century charter, shortly after Erkenwald founded Chertsey Abbey in AD 666. He secured from Frithwald, sub-king of Surrey, a charter endowing the abbey with much of the surrounding land, including Muleseg. Etymologists suggest that the town's name is derived from the personal name Mul (pronounced Mule) compounded with the Old English word eg, meaning an island or river meadow – thus Mul's Island. Therefore, Molesey is not, as commonly believed, named after the River Mole that runs through it. The prefixes East and West did not appear until about the year 1200, before which there was only one parish centred around what is now known as East Molesey.[3] Molesey lay within the Saxon administrative district of Elmbridge hundred.

East Molesey appears in Domesday Book of 1086 as Molesham. It was held partly by John from Richard Fitz Gilbert and partly by Roger d'Abernon. Its Domesday assets were: 2 hides and 3 virgates. It had 7 ploughs, 2 oxen, and 32 acres (13 ha) of meadow and woodland worth 10 hogs. It rendered £6 15s 0d. West Molesey was held by Odard Balistarius. Its Domesday assets were: 1 hide, 1 church, and 5 ploughs. It rendered £4.[4]

Along with neighbouring Thames Ditton, East Molesey formed a part of the ancient parish of Kingston upon Thames, based at the historic All Saints Church, Kingston upon Thames. From 1933, the Urban District of East and West Molesey became part of the Esher Urban District, which was originally recommended by the Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London (the Herbert Commission) for inclusion within the new ceremonial county of Greater London. In 1974, the district eventually merged with its neighbour to the west, Walton and Weybridge Urban District, to form the new borough of Elmbridge within Surrey.[5]

Molesey was one of the many villages and towns along the Thames valley affected by flooding in 1968; specifically here the flooding of the River Mole. Some barriers and overflow fields have been created since then by the Environment Agency and its precursors.[6]

East and West Molesey uses a roughly due north-south compass axis, based on a point of division by the Molesey Stone on the grass outside Molesey Library on Walton Road, though the Stone has been moved from its original position and the actual boundary between East and West Molesey has become somewhat blurred and disputed.

West Molesey, East Molesey and Hampton Court

Molesey is directly south of the River Thames, with several large reservoirs bordering the town to the west and south that provide water within the London Basin. Some of these are now disused and are being converted into nature reserves. To the west lie Bessborough Reservoir and Knight Reservoir, to the north-west Molesey Reservoirs, to the south Island Barn Reservoir, and to the south-west Queen Elizabeth II Reservoir. There are walks beside Metropolitan green belt fields to the south along the river Mole to Esher, and to the west along the Thames Path to Walton-on-Thames.

Hampton Court Palace is immediately north-east of East Molesey across Hampton Court Bridge.

Hampton Court Bridge and East Molesey Riverbank

The Palace, together with the southern part of Bushy Park and most of Hampton Court Park are in the post town East Molesey.

Molesey Lock is just above Hampton Court Bridge, downstream of Sunbury Lock and upstream of Teddington Lock. Cigarette Island Park is just below the bridge, occupying the eastern extremity of the town.

Hurst Park is on the south bank of the Thames, from where there is a daily ferry service to Hampton on the Middlesex bank. It once had a horse racing course but no longer does.

The residential streets of East Molesey run directly into Weston Green and the northernmost stretches of residential Esher to the south, and Thames Ditton to the south-east. Together with the reservoirs, Green Belt land to the west and south-west divides West Molesey from Walton on Thames.

On the south side of Molesey, separating West Molesey from Hersham and Walton-on-Thames, lies Molesey Heath which is home to a large and rapidly growing roost of Parakeets, one of several in North Surrey. Thousands of these bright green birds can be seen flying across the heath in the hour before sunset each day as they return to their roosts on the heath and at nearby Esher Rugby Club.

The central shopping area of Kingston upon Thames lies 1.7 miles east of Bridge Road in East Molesey, while central Walton on Thames lies 2.3 miles to the west-southwest of West Molesey High Street.

Molesey's conservation area is to the south by a corollary channel of the River Mole, known as the River Ember, where successive environment authorities have implemented capacity-adding flood defences following a widespread and costly flood in 1968. Following further extensive flooding along the Thames in 2014 the Environment Agency is to carry out more large scale 'capacity building' work involving the construction of nine miles of new channels in areas upstream of Molesey as part of a flood relief project known as the River Thames Scheme (RTS) running between 2018 and 2027. This is hoped will protect built-up areas adjacent to the Thames between Datchet and Teddington which the Agency describes as "one of the largest and most at risk developed but undefended floodplains in England" in the report. Costs were estimated at around £476 million with an extra £100m for disposing of excavated waste as landfill. There has been political controversy about how the totality of these vastly costly works will be met. It is unknown if these costs will be subsidised nationally or raised locally. Elmbridge's population on average is statistically one of the wealthiest in the country so large scale national subsidies might be controversial. The Latin motto of Elmbridge council is "Dum Defluant Amnes" (Until the rivers cease to flow), somewhat ironically in view of this threat.

Before 1968 the whole area including expensive areas such as East Molesey flooded badly on a regular basis as they are in part located on the former flood plains of the Thames and the Mole. Even today localised flooding and standing water can be quite common in times of heavy rain as the area is very low lying and flat. Molesey can be the subject of flood warnings that affect the Thames Valley.

Some recent development has been very controversial for this and other reasons and long running high-profile planning rows are a feature of Molesey - administered by Elmbridge Council. The most well-known is the long-running row lasting many years over the empty "Jolly Boatman" site opposite Hampton Court Palace which later began to be used by fly-tippers on a large scale, an issue often reported on in the area. The row over this site has been running since the 1990s when plans to redevelop East Molesey railway station and the adjacent site were first mooted. At various times national heritage organisations, historians of national significance, MPs and local residents and businesses have become involved resulting in extensive national press coverage. In 2006 a developer lodged formal plans with Elmbridge Council and a formal opposition group, Hampton Court Rescue Campaign was formed. The numerous twists and turns in a highly contentious battle have been extensively documented and included an appeal against Elmbridge Council by a developer in 2013 which resulted in costs being awarded against EBC. Total costs to the council were some £78,000. The site changed hands in 2015. A further large-scale riverside planning row has been running over the development of the so-called Walton Sports Hub which is sited on a former waste tip adjacent to the Thames. Elmbridge originally gave planning permission without requiring an Environmental Impact Assessment despite concerns of local residents and businesses on a range of issues including fears of toxins entering the Thames, only to be immediately overruled by Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles. Objectors then mounted a legal challenge to the original application and a High Court Judge quashed the original planning application in January 2017 following a legal challenge. The following day the council passed a second planning application and this has been in consultation during 2017. The "Surrey Advertiser" called the project history "marred in controversy" in September 2017. A third major controversy over the nearby Drake Park site off Molesey Road and near Fieldcommon Lane ran for around two years where a developer wanted to build a new 'village'. Hundreds of objections cited issues such as access and traffic problems, periodic local flooding and green belt considerations and the proposal was rejected by Elmbridge Council late in 2016 but an appeal to the Planning Inspector brought a further hearing in October 2017 which was finally rejected in May 2018 with another Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government again intervening. This was days after Local Government elections in which an alliance of opposition parties which surprisingly had ousted the Conservatives in 2016 handed back the leadership of Elmbridge Council to a Conservative nominee following a drawn election result. In another bizarre lengthy planning row in 2014, Elmbridge Council gave permission for further works on a house in Molesey where unfinished works had already been in progress for well over a decade, despite over a dozen objections and despite the then leader of the Council referring to the house as "Visual Armageddon" in the local press. The row went on for three months and through all levels of the local planning process occupying considerable public and private resources. The local planning sub-committee rejected the application on the chair's casting vote when local independent councillors sided with the objectors. However a 'procedural error' was then discovered and the matter referred to the full committee which had a large majority from the then ruling party and was passed. One local councillor commented that there was no point objecting. In 2018 it is thought that only basic works have been carried out.

Local politics in Molesey have a very robust history with the mainly independent minority groupings in Molesey and other parts of Elmbridge often at odds with the dominating Conservatives. One Conservative defector to the Liberal Democrats who helped oust the Conservatives for the interim period 2016-18 called the usually dominating party "complacent and arrogant" in 2017 and went on to say "When as a member of same political group [the Conservatives] my efforts on behalf of my ward residents were frustrated at every stage, something is very wrong".[9]

Molesey Lock is the second lock (and weir) on the River Thames, and marks the furthest point upstream that the influence of the tides on the Thames (regulated by the Thames Barrier at Woolwich) may be registered. The lock is located within 100 metres of Hampton Court Bridge, designed by Edwardian Arts and Crafts architect Edwin Lutyens, styles reflected by contemporary properties in the town. Other styles which are prevalent are 1960s red-brick semi-detached homes and Art Deco/Bauhaus.

In the West Molesey area some houses are the result of over-optimistic development in the 1930s by developer Donald Gordon Howard who eventually went bankrupt trying to sell houses at exceptionally low prices - at £395 some of the cheapest in the London area - while implying a misleading proximity to Hampton Court. The attraction was cheap, low-lying land near the London reservoirs and quite remote from transport links, especially the railway. Speculative land dealing and building go back a long way in the area. Much of East Molesey resulted from large scale land speculation in the 1850s by one Francis Jackson Kent who saw an opportunity to make a killing when the railway arrived at Hampton Court in 1849, quickly snapping up land nearby and selling it on to wealthy individuals or developers who rapidly built on low lying former meadows that had always been flood prone. They naturally remained so until the 1960s when the nearby River Mole was re channeled after a hugely expensive flood. Pictures of the East Molesey area and Hampton Court station environs (on the opposite bank to the Palace) in flood conditions recur in 19th and 20th centuries.

Molesey and adjacent areas of Esher, Walton and Hersham also have a significant amount of former council housing constructed by the predecessors to Elmbridge Council. There are also areas of post-war system built housing, thought to be of the concrete sectional type, built at the time of housing shortage in the years after World War 2 including on the West Molesey/East Molesey border. They could be built more cheaply and rapidly than conventional houses using prefabrication techniques developed in the war years. This housing was probably partly linked to an area of light industrial development in Molesey and nearby areas some dating from the post-war period. It was at one time home to the well-known company Roberts Radio who built a factory there in 1962.

There are no permanent traveller sites in East or West Molesey, but there is believed to be a small settled traveller population in the Field Common area to the south of Molesey Heath and in adjacent Hersham, which featured in the TV series "My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding". Elmbridge borough as a whole has also had the equal largest number of illegal transient traveller incursions in Surrey in recent years and a former leader of Elmbridge Council referred to this being a particular problem in Molesey in extensive press coverage of the issue which has been ongoing and contentious in recent times. In 2013 nearly 80 people signed a petition to Elmbridge Council concerning an illegal traveller camp on land adjacent to Molesham Way and eventually the site was cleared and barriers erected. However, travellers later returned to the adjacent car park and the cycle repeated leading to speculation that the group had contacts in that vicinity also. In 2015 the Traveller Movement, a traveller charity, complained about Elmbridge Council to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. As of 24 July 2017 The Surrey Advertiser's online outlet 'Get Surrey' reported there were three illegal traveller sites at that time in Elmbridge in Cobham, Esher and Weybridge with some 60 travellers estimated at the Cobham site. At the end of August 2017 another group moved onto West Molesey Recreation Ground, Walton Road, West Molesey close to the earlier incursions off Molesham Way, staying around a week. On 17 November 2017 "Get Surrey" reported that there had been 14 unauthorised traveller camps in Elmbridge to that point in 2017 a pattern continuing in 2018. Traveller or gypsy associations with the riverside areas of Elmbridge and adjacent boroughs seem to have a long history and may be associated with the availability of marginal land not very suitable for permanent settlement and riverside sports and entertainments as in the Hurst Park area of Molesey.

The former Hurst Park race course in Molesey was the scene of an event of the suffragette campaign when two women extremists set fire to the grandstand in 1913 virtually destroying it in a huge and costly blaze that could be seen across large parts of south London, requiring fire crews from many surrounding areas to extinguish it. The attack was said to be in revenge for the death of Emily Davison at the Derby earlier that year and part of a deliberately violent and destructive campaign by the suffragette movement that in turn provoked an increasingly harsh crackdown by politicians, police and judiciary with more arrests and imprisonments and a raid on the suffragette HQ by police. There had already been large deployments of police to protect politicians and break up suffragette demonstrations and numerous complaints about the aggressive tactics of the police and 'roughs' or thugs who seemed to be allowed to attack and assault the demonstrators. Suffragette fury built over time but especially in 1910 when the Government promised a bill giving some women the vote but this was talked out in a cynical and devious political move resulting in a mass demonstration by women to Parliament on 'Black Friday' 1910.[10] It had seemed that the system was on the side of justice and reason in a case of clear injustice but this now appeared a molesham. Violence erupted and police arrested over 100 women but once again there were many complaints about police actions and their apparent 'blind eye' or even encouragement of harassment and assaults by thugs and yobs. The Government tried to suppress the "Daily Mirror" which appeared to show a policeman and yobs kicking an apparently well-off middle class women on the ground on the front page. One of the women in the Molesey attack, Kitty Marion, had already been in prison for breaking windows and causing disturbances at speeches by prominent politicians and had staged violent hunger strikes while in prison but had been brutally force fed on several hundred occasions. However, an interview in the "BBC History" Magazine in May 2018 describes the violence of the suffragettes revealing the extent of their bombing and arson campaign - Marion herself is said to have carried out a "nationwide" arson and bombing campaign while in May 1913 alone suffragettes carried out 52 attacks the "majority" involving bombs and arson while a loaded revolver, shotgun and prepared bomb were found in a raid on another woman's home. Nitroglycerin and phosphorus bombs were also used the latter causing serious injuries. Author and historian Fern Riddell labels the suffragettes of the WSPU as "terrorists".[11] The police regarded the women extremists as more dangerous than Irish and anarchist terrorists and "the most dangerous organisation operating in Britain at that time" according to the interview.

Molesey was once the bare-knuckle boxing centre of England,[12] and had a famous horse-racing track stretching the length of the River Thames from where Hurst Park School now stands, down to Molesey Lock. Much of the course was built on in the 1960s: the Hurst Park Estate has a mixture of three and two-storey homes and a block of flats overlooking the river. Part of the open space that was part of the racetrack is now an riverside park. There is a wide grass expanse, a playground and open access to the Thames, features here include the popular Hampton Ferry and Molesey Regatta, a major event in the sport of rowing with catering and evening outdoor music. There are some large iron gates in the access road to Hurst Park called Graburn Way which were built so that horse races then started just east of the road and enabled the course to have a 'straight mile'.

A website that collates various police statistics for locations across the country reports that for the period September 2016 to August 2017 Violent Crime was the biggest single category of offences for the West Molesey area with 241 instances shown. According this data Violent Crime comfortably exceeded the second category which was Anti-Social Behaviour with 224 instances.[14] Criminal Damage and Arson ranked third with 104 instances and Burglary fourth with 82 instances. Home Office Statistics for the next chronological period (August 2017 to July 2018) are very similar showing Violence and Sexual offences as the largest category with 248 offences, Anti-Social Behaviour second with 198 offences and Burglary third with 106 offences just ahead of Criminal Damage and Arson with 101 offences[15]

There were two murders in West Molesey in 2016-17. A woman was found murdered with a machete or axe according to police in the front garden of her house on Walton Road, Molesey in March 2016 resulting in extensive national publicity. Police launched a second current local murder investigation on 7 December 2017 when a woman reported as previously deliberately run down in the small hours of the morning in a car park on land between Hurst Road, Molesham Way and Walton Road, died in hospital. A man was also murdered while fishing on the Thames towpath in nearby Walton in 2016. Three young men with links to Molesey or other nearby areas were jailed for this crime in early 2019.

• Rick Astley, British pop musician, lives in East Molesey.[18]
• Chemmy Alcott, British Olympic alpine skier
• Mick Avory, drummer and percussionist for rock band The Kinks, grew up in West Molesey.[19]
• Keith Barron, actor, lived in the town from the 1970s to 2017.
• Ed Bishop, actor, lived in West Molesey.
• Liv Boeree, professional poker player, lives in East Molesey
• Ronald Brooks (1899–1980), first-class cricketer and British Army officer
• Bernie Constable (1921–1997), cricketer, brother of the below
• Dennis Constable (1925-2011), cricketer, brother of the above
• Bill Cotton, the television producer and executive and the son of big-band leader Billy Cotton, lived in East Molesey in his latter years.
• Terence Cuneo 1907-1996 Artist.
• Hazel Dean, pop music singer, lives in the town.
• Ray Galton script writer. Comedy. Most notable for Hancock's Half Hour and Steptoe and Son.
• Marius Goring, actor
• Roy Holder, actor
• Jentina, British rapper
• Eric Lyons, architect
• Lee Mack, stand-up comic, lives in East Molesey
• Howard Parkes (1877–1920), cricketer, buried at Molesey Cemetery, West Molesey.[20]
• John Orlando Parry (1810-1879), 19th century entertainer.[21]
• Luke Shaw, professional footballer, grew up in West Molesey[22] and played for Molesey Juniors FC.
• Alfred Sisley (1839–1899), Anglo-French impressionist painter, resided in East Molesey in 1874, executing nearly twenty paintings of the Upper Thames.
• Steve Steen, actor, lives in East Molesey.
• Les Strong, professional footballer who played for Crystal Palace and Fulham
• Michael Underwood, the physician who first described polio, was born in West Molesey.
• Julius Vogel (1835–1899), British-born Prime Minister of New Zealand, retired to East Molesey, and died there
• Matt Willis, the musician, TV presenter and ex-actor, who is best known for being the bassist in Busted, lived in Molesey during his youth
• Freya Wilson, a raging narcissist

The average level of accommodation in the region composed of detached houses was 28%, the average that was apartments was 22.6%.

The proportion of households in the settlement who owned their home outright compares to the regional average of 35.1%. The proportion who owned their home with a loan compares to the regional average of 32.5%. The remaining % is made up of rented dwellings (plus a negligible % of households living rent-free).

There is a locally moored boat, the West Molesey houseboat, which is moored on the river Thames.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Molesey.

• Molesey History – This site has many books, papers and pictures on the history of Molesey and the surrounding area from Rowland G M Baker's collection.
• Molesey News & Mail local newspaper
• Molesey Residents' Association – The local Residents Association.
• Elmbridge Borough Council – The local council.
• Molesey Life – Local Guide to Molesey and the Hampton Court Palace area
• Molesey.uk - Local news and information
• Thames Ditton and Weston Green Residents' Association - local Residents Association