The Village
The 2001 census population of Virginia Water was 6,113. Many of the village's houses are large detached homes situated on the private Wentworth Estate home of the famous Wentworth Club which has four golf courses. The Ryder Cup was first played there. It is also home to the headquarters of the PGA European Tour, the world's second-richest professional golf tour (after the PGA Tour in the US). The estate reached the headlines in 1998 when General Augusto Pinochet was kept under house arrest in one of its houses prior to his extradition. Sarah, Duchess of York is a former royal resident. Many entertainment personalities also have or have had homes on the estate including Chris Squire, Sir Elton John, songwriter Bernie Taupin, Diana Dors, Russ Abbot, Cliff Richard and Sir Bruce Forsyth. Golfers who have or have had homes on the estate include Sir Nick Faldo, European Ryder Cup captain Bernard Gallacher, Sam Torrance, Sandy Lyle, Ernie Els and Thomas Bjørn. Ex-formula 1 team owner Eddie Jordan and boxer Prince Naseem Naseem Hamed also live on the Estate. The author and traveller Bill Bryson spent his early married life in the village. Paul Pindar, Chief Executive of Capita lives there.
Edward VIII was a resident of nearby Fort Belvedere.
Virginia Water is also home to many London commuters. It is close to the M25, M4 and M3 motorways. The village has a four track railway station in the middle of the village on the line between London Waterloo, Weybridge and Reading. Heathrow Airport is located eight miles to the north-east. The village has two rows of shops, although many inhabitants travel to the nearby towns of Staines-upon-Thames, Ascot and Windsor for shopping. The towns of Egham, Englefield Green and Old Windsor are nearby. Holloway Sanatorium, an asylum for the mentally ill, where the writer Bill Bryson worked upon first settling in England was located near to the village but closed in the 1980s and was converted to private accommodation.
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Famous quotes containing the word village:
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Zhivago: It seems you bombed the wrong village.
Strelnikov: They always say that. And what does it matter? A village betrays us, a village is burned. The point made.
Zhivago: Your point. Their village.”
—Robert Bolt (1924–1995)