History
East Horsley appears in Domesday Book of 1086 as Horslei. It was held by Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury. Its domesday assets were: 3 hides and 1½ virgates; 8½ ploughs, woodland worth 50 hogs. It rendered £5.
There is a well-equipped amateur theatre called the Nomad Theatre which is behind the smaller of East Horsley's two rows of shops, Bishopsmead Parade. The theatre, the construction of which was largely financed by lottery grants from Arts Council England, opened in October 1998 with a production of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. A larger row of shops is situated near the railway station.
The village has a large gothic mansion which was designed by Sir Charles Barry (later the architect of the Houses of Parliament) for William Currie in place of an earlier building. William Currie, a distiller and banker, had bought the property in 1784 and over the next 44 years made extensive changes to the village including rebuilding most of the houses in the village, establishing the school and restoring the church. After William Currie's death in 1829 the property was acquired by the 1st Earl of Lovelace. It was the home of Ada, Lady Lovelace (the poet Lord Byron's daughter) and later Sir Thomas Sopwith, the aviation pioneer.
Read more about this topic: East Horsley
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)