History
The earliest evidence of settlement is an Iron Age hill fort dating from around 500BC, called Danesborough Camp which is located to the southwest of the present town. Later when the settlement had developed into a hamlet it was part of the parish of Wavendon, becaming a separate civil parish in 1907. Under the Local Government Act 1972 the parish council has adopted the status of a town in its own right. It has separated from Wavendon which is just to the north of the Marston Vale Line.
The village name was originally Hogsty End, one of Wavendon's four 'ends' (along with Church End, Cross End and Lower End) but by Victorian times, this un-picturesque name had fallen out of favour, and Woburn Sands had taken over as the accepted name. There is a local story that a schoolmaster was unable to attract business to his "Hogsty End Academy", and was one of the first to promote the use of the new name, but in fact it had been in use before this. The modern place name is related to nearby Woburn in Bedfordshire, and to the sandy local soil resulting from its proximity to the Greensand Ridge, an escarpment of Greensand.
The town had a reputation as a health spa because of the micro-climate, and people would come from far and wide to "take the airs". Several convalescent homes were built locally.
Read more about this topic: Woburn Sands
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)