-->England-->Buckinghamshire-->Chesham

Local Information for Chesham

Chesham is a town in the Chiltern Hills, Buckinghamshire, England, the fourth largest in the county, and is situated in the Chess Valley. It has a tube station, which is the last station on the spur off the Metropolitan Line, of the London Underground.

The first recorded reference to Chesham, or Cestreham, was in the will of Lady Elgiva, an Anglo-Saxon Queen. There is archaeological evidence of a Roman villa downstream at Latimer and the planting of grapevines near the Balks.

Chesham is mentioned in 1012 AD as Cæstæleshamm, which is Anglo-Saxon for "the river-meadow at the pile of stones".

Chesham has a long history of religious diversity, such as the persecuted Lollards of the 15th century and Thomas Harding, martyred on White Hill, near Dungrove Farm, in 1532. The 18th and 19th centuries saw the rapid growth of non-conformists especially Baptists, and the later 20th century saw the establishment of a sizable Muslim community. The first proper mosque in the ...More