Qualla: Chesham

Chesham: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James Cracknell, CC BY-SA 4.0. Boots, beer, brushes, and Baptists — the four Bs of Chesham. The town in the Chiltern Hills was once known across the Home Counties for all four. It supplied London with footwear, with paper pulp turned from grain mills along the River Chess, with brooms and shovels and the small wooden goods that came from the beechwoods on the hills above, and with the dissenting Christianity that had taken root here in the seventeenth century. It also, since 8 July 1889, has been the terminus of a single-track spur of the London Underground's Metropolitan line — the furthest outpost the Tube reaches from central London, twenty-six miles north-west of Charing Cross. Step off the train at Chesham station and you are technically still inside Transport for London's network, in a market town surrounded by Chiltern farmland that was here long before London began.

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Image: James Cracknell | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chesham: The River Chess and the Mills

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Nyborg, CC BY-SA 3.0. Chesham is not named after the river. The river is named after the town. The earliest record of the place dates from around 970, in the will of Lady Aelfgifu — possibly the former wife of King Eadwig — who bequeathed an estate here to Abingdon Abbey. The Old English name was Caes...

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Image: Chris Nyborg | CC BY-SA 3.0

Chesham: The Lollards and the Four Bs

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Iridescent, CC BY-SA 3.0. Long before the four Bs became a slogan, Chesham was a centre of religious dissent. The Lollards — followers of John Wycliffe, who had translated the Bible into English in the 1380s — were active here from the late fourteenth century. One of them, Thomas Harding, was burned at th...

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Image: Iridescent | CC BY-SA 3.0

Chesham: The Civil War and the Townsfolk

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nick.x5d, CC BY-SA 3.0. Chesham's dissenting heritage made it a Parliamentarian town during the English Civil War. In 1635, when Charles I's sheriff Sir Peter Temple tried to collect Ship Money from the townsfolk — a tax that was the constitutional crisis of the decade — Chesham refused. By 1642 the Par...

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Image: Nick.x5d | CC BY-SA 3.0

Chesham: The Metropolitan Line

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oxyman, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 8 July 1889 the Metropolitan Railway reached Chesham. The line had been intended to carry on to Tring, with connections to the West Coast Main Line. The route was abandoned, and Chesham became a terminus instead. The original goods yards beyond the station, where coal arrived ...

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Image: Oxyman | CC BY-SA 2.0

Chesham: The Town That Survives

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James Cracknell, CC BY-SA 4.0. The High Street was pedestrianised in 1990, after a new bypass routed the A416 around it. The clock tower in Market Square, rebuilt in 1992, uses the original mid-nineteenth-century glass-dialled clock face from the town hall demolished in 1965. The Bury, a Queen Anne house built...

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Image: James Cracknell | CC BY-SA 4.0