Hampton existed long before any cardinal noticed it. The Anglo-Saxon village clustered around the small hillock where St Mary's Church still stands, at the intersection of the Windsor-Kingston road and the road north to Twickenham. The Domesday Book of 1086 recorded forty-one villagers and four smallholders, about two hundred people in total, working thirty-five hides of land - around four thousand two hundred acres in modern measurement. The manor passed from a Norman crusader named Walter of Saint-Valery to a London merchant in 1217, then to the Knights Hospitaller in 1237. The Knights, returning crusaders who used English estates to fund their headquarters on Rhodes, built a substantial house here, kept sheep and oxen, ran a fish weir on the Thames, and kept pigeons. They held Hampton for nearly three centuries before Wolsey's lease and Henry's appetite changed everything.

In the Christmas of 1603, the newly crowned James I moved his entire court to Hampton Court Palace to escape an outbreak of plague that had ravaged London through the summer - and had killed ninety-nine of the one hundred and nineteen people who died in Hampton itself that year. The conference of bishops and clerics that James had summoned to debate church reform, postponed by the same plague, was reconvened at the palace in January 1604. The Hampton Court Conference produced two of the most consequential documents in English religious history: a new edition of the Book of Common Prayer, and a commission for a new translation of the Bible. The King James Version, completed by forty-seven scholars working in six committees across England, was published in 1611. The translation was decided here, in the Great Hall, while plague burned itself out in the streets of London thirteen miles to the east.

Sometime around 1690, William and Mary's gardeners planted the hedge maze that still confuses visitors today. It is the oldest surviving hedge maze in the British Isles - a third of an acre of hornbeam hedges arranged in a trapezoidal layout, with twisty walks and dead ends, designed to entertain the court of the late seventeenth century. Visitors have been getting lost in it for more than three hundred and thirty years. Jerome K. Jerome made it famous in the 1889 comic novel Three Men in a Boat, in which Harris confidently leads a party into the maze claiming it is 'so simple it is absurd to call it a maze' and is found, hours later, in the centre, surrounded by lost tourists who have followed him under the impression that he knows the way out. The maze still does that. The hornbeams have been replaced over the centuries but the layout has not.

In 1852 Parliament passed the Metropolis Water Act, which made it illegal for water companies to draw drinking water from the tidal Thames below Teddington Lock. The water below the lock was filthy with London's sewage; cholera epidemics had killed thousands. Three water companies - the Southwark and Vauxhall, the Grand Junction, and the West Middlesex - jointly built new waterworks on the Thames at Hampton, above Sunbury Lock, where the river was still freshwater. The works opened in 1855 and became one of the largest employers in Hampton for more than a century. The water that comes out of taps across south London still passes through these treatment beds. The Italianate brick pump houses are listed buildings; the original beam engines have been preserved. It is the kind of Victorian infrastructure that England builds and then quietly maintains for a hundred and seventy years.

The Thames at Hampton bulges around three small islands. Tagg's Island, the largest, was named after Thomas Tagg, a Victorian boat-builder who established the first boatyard on its eastern end in 1866. In 1913 the impresario Fred Karno - born Frederick Westcott, the man who first put Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel on stage - bought the island and built the Karsino Hotel, a thousand-room riverside resort with a music hall, a tennis lawn, and Edwardian extravagance everywhere you looked. The Karsino was a flop. Karno lost his fortune; the hotel was demolished in 1971. The island today is a quiet houseboat community, the docks lined with floating homes painted in colours you could not name in a catalogue. Across the channel on Platt's Eyot, the boat-builder John I. Thornycroft built motor torpedo boats during both world wars, including Miss England III, which set the world water speed record in 1932. The boatsheds burned in 2021. The river keeps moving, the same colour it always was.