The name is older than London thinks of itself. In the seventh century, a Saxon people called the Wixan migrated south from Lincolnshire and settled around a crossing of the River Colne, where the Oxford Road now meets a modern bridge beside the Swan and Bottle pub. By 1107 the place was being written down as Woxbrigge, then Uxbridge. Anglo-Saxons cleared the dense oak and elm woodland that had stood largely unchanged since the Mesolithic; archaeologists working ahead of the Chimes shopping centre construction in the 1990s turned up Bronze Age remains and the charcoal traces of campfires older than any English kingdom. The land underfoot here remembers things the buildings cannot.

By 1645, Uxbridge had become the country's most important market town outside the city proper, the first stop for stagecoaches running between London and Oxford. That convenience made it the obvious neutral ground when King Charles I and the Parliamentary Army agreed to attempt peace. They met at the Crown Inn, now the Crown and Treaty pub. The negotiations broke down, in part because the king refused to compromise. Four years later he was beheaded at Whitehall. In 1924 the panelled room where the talks took place was sold to an American businessman and installed in his Empire State Building office; in 1953 it was returned to England as a coronation present for the newly crowned Queen, who kept ownership but sent the panels home to Uxbridge.

On a wooded plot a mile from the high street, sixty feet underground, sits the room from which the air defence of southern England was directed during the summer of 1940. The Battle of Britain Bunker housed No. 11 Group's Operations Room: a long table marked with the counties of southeast England, plotters in headphones pushing wooden blocks to track every German formation crossing the Channel. Winston Churchill visited during the battle and afterwards spoke the line that has outlived almost everything else about the war. The same room directed fighter cover for the D-Day landings in June 1944. RAF Uxbridge closed in 2010, but the bunker was preserved, along with a replica Spitfire gate guardian and a Hurricane painted in the colours of 303 Polish Squadron — added in 2010, a quiet acknowledgement of pilots whose courage the official histories took decades to fully credit.

For roughly two hundred years, most of London's bread began here. The Grand Junction Canal, opened in 1794, linked Uxbridge's mills with Birmingham and the Thames at Brentford. One of those riverside mills was bought in the nineteenth century by William King and named Kingsmill — the bread brand still on supermarket shelves today carries his name. North of the mills, the Lowe and Shawyer plant nursery on Kingston Lane became, by the late nineteenth century, the largest cut-flower producer in Britain; chrysanthemums entered the borough coat of arms in its memory. Both industries are gone. Brunel University rose on the nursery site in 1966. The mills are derelict or converted. The war brought a different kind of erasure: between June 1944 and March 1945, V-1 flying bombs killed seventy-nine people in the Uxbridge district. The first struck at seven in the morning on 22 June, skimming over the roof of a bus before hitting four houses on the next street.

Modern Uxbridge is a commercial centre, the western terminus of the Metropolitan and Piccadilly lines, home to Brunel University and the European offices of Coca-Cola, Cadbury and a dozen other names. The Chimes shopping centre opened in 2001 over ground where the Bronze Age remains had emerged a decade earlier. The High Street is mostly pedestrianised. The Crown and Treaty still serves pints in the room where the king's men once tried to bargain their way out of a war. And the underground operations room, where young men and women guided the fighters that defended London, is now a museum that schoolchildren can walk through on a Saturday afternoon.