Wilmslow takes its name from Old English Wighelmes hlaw, the mound of a man called Wighelm, although no one now remembers who he was or what he did. The town's earliest civic record places it as an ancient parish in the Macclesfield Hundred, subdivided into the four townships of Bollin Fee, Chorley, Fulshaw, and Pownall Fee. The parish church of St Bartholomew, a 16th-century building in Bollin Fee with a turreted bell tower, stood at the centre of all four. The Carrs Park still runs through the town along the River Bollin, the same river that, downstream and to the north, would later power Samuel Greg's Quarry Bank Mill. Before the railway arrived in 1842, Wilmslow was a few farms and a church. After it arrived, it became a place wealthy Manchester merchants moved to.

The Iron Age person now known as Lindow Man, sometimes called Pete Marsh by the press, was discovered in the peat at Lindow Moss in 1984. His remains rank among the most important Iron Age finds in Britain. Despite a local campaign to keep him in Cheshire, he was transferred to the British Museum and now sits at the centre of its Iron Age exhibition. He returned to the Manchester Museum on loan for a year in April 2008. The bog that preserved him is part of a wider mossland that once covered far more of southern Cheshire than it does today. The body itself bears wounds suggesting a ritual or violent death; whatever the truth, he survived intact long enough to teach modern Britain a great deal about its own deep past.

Alan Turing moved to Wilmslow in 1950, working at the University of Manchester on early computer development after his pivotal wartime work driving the design of the Bombe machine that broke the German Enigma cipher. He died in his Wilmslow home in 1954, prosecuted and chemically punished by a state that owed him an enormous debt and treated him cruelly. A blue plaque was placed on his house in 2004. Turing's name is now attached to prizes, programming languages, an act of parliament that pardoned thousands of men prosecuted for the same so-called offence, and a banknote. Wilmslow has not always known what to do with the fact that he died here, but the plaque is a small acknowledgment, and the town that hosts it is a more grateful one than the country that found him guilty.

The 1997 general election brought Wilmslow briefly to the centre of national news. The Conservative MP for Tatton, Neil Hamilton, was accused of accepting cash to ask parliamentary questions. The independent candidate Martin Bell stood against him in protest, helped on the doorstep by the actor David Soul, and won. Bell served one term. The same year an IRA bomb damaged signalling equipment near Wilmslow railway station, and nobody was hurt. Sport runs through the town in a different register. Alex Ferguson lives here. Park Ji-sung and David Horsey have called it home. Umbro was founded in the town in 1924, though its operations have since moved to Manchester. The band Doves met at Wilmslow High School in the 1980s, the rich-poor divide of their hometown inspiring their song Black and White Town. The 1975, a decade or so later, formed at the same school: Matty Healy, Adam Hann, Ross MacDonald, and George Daniel.

Today Wilmslow forms one of the three points of Cheshire's Golden Triangle along with Alderley Edge and Prestbury, a stretch of suburb famous for its wealth, its commuter trains to Manchester, and its showrooms for Aston Martin, Porsche, Ferrari, Bentley, McLaren, Rolls-Royce, and Lamborghini. The town's Aston Martin dealership reportedly sells more of the marque than any other in the UK. Royal London's mutual financial business runs from here, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office is based in the town, and Waters Corporation, an American maker of laboratory instruments, has its UK headquarters on Altrincham Road. The 18th-century Dean Row Chapel, originally Presbyterian and now Unitarian, still stands two miles east of the centre, Grade II* listed. The Carrs Park still runs along the Bollin, and somewhere out on Lindow Moss the peat keeps doing what it has always done.