At the southern end of the common, on land now used by the Royal Wimbledon Golf Club with a public footpath running through it, lie the remains of an Iron Age hill fort. The 19th-century antiquaries called it Caesar's Camp. Whatever Caesar called it, the main period of use as an oppidum appears to have been the 6th to 4th centuries BC. There is evidence the Romans stormed it - possibly during the Claudian invasion of Britain in AD 43, possibly by Vespasian and the Second Legion pushing west in AD 44. The site may go back further, to the Bronze Age, but in 1875 a landowner named John Erle-Drax deliberately destroyed the hill fort earthworks and the surrounding barrows, removing in a single act of vandalism what archaeology has spent the next 150 years trying to recover from LiDAR scans and surface features.

Putney Heath, the northern portion of the Commons, was historically the spot for things London preferred to keep out of sight. Charles II reviewed his forces here in 1684, George III did the same in 1767. Many duels were fought - including one in May 1652 in which Colonel Henry Compton was killed by the third Lord Chandos, and one in May 1798 in which the sitting Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, exchanged bloodless shots with the MP William Tierney. Pitt lived nearby at Bowling-Green House. Between 1796 and 1816 the heath hosted a shutter telegraph station - part of the chain that connected the Admiralty in London to the fleet at Portsmouth - replaced by a semaphore station that operated from 1822 to 1847. A stone obelisk erected in 1770 still stands, marking the 110th anniversary of the Great Fire of London and the spot where the inventor David Hartley demonstrated his fireproof building plates, repeatedly setting fire to the lower floor of his house in the presence of George III, Queen Charlotte, and assorted Members of Parliament.

Thomas Cromwell, the 1st Earl of Essex and Henry VIII's chief minister, was born on the north side of Putney Heath circa 1485. Tradition placed his birthplace at a spot now occupied by the Green Man public house, where a 17th-century manor survey describes 'an ancient cottage called the smith's shop... being the sign of the Anchor.' A few hundred yards away, on a rise still known as Jerry's Hill, the highwayman Jerry Abershaw was hung in a chain gibbet after his 1795 execution at Kennington, as a warning to other road agents. Abershaw had frequented the nearby Bald Face Stag Inn. The inn was later knocked down to make way for the KLG factory of Kenelm Lee Guinness, the racing driver who developed the spark plugs that bore his initials. The factory site is now an Asda supermarket. Layers on layers.

Near the centre of the Common - though the unmarked parish boundary with Putney Common runs past it - stands Wimbledon Windmill, built in 1817 as a hollow-post mill, one of only a few surviving in Britain. In the 19th century it served as headquarters for the National Rifle Association, which held its national championship - the Imperial Meeting - on Wimbledon Common every July, drawing 'the elite of fashion' to the open-air shooting ranges. The NRA outgrew Wimbledon and moved to Bisley in 1890. Robert Baden-Powell wrote parts of Scouting for Boys in the windmill in 1907, the year before publication. The book launched the Scouting movement worldwide. Baden-Powell first noticed the interest of girls in scouting at a Boy Scout meeting at Crystal Palace in 1909 - an observation that led to the Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. The windmill is now a small museum.

Wimbledon F.C., which would win the FA Cup in 1988, started in the late 19th century as a former-pupils' team called The Old Centrals, playing on Wimbledon Common with the Fox and Grapes pub as their changing room. Putney Lower Common hosted Fulham F.C.'s home games in the 1885-86 season. The Roehampton Cricket Club has played continuously on its village green since 1859. In 1900, J. P. Morgan was made an honorary member; ten years later, the polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton presided at the club dinner. Four German V-1 flying bombs hit the area in 1944. One destroyed the cricket pavilion in July. The common's three ponds - Kingsmere, Rushmere, and the deeper, more remote Queensmere - sit among the heath and woodland. American servicemen during the war used to stop their jeeps to 'taste this crazy cricket game.' A modern parkrun starts and finishes at the windmill every Saturday morning with more than 300 runners. The Wombles - the burrowing recyclers of Elisabeth Beresford's children's books - lived under the common, in fiction. Visit on a quiet weekday and you can almost believe in them.