History
Kingston upon Thames, on the south bank of the River Thames has existed for many hundreds of years. Many Roman relics have been found in the surrounding areas. A church has stood on the site of All Saints Church, in the centre of Kingston, for more than a thousand years. An earlier church was sacked by the Vikings in 1009AD. Kingston was the site of the coronations of seven Anglo-Saxon monarchs:
- Edward the Elder, son of Alfred the Great), 900AD
- Athelstan, 925AD
- Edmund I, 939AD
- Eadred, 946AD
- Eadwig, 956AD
- Edward the Martyr, 975AD
- Ethelred the Unready, 979AD
The Coronation Stone, on which they are said to have been crowned stands outside the local council offices, the Guildhall. A coin from the reign of each of those kings is set into the base of the stone.
The borough was formed in 1965 by the merger and the transfer from Surrey to Greater London of the Municipal boroughs of Kingston-upon-Thames (which itself was a Royal Borough), Malden and Coombe and Surbiton.
The current name of the borough omits hyphens to distinguish it from the similarly named former municipal borough.
Kingston, administratively part of Greater London, contains County Hall, the seat of Surrey County Council, and except for the Kingston Vale area in the north-east which has a London SW15 postcode, was part of Surrey for postal purposes until postal counties were abolished in 1996.
Read more about this topic: Royal Borough Of Kingston Upon Thames
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)