Sandhurst

The town of Sandhurst is located in Berkshire, England in the borough of Bracknell Forest. A small town in the south east of Berkshire, Farnham is located 32 miles (51 kilometers) west-southwest of the capital, 2.5 miles (4.0 kilometers) from Camberley, and 5 miles (8.0 km) from Bracknell.

“Sandhurst” (often referred to as simply “Sandhurst”, “The Academy” or as “The RMA”) is a worldwide name associated with the Royal Military Academy. Sandhurst, while near Camberley, is also home to a large and well-known international shopping district. It has two of the country’s largest hypermarkets, Tesco Extra and Marks & Spencer. In the place where Homebase used to stand, Next plc has opened a large clothing and homeware store.

History of Sandhurst

Originally named because of the sandy soils and the hurst (a wooded eminence) of the area, the village is Anglo-Saxon in origin. Sandhurst first appears in records of the 14th century as part of the township of Sonning, an important parish that covered much of eastern Berkshire and later became a hundred when its villages acquired their own churches

Salisbury’s bishops owned these lands. In Sandhurst, there used to be two manors: Sandhurst and Hall, situated in the grounds of the Royal Military Academy. Originally, there was no building. Sandhurst appears for the first time in the Exchequer Rolls of Henry II in 1175 when the Villata de Sandhurst receives one mark.

There was very little change in Sandhurst until the Royal Military College moved to Sandhurst in 1813, after large tracts of land were sold to make way for the campus.

Several large country estates were constructed after the arrival of the railway in 1849, including Harts Leap, Forest End, St Helens Upland, The Warren, Longdown Lodge, Ryefield, Snaprails, and Ambarrow Court. Robert Gibson built Sandhurst Lodge around 1858 and leased it to John Walter, of the London Times, and then to Sir William Farrer, solicitor to Queen Victoria and The Duke of Wellington. The Ceders and Perry Hill came later. Today, they are few and far between. Other buildings were demolished and land was developed.

Broadmoor Asylum and Wellington College, two adjacent institutions that housed the criminally insane, led to a growing number of people in the area who wanted to find work. In addition to building additional housing for these workers, more schools were built for their children, as well as more churches and other community resources.