Ealing holds England's oldest surviving census, a tally of 85 households
In January 1599 someone went door to door in the Middlesex village of Ealing and listed all 85 households: every resident's name, age, relationship and job. It is the earliest English census known to survive, now kept at The National Archives. Three centuries later, the village had become the Queen of the Suburbs.
The name reaches back further still, to the Gillingas, a Saxon group named after a leader called Gilla and mentioned in a Mercian charter of around 700. Spellings drifted to Yllinges around 1170 and Elyng by 1553. Before that, stone tools suggest Neanderthal-era hunters used the area. Medieval Ealing sat in a forest dotted with fields and hamlets, grew wheat, barley and rye, and belonged to the Bishop of London. Its manor stretched to the Thames at Old Brentford, and in 1257 the king ordered the bishop to supply 8,000 to 10,000 lampreys and other fish, a hint of how rich the river catch was.
Fruit came later. One West Ealing field held 1,008 trees in 1767, 850 of them apples. The old Oxford Road, gravelled after toll legislation and later renamed the Uxbridge Road, lined up inns for horse-drawn traffic and attracted highwaymen. Wealthy Londoners began escaping the city's smoke: the architect John Soane bought a house in 1800 and renamed it Pitzhanger Manor, purely for entertaining, and the Duke of Kent bought one at Castlebar the next year. Spencer Perceval, the only British prime minister to be assassinated, lived at Elm House.
Great Ealing School, founded by the parish church in 1698, was once praised as the finest private school in England, teaching W. S. Gilbert and John Henry Newman before closing in 1908. A summer fair on the green drew crowds until it was suppressed in 1880.
The railway station opened in 1838, and market gardens gave way to houses. By 1902 Ealing's greenery and position halfway between city and country had earned its nickname. It became a municipal borough in 1901 and joined Greater London in 1965. Today, about 7.5 miles west of Charing Cross, it is a busy commercial centre, while neighbourhoods such as Pitshanger keep their village feel.
Source: Ealing
