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| Areas of Outstanding
Natural Beauty |
Lying
just south of Greater London the Surrey
Hills form part of the Green Belt which encircles the capital
in order to restrict the city's expansion into the surrounding countryside.
The AONB was one of the earliest to be designated in 1958. It spans
the county from east to west and includes some of its most famous
beauty spots with Box Hill, the Devil's Punchbowl and Leith
Hill - the highest point in the south-east of England - all lying
within its borders.
Spreading
across three ancient counties, the major part of the High
Weald is found in Sussex, reaching down to the coast at Hastings.
Designated an AONB in 1983, the area lies between the North and South
Downs and contains one of the largest areas of ancient woodland remaining
today in England. This woodland includes the Ashdown
Forest.
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| Artists
and Architects |
The
portrait and landscape painter Thomas
Gainsborough was buried in Kew in 1788.
Thomas
Gainsborough
The
writer and pioneering garden designer Gertrude
Jekyll died at her home Munstead
Wood near Godalming in 1932 and is buried in the church at nearby
Busbridge. She planned many gardens in Surrey where she spent most
of her life and over 300 for the buildings of her friend, the architect
Edwin Lutyens.
Gertrude
Jekyll
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| Monarchs |
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House of Lancaster |
House of Lancaster |
Murdered
in the Tower
of London in 1471 Henry
VI was was not to be given the honour of a burial at Westminster
Abbey and so the Yorkist Edward
IV had
the king buried in Chertsey
Abbey. It was not until 1484 when Richard
III
had the last Lancastrian monarch disinterred and reburied at
Windsor Castle in Berkshire.
Henry
VI
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House of Windsor |
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House
of Windsor |
Edward
VIII was born at White
Lodge in Richmond Park in 1894.
In
December 1936 he became the only British monarch to voluntarily
abdicate
so that he could marry the American divorcee Wallace Simpson.
He had ruled since January of the same year but was never crowned.
Edward
VIII
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Prime
Ministers
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Prime Ministers |
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Prime
Minister in 1765-66 and 1782, Charles Wentworth, the Marquess
of Rockingham died in Wimbledon in 1782 whilst still in office.
Marquess
of Rockingham
William
Pitt, the Younger, twice Prime
Minister in 1783-1801 and 1804-06, died at his home Bowling Green
House in Putney Heath in 1806. He
is buried in Westminster
Abbey. The
second son of the former Prime Minister the Earl of Chatham, he
was aged only 24 in 1783, the youngest Prime Minister ever.
Pitt the Younger's second administration was faced with the growing
Napoleonic threat to Europe and it was Pitt who formed the coalition
of countries which defeated the French at the Battle
of Trafalgar.
Pitt's glory was shortlived and in the same year the coalition fell
apart and Napoleon was victorious at Austerlitz. Pitt died the following
year and it was nearly a decade before Napoleon was eventually defeated
at Waterloo in 1815.
William
Pitt, the Younger
Battle of Trafalgar
Famous
people buried at Westminster Abbey
The Prime Minister from 1812-27, Robert Jenkinson, the
Earl
of Liverpool, died at Coombe House in Kingston-upon-Thames in
1828.
Earl
of Liverpool
Henry
Addington, Prime Minister from 1801-04, died at White
Lodge at Richmond Park in 1844 and is buried in Mortlake churchyard.
Henry
Addington
Prime
Minister in 1827-28, Frederick Robinson, Viscount
Goderich
died at Putney Heath in 1859.
Viscount
Goderich
Twice Prime Minister from 1846-51 and 1865-66, Earl
Russell died at Richmond Park
in 1878.
Earl
Russell
Prime
Minister from 1945-51, Clement
Attlee
was born in Putney in 1883. His Labour administration governed in
the turbulent post-war years and revolutionized British society
by introducing the Welfare
State
including in 1948 the National Health Service. In 1947 and 1948
India and Burma gained independence, the beginnings of the dismantling
of the British Empire.
Clement
Attlee
Welfare State
The
Earl
of Rosebery, Prime Minister
from 1894-95, died at The Durdans in Epsom in 1929.
Earl
of Rosebery
Arthur
James Balfour, Prime Minister from 1902-05, died at Fisher's
Hill in Woking in 1930.
Arthur
James Balfour
The
son of a performing trapeze artist, John
Major
was born at St Helier Hospital in Carshalton in 1943, and was Prime
Minister from 1990-97, completing one of the quickest rises to power
of modern times. In 1987 he was promoted to Chief Secretary of the
Treasury, before in 1989 becoming Foreign Secretary and Chancellor
of the Exchequer in quick succession and then only a year later
Prime Minister when he was chosen to succeed Margaret Thatcher after
she had resigned. Major went on to lead the Conservatives to a fourth
election victory in 1992 before losing to Tony Blair's Labour Party
in 1997.
John
Major
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Writers
and Poets
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For
John Galsworthy see Nobel
Prize Winners
The
writer William
Cobbett was born in 1763 at the Jolly Farmer Inn in Farnham. The
son of a small farmer he taught himself to read and write and later
campaigned for the rights of the poor. He died in 1835 and is buried
in Farnham.
William
Cobbett
Alfred
Tennyson
died at his home Aldworth
near Haslemere in 1892. From 1869 Tennyson had used Aldworth as his
second home to escape the summer crowds which visited his home near
Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. He had been Poet
Laureate
since the death of William Wordsworth in 1850 and was himself succeeded
in 1896 by Alfred Austin. He is buried in Westminster
Abbey.
Alfred
Tennyson
Famous
people buried at Westminster Abbey
Poets
laureate
The last red leaf is whirled away,
The rooks are blown about the skies.
In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850)
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850)
In
1898 the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis
Carroll died whilst visiting his sisters who lived in Guildford.
He is buried in the town.
Lewis
Carroll
Lewis Carroll Society
The
author of Brave New World Aldous Huxley
was born in Godalming in 1894. He was buried in 1963 at nearby Compton.
He had died in Los Angeles on the 22nd November, the same day as the
American President John F. Kennedy and the author C.S. Lewis.
Aldous
Huxley
"Art, science - you seem to have paid
a fairly high price for your happiness," said the Savage, when
they were alone. "Anything else?"
"Well, religion, of course," replied the Controller. "There
used to be something called God - before the Nine Years' War. But
I was forgetting; you know all about God, I suppose."
"Well...." The Savage hesitated. He would have liked to
say something about solitude, about night, about the mesa lying pale
under the moon, about the precipice, the plunge into shadowy darkness,
about death. He would have liked to speak; but there were no words.
Not even in Shakespeare.
Brave New World (1932)
... and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond,
somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life
was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and
refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.
Brave New World (1932)
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons,
Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
Ends and Means (1937)
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