Shepperton, United Kingdom

Finds from the Iron Age include an inhumation of a woman in her 40s, found on Chertsey Road, and iron swords, discovered at Shepperton Ranges. Pewter plates, from the latter site, are thought to date from the late Roman period. Evidence of late-Iron Age and Saxon settlements was found at Shepperton Green in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Shepperton is recorded in Domesday Book of 1086 as Scepertone. It had a population of 25 households and was held by Westminster Abbey; (excluding any woodland, marsh and heath) it had eight hides, pasture for seven carucates and one weir (worth 6s 8d per year). In total, the annual amount rendered was £6.

The Church Lane and Church Square area, leading to and next to the river predates by several centuries the High Street as the village nucleus. When the Thames Valley Railway built in 1864 the terminus of Shepperton railway station, 1 mile (1.6 km) north, for the 12 initial years a single train and track running to and from Strawberry Hill, the village slowly expanded into its northern fields. Its coming which was largely due to contributions and permission of W. S. Lindsay the owner of Shepperton's manor.

The River Thames was important for transport from the late 13th century and carried barley, wheat, peas and root vegetables to London's markets; later timber, building materials such as bricks, sand and lime, and gunpowder, see the Wey Navigation.

While the village was wholly agricultural until the 19th century, there are originally expensive gravestones of the local minor gentry in the churchyard, two of which are dedicated to their naturalised black servants, Benjamin and Cotto Blake who both died in 1781. These bear the inscription "Davo aptio, Argo fidelior, ipso Sanchone facetior". During this long period since the conquest the wealth of the local rector and his bishop was great: William Grocyn was rector 1504–1513 and was an Oxford classical academic who corresponded regularly with Erasmus and Lewis Atterbury (1707–31) expended much of the large parish revenues on having the large tower rebuilt.

A large net income of rents and tithes of £499 per year was paid to the rectory belonging to S. H. Russell in 1848; this compares to £600 of poor relief, including for supporting its workhouse, paid out in 1829.

A change to secular council-administered rather than church-administered public services followed the establishment of poor law unions and Sanitary Districts and was completed with the founding, in 1889, of the Middlesex County Council and Staines Rural District from 1896. In 1930 on the rural district's abolition, Shepperton became part of the Sunbury-on-Thames Urban District until its dissolution into a reduced and reconfigured county of Surrey in 1965. Three districts of the historic county thus did not become part of Greater London: Staines Urban District also joined Surrey and Potters Bar Urban District joined Hertfordshire. In 1951 the civil parish had a population of 6060. On 1 April 1974 the parish was abolished.

In 2025, a new sand and gravel quarry, operated by Cemex, was opened in Shepperton.

In semi-fiction, George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life telling the Sad Fortunes of The Rev. Amos Barton, gives a thinly veiled picture of Chilvers Coton's church and village in the early 19th century in which she uses the name Shepperton. If anything real is to be gleaned for its use, it is perhaps a passing similarity. Shepperton Manor by John Mason Neale was contemporaneously written in 1844 fifteen years after he had spent six years living in the village. Old parts of Shepperton are said to be haunted by the ghost of a headless monk. Battlecrease Hall (formerly home to Walter Hayes, Ford Motor Company executive and a founder of the company's Formula One programme) is alleged by its owners and certain visitors to have poltergeists.

Leading to this is a short, since 1989 bypassed, winding lane from the High Street to Church Square, flanked by Shepperton Manor and the cricket ground, with some listed walls. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described the view looking towards the south-east of the square with its now listed buildings and river opening as "one of the most perfect village pictures that the area has to offer". It offers two pub/restaurants two hotels, the Anchor Hotel and the Warren Lodge Hotel. In this little square there is also the King's Head public house.

The riverside manor, late 18th century, (its predecessor, as with the church here, predates the 12th century), features a room painted and rendered to look like a tent or draped damask. Also Grade II* listed is the c. 1500 timber framed Old Rectory refronted in the early 18th century, and including a reception hall built in 1498. Its front cladding has mathematical tiles.