Witham, United Kingdom

The Saxon settlement of Witham was centred on Chipping Hill, about 0.5 miles (0.8 km) north of the Roman road. Although a church is not mentioned in the Domesday Book, it is thought there was a church at Witham by that time. The parish church of St Nicolas is at Chipping Hill; it was substantially rebuilt around 1330, retaining fragments of an earlier building.

The manor of Witham was given to the Knights Templar in 1148, supplementing the property at Cressing Temple to the north that they had been granted in 1136. There had been a market at the original settlement at Chipping Hill ("chipping" means a market in Old English). The Knights Templar moved the market to a new location on the Roman road in the mid-12th century.

The manor of Witham passed to the church after the dissolution of the Templars in England in c. 1309. The manor was sold to Sir John Southcott in c. 1575, a prominent judge and politician from Devon. His heirs held the manor for almost two centuries, until 1648 when the Southcott family had their lands destroyed for supporting the royalist cause in the English Civil War.

During the latter half of the 18th century and the early 19th century, Admiral Sir William Luard was the town's most prominent citizen, a resident of Chipping Hill. His funeral cortège through the town in 1910 was witnessed by thousands.

In the 18th century, Witham briefly enjoyed a period as an affluent spa town after the discovery of a mineral-bearing spa by a Dr Taverner. Witham was also a centre of the wool trade until the decline of the industry in the late 17th century.

Witham railway station was the scene of a serious accident 09:27 on 1 September 1905. The London Liverpool Street-to-Cromer 14-coach express derailed whilst travelling at speed through the station. Ten passengers and a luggage porter were killed when several of the carriages somersaulted on to the platforms causing considerable damage to the rolling stock and the station. Seventy-one passengers were seriously injured. It remains to this day the worst loss of life in a railway accident in Essex.

In 2005, an opportunity to commemorate the centenary was missed and the incident is now largely forgotten. Ben Sainty, a signalman, whose quick action averted the next train hitting the wreckage, has a road named after him in the town, Ben Sainty Court.

The town expanded greatly in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the Greater London Council built three large council estates on the west and north sides of the town, and a smaller one to the south, for families from London to move to as part of the New Town and Expanded Town overspill policy of that time. A famous one-time resident of the town was the author Dorothy L. Sayers, whose statue stands opposite the town's library, which is a short distance from the author's house. The library stands on the site of the old Whitehall cinema, which closed in the late 1970s and which was itself a conversion of the White Hall country house.

Witham has grown in size after the development of the Maltings Lane estate to the south of the town between 2002 and 2003. This was followed, in 2012, by the moving of Chipping Hill Primary School from its old premises in Church Street to a new-build in Owers Road. The development of this area has continued, including the opening of an Aldi superstore in 2015.

Approved developments in this period included the reconstruction of both the town's secondary schools, the New Rickstones Academy and the Maltings Academy, completed in 2011; the Marston's pub and restaurant on Gershwin Boulevard, completed in 2013 with the adjacent Seymour House day nursery; the refurbishment and opening of a Morrisons store in the old premises of the Jack & Jenny pub in 2014; and the newly-built Witham Leisure Centre on Spinks Lane, replacing Bramston Sports Centre, completed in 2014.