Denham History

Denham is a village and civil parish in the South Buckinghamshire district of Buckinghamshire, England. It is north west of Uxbridge and north of junction 1 of the M40 motorway. The parish has two notable golf courses within its boundaries, The Denham and The Buckinghamshire Golf Clubs.

The village name is derived from the Old English for “homestead in a valley”. It was listed in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Deneham.
The whole of Denham Parish is located within the Colne Valley Regional Park which stretches from Rickmansworth in the north to Staines in the south, Harefield and Uxbridge in the east to Gerrards Cross and Slough in the west.

The Park contains a mixture of farmland, woodland and water, over 200km of rivers & canals and over 70 lakes, which help to regulate the flow of the major Thames tributary and provide fish for angling. As well as providing homes and farms it is also a regionally important place for recreation and internationally important for wildlife. Large areas are open to the public or accessible through a network of paths.

The Church of England parish church of Saint Mary has a flint and stone Norman tower and Tudor monuments. The tree-lined Village Road includes several old red brick houses with giant wisterias on them, and has been used as a location in several British films and television dramas. Denham Film Studios were situated near the village.

Housing and other development growth has, over the years, created new parts to Denham and modern-day Denham consists of:

  • Denham Village, as above; the original settlement
  • Denham Garden Village, located to the north of Denham Green Lane – originally built in the 1950s, redeveloped in 2006.
  • Denham Green grew up around the shops beside Denham railway station. Alexander Korda’s Denham Film Studios (now demolished) used to be sited between the junction of the road to Rickmansworth (A412 North Orbital road) and Moor Hall Road towards Harefield. The site of the studios is now used as a business area named Broadwater Park.
  • Wyatts Covert is a mobile Home Development situated just North of Denham aerodrome and accessed from Tilehouse Lane.
  • New Denham grew along the old Oxford Road north-west of Uxbridge, west of the Grand Union Canal.
  • Willowbank is situated between the Oxford Road, New Denham and the Grand Union Canal. It started off in the 1920s as a collection of small holiday chalets on an island between the River Colne and the Grand Union Canal mainly for Londoners wanting to enjoy the countryside. A few of the original chalets remain today, but most have been demolished and replaced by much larger permanently occupied homes
  • Higher Denham was built on the site of a First World War army training and transit camp, placed to take advantage of the adjacent Denham Golf Club station. After the War, the camp land was sold off piecemeal for housing, following a wider trend whenever former military bases were declared as being surplus to need. Martin-Baker Aircraft Ltd, world leader manufacturers of aircraft ejector seats, have a factory in Higher Denham.
  • Bakers Wood is an area 2 miles west of Denham and is sited between the A40 and Higher Denham (no direct access from Higher Denham).
  • Tatling End, Denham is on the Oxford Road, west of the junction with the A412, at the top of the hill leading out of the Misbourne Valley.
Denham railway station has direct services to London Marylebone and High Wycombe and limited services to Princes Risborough, Aylesbury and Banbury. Connecting services link to Birmingham Snow Hill, Stratford-on-Avon and Kidderminster.

Denham Aerodrome was established during the 1930s and is sited on higher land to the north of the village. It is now the base of many private and executive aircraft and helicopters and has several hangars and a hard runway.

Denham is twinned with Denham Shark Bay, Western Australia.