Ditune (xi cent.).
LONG DITTON is a village one and a half miles southwest of Kingston. It was at the time of the Domesday Survey in Kingston Hundred. There was a church there then, and it may have been already parochially distinct from Kingston. In the grant of Kingston and Long Ditton churches to Merton Priory, soon after the foundation in 1117, Long Ditton was not included among the chapelries of Kingston which are enumerated. The parish is divided into two parts, Long Ditton proper and Talworth (q.v.), with a strip of Kingston parish, the hamlet of Hook, intervening. The western portion, which contains the village of Long Ditton, abuts on the Thames to the north. It is rather over 2 miles from north to south, less than a mile broad, and contains 896 acres of land. The parish is traversed by the road from Kingston to Guildford, and the main line of the London and South Western Railway runs through it. The soil is chiefly London clay, but to the north is Thames alluvial gravel and sand, and it contains two patches of Bagshot Sand in the southern part. Long Ditton gives one of the few examples in Surrey of an ancient church and village standing on the London Clay.
Long Ditton Rectory from the South-west
The parish is now agricultural and residential. A large number of small country houses and villas have been built in the parish during the last thirty years. Talworth is the eastern portion of Long Ditton parish, separated from the rest by Hook in Kingston. It is on the London Clay, and has an area of 1,193 acres. On the eastern borders is the Hogsmill Stream, which early in the 19th-century here worked the Gunpowder Mills, commonly called Malden Mills, of Mr. Taylor. The original powder mills of the Evelyns may have been on the same site. According to Manning and Bray Talworth always elected separate parochial officers. It is now ecclesiastically in Surbiton, to which it was annexed in 1876; it was made a civil parish in 1895, but is included in the Surbiton Urban District. Since the sale of the Earl of Egmont's property it has been covered with small houses. There was an inclosure act for Talworth in 1818, the award being made on 2 February 1820. The manors had originally been all open fields.
The manor of LONG DITTON, which under King Edward the Confessor was held by Almar, in 1086 formed part of the possessions of Richard de Tonbridge, of whom it was held by Picot. The extent then included a mill, and a rent of 500 herrings payable from a house in Southwark.
The overlordship passed through Eleanor, sister and co-heir of Gilbert de Clare, who died in 1314, to the Despensers. Isabel, daughter of Thomas le Despenser, married Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, and was the mother of Anne, wife of Sir Richard Nevill, the Kingmaker. In 1474 the estates of Anne, the latter's widow, were settled on her daughters Isabel, the wife of George Duke of Clarence, and Anne, the wife of Richard Duke of Gloucester, afterwards Richard III. Both their husbands were attainted, and they both died before the Dowager Countess Anne. Another Act of Parliament early in the reign of Henry VII restored the estates to the countess, who immediately conveyed them to the king, who thus became overlord of Long Ditton.
Clare. Or three cheverons gules.
Despenser. Argent quartered with gules fretty or a bend sable over all.
Beauchamp. Gules a fesse between six crosslets or.
Nevill. Gules a saltire argent and a label gobony argent and azure.