Boreham is a village and civil parish
in Essex, England
.
It is
located approximately 6 km (3 miles) northeast from the county town
of Chelmsford
. The village is in the borough of Chelmsford
and parliamentary constituency of West Chelmsford
.
History
The
parish of Boreham is ancient, and the
village is mentioned in the
Domesday Book as
Borham.
In the 1930s Boreham House and 3000 acres (12 km²) of land
surrounding it was bought by car magnate
Henry Ford. In addition to using the house as a
school for training
Ford tractor
mechanics, the company's British chairman,
Lord Perry, established Fordson Estates Limited
there and founded the Henry Ford Institute of Agricultural
Engineering, an agricultural college which continues to occupy the
house. The house also served as the temporary home for the National
College of Agricultural Engineering in 1962.
This moved to Silsoe
, Bedfordshire as Silsoe College later joining
with Cranfield
University
. The Silsoe campus closed at the end of
2007.
Boreham remained relatively small until the mid-1970s when a
programme of house and shop building increased its size
significantly.
Geography and administration
In addition to being a village, Boreham is a civil parish which has
a
parish council
The
village lies on a Roman road (now a
modern trunk road, the A12
) and has a well known Norman church and a public house (The
Cock Inn) that dates from the 1400s. The surrounding
countryside is gently hilly and is used to grow crops such as
wheat,
sugar beet
and
peas.
It is north of the River Chelmer
.
The
Great Eastern Main Line line
from Chelmsford to Colchester
runs past the village, but the Boreham's local halt
was removed in the 1960s as part of the Beeching cuts. In the 1970s a
bypass was built on the edge of the village,
along the same route as the A12 and the nearby railway line.
Landmarks
.jpg/180px-Boreham_House_(John_V_Nicholls).jpg)
Boreham house
Just
outside the village is Newhall School, once a palace of Henry VIII known as The Palace of
Beaulieu
. The estate on which it was built - the
manor of Walhfare in Boreham - was granted to the Canons of Waltham
Abbey in 1062.Charter S 1036 After various changes of possession it
was granted by the Crown to the Earl of Ormond in 1491. By this
time it had a house called New Hall.
In 1517 New Hall was sold by Thomas Boleyn to Henry VIII of
England. The king rebuilt the house in brick at a cost of £17,000,
a considerable sum at the time.[1] He gave his new palace the name
Beaulieu, though the name change did not outlast the century. New
Hall was later the estate of the Tyrell family and latterly the
Hoare banking family. Benjamin Hoare commissioned
architect Henry Flitcroft to build a new home
nearby known as Boreham House, a
stately
home in 1727; the early
Georgian mansion is now a Grade II
listed building.
Boreham airfield
A forest near the village was felled in 1943 to build a military
airfield, and the three one-mile (1600 m)
runways of RAF Boreham opened in 1944. It hosted
elements of the
US Army Air
Forces 394th Medium Bomb Group (flying
B-26 Marauder bombers) and later the 315th
Troop Carrier Group flying
C-47. After
World War II the three runways were
adapted into a roughly triangular
motor
racing circuit, which hosted competitive meetings between 1949
and 1952. It was bought by Ford in 1955 for use as a development
test track. Ford Motorsport moved to Boreham in 1963, and although
some of the track was removed for gravel quarrying in 1996 the
remaining track surface continues to be used for testing. Essex
Police Air Support Unit have been based at the airfield and in 1990
began using Boreham airfield as a control centre for its fleet of
helicopters. In 1997 Essex Air Ambulance was also based at the
site.
Notable residents
Trivia
References
External links
to York
, although
historians now believe the ride never occurred.
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