Chiddingfold

Chiddingfold once made the window glass for Westminster and Windsor, and it has spent the centuries since looking out of its own at the Surrey Hills with the calm of a village that knows exactly what its houses are worth. The green, the church, the pond and the Crown are laid out so neatly that visitors half expect a costume drama to be filming. The last real unrest was Bonfire Night 1929, when two hundred policemen arrived on requisitioned buses to stop an innocent sergeant being ducked in that pond, and someone kept the Riot Act ready to read. These days the mob has retired, and the only thing that gets the village this worked up is a planning application.