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Boreham

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For the town in Hertfordshire, see Borehamwood.
Boreham
Village sign
OS grid referenceTL759099
Civil parish
  • Boreham
District
Shire county
Region
CountryEngland
Sovereign stateUnited Kingdom
Post townCHELMSFORD
Postcode districtCM3
Dialling code01245
PoliceEssex
FireEssex
AmbulanceEast of England
UK Parliament
List of places
UK
England
Essex

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[1].

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[2].

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[3]

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

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

Essex Air Ambulance

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)[4] and later the 315th Troop Carrier Group flying C-47s. 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.[4] 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.[4] In 1997 Essex Air Ambulance was also based at the site.[4]

Notable residents

Trivia

References

  1. ^ "Image details (Boreham, Essex)" (HTML). www.nationalarchives.gov.uk. Retrieved 2007-01-29.
  2. ^ "Silsoe College timeline" (HTML). Retrieved 2008-04-10.
  3. ^ "Parish Councils" (HTML). www.chelmsford.gov.uk. Retrieved 2007-01-28.
  4. ^ a b c d "Air Support Unit Location" (HTML). www.essex.police.uk. Retrieved 2007-01-29.
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