Basingstoke: A wonderful town to live in!

Basingstoke is a thriving town with a number of beautifully designed neighborhood and a 5 star school.

Basingstoke is a lovely place to live with it's extremely rich history.

Basingstoke is related to many famous people like Jane Austen and Elizabeth Hurley.

The name Basingstoke is believed to have been derived from the town's position as the outlying, western settlement of Basa's people. The ending -stoke means outlying settlement or possibly refers to a stockade that surrounded the settlement in early medieval times. Basing, now Old Basing, is thought to have the same etymology, and was the original Anglo-Saxon settlement of the people led by a tribal chief called "Basa".

Big History

Early settlements

A Neolithic campsite of around 3000 BC beside a spring on the west of the town is the earliest known human settlement here, but the Willis Museum has flint implements and axes from nearby fields that date back to Paleolithic times.

Basingstoke is recorded as a weekly market site in the Domesday Book, in 1086, and has held a regular Wednesday market since 1214. During the Civil War, and the siege of Basing House between 1643 and 1645, the town played host to large numbers of Parliamentarians. During this time, St. Michael's Church was damaged whilst being used as an explosive store and lead was stripped from the roof of the Chapel of the Holy Ghost, Basingstoke leading to its eventual ruin. It had been incorporated in 1524, but was effectively out of use after the Civil War. The 17th century saw serious damage to much of the town and its churches, because of the great fires of 1601 and 1656.

The London and South Western Railway arrived in 1839 from London. In 1848, the Great Western Railway built a branch from Reading.

Basingstoke was fortunate during the Second World War to suffer very little bomb damage. ] After the war, the town had a population of 25,000.

Basingstoke was rapidly developed in the late 1960s as an 'expanded town'. Many office blocks and large estates were built, including a ring road. The shopping centre was built in phases. The first phase was completed by the 1970s and was later covered in the 1980s, and was known as The Walks. The second phase was completed by the early 1980s, and became The Malls. The third phase was abandoned and the site was later used to build the Anvil concert hall. The central part of the shopping centre was rebuilt in 2002 and reopened as Festival Place.

In the mid-1990s, numerous reports described sightings of the Beast of Basingstoke, a big cat believed to be a lion or a puma, possibly two. Local legend suggests the animal was shot and killed, although no official news sources document any capture or killing of the beast.