Chartered Surveyors Leamington Spa Warwickshire

Approximate Population: 45,114

Leamington, Warwickshire, is a relatively modern town. Until the beginning of the 1800s, Leamington was a village named Leamington Priors. Leamington was first mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Lamintone. For 400 years, the settlement was under the control of Kenilworth Priory, whence the older suffix.

Leamington would have probably remained as a small village near Warwick, had it not been for the rediscovery of the healing properties of spa waters (they had been known about in Roman times). The first spring to be used for commercial purposes was discovered in Leamington in 1784 by William Abbotts and Benjamin Satchwell, and steps were soon underway to develop the town.

Its name came from Anglo-Saxon Leman-tūn or Lemen-tūn = “farm on the River Leam”.

The town centre “Old Town” was originally located on the southern bank of the River Leam. At first, development only took place south of the river. Soon however speculative builders, tired of building around the old village concentrated much of their effort on the land north of the river,[citation needed] resulting in the current Georgian centre “New Town” north of the river, with the Leam flowing through the centre of the modern town. In 1767 Parliament passed an Act, sponsored by Edward Willes, a local landowner, for dividing and inclosing the open and common land on the south and west of the River Leam.

A survey of the area, estimated to be 990 acres, made by John Tomlinson was completed in 1768, and the commissioners then divided the land and new public roads were set out. After the division on the south of the river most of the land east of the village was mostly owned by the Willes family and to the west by Matthew Wise, and north of the river most of the land was owned by three landowners, the Willes family, the Earl of Warwick, and Bertie Greatheed. The main landholders of the village and adjacent land was the Earl of Aylesford, and a number of smaller landowners. In the following decades some of the land was sold.