Facts about Hayes
History of Hayes
For some 700 years up to 1546, Hayes formed part of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s estates, ostensibly owing to grants from the Mercian royal family. In that year, the then-Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was forced to surrender his land to King Henry VIII, who subsequently granted the estate to Edward North, 1st Baron North. The area changed hands several times thereafter, but by the eighteenth century, two family-names had established themselves as prominent and long-time landowners: Minet and Shackle.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Hayes was home to several private boarding schools catering for wealthy families. The former Manor House on Church Road was by the 1820s a boys’ school called Radnor House Academy; Grove Cottage, Wood End, a school for young men, opened in the 1830s; Belle House School for Boys opened on Botwell Lane in the 1850s.
Gemeral Info
Hayes is a town in west London, situated 13 miles west of Charing Cross and part of the London Borough of Hillingdon. The town’s population, including its localities Hayes End, Harlington and Yeading, was recorded as 83,564 in the 2011 census. Hayes has a long history. The area appears in the Domesday Book.
Landmarks in the area include the Grade II* listed Parish Church, St Mary’s – the central portion of the church survives from the twelfth century and it remains in use – and Barra Hall, a Grade II listed manor house. The town’s oldest public house – the Adam and Eve, on the Uxbridge Road – though not the original seventeenth-century structure, has remained on the same site since 1665.
