Wimbledon

A village at the top of a hill, a town the railway built at the bottom, and eleven hundred acres of common land west of both.

Wimbledon has been lived in since the Iron Age, when somebody built a hill fort on what is now the Common - the second largest in London. The village at the top of the hill is the old settlement, named in a charter of King Edgar in 967 as Wimbedounyng, which means Wynnman's hill; the Dog and Fox was a stop on the Portsmouth stagecoach run.

Everything else here is the railway's doing. The London and South Western Railway put a station at the bottom of the hill in 1838 and the town grew round that rather than round the village, which is why people still say village or town and mean different places. The same company made Raynes Park out of fields to the south-west in 1871; the District line reached Wimbledon Park in 1889 and the Northern line South Wimbledon in 1926. What reads as one place on a map is five, each of them built by a different decade of transport.

The Broadway is the length of the town and the reason to come: the New Wimbledon Theatre, a 1910 house that takes touring work and a pantomime, and the Polka, which has made theatre for children and nobody else since 1979. Raynes Park and Wimbledon Park are quieter and residential. The village at the top of the hill is a high street of its own, and Church Road runs north from it to the All England Club, where the Championships are played each summer and the tennis museum and the court tours run for the rest of the year. West of the village the ground opens into the Common: eleven hundred acres of gorse, oak woodland and playing fields that an Act of Parliament of 1871 put beyond building, with a windmill at the middle of it that Robert Baden-Powell wrote part of Scouting for Boys in.