Town in Hampshire, England

Basingstoke

Basingstoke is a town where Cromwell blasted a Royalist palace, a canal tunnel became a bat sanctuary, and a few thousand Londoners set off a boom.

Key information

County: Hampshire
Nation: England
Known for: 1960s-70s London overspill growth, roundabouts, the Basingstoke Canal, Basing House
Famous people: Thomas Warton, Sir John Thornycroft, Jane Austen (local ballroom regular)
Football clubs: Basingstoke Town (the Stokes)

About Basingstoke

The tunnel that fell in and filled up with bats

The Basingstoke Canal opened in 1794, linking the town to the Thames system at Byfleet. It was built to carry timber, chalk and farm produce, and it never made its investors much money. The real drama came at Greywell Tunnel, which partly collapsed in 1932. The tunnel has been closed to boats ever since, but the bats didn't mind. It is now one of the best-known bat roosts in southern England, and the canal beyond it has become a haven for wildlife and walkers. The canal also gave Basingstoke a surprising nickname for locals to chuckle at: a landlocked Hampshire town with its own waterway that mostly leads to a hole in the ground.

When Cromwell took the grandest house in the county

A few miles east of the town centre stood Basing House, a vast Tudor palace owned by the Marquess of Winchester. During the Civil War it became a Royalist stronghold, and the garrison held out through repeated sieges between 1643 and 1645. On 14 October 1645, Oliver Cromwell's troops stormed it and the house was burned and plundered. The architect Inigo Jones was among those found inside. Basingstoke has older battles too. In 871 the Danes beat the Saxons at Basing, only a couple of weeks after Alfred and his brother King Æthelred had won at Ashdown.

A ruined chapel and a very Austen kind of ballroom

The roofless Chapel of the Holy Ghost stands on a rise above the town. It dates from the 13th century, and the adjoining Holy Trinity chapel was added in the early 16th century with support from Lord Sandys of the nearby Vyne and Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester. It once belonged to a guild that ran a school, and its ruins still make the best old-world postcard in town. Jane Austen grew up at Steventon, a short ride away, and Basingstoke was her local ballroom town. She danced at its assembly balls and mentions them in her letters. When she wrote about country-town dances, this was one of the places she knew. The poet Thomas Warton was born in Basingstoke in 1728 and became Poet Laureate in 1785.

The town that ordered a new town

For centuries Basingstoke was a coaching and market town. Its next big boost came in 1898, when John I. Thornycroft moved his engineering works here from Chiswick. The factory built steam wagons and then lorries, and the firm later produced vehicles for the Army. The real transformation came after the Second World War. Under the Town Development Act 1952, Basingstoke was chosen to take Londoners from overcrowded neighbourhoods. New housing estates, offices and a pedestrianised shopping area sprang up, and the town grew several times over. The AA was long headquartered here, and Basingstoke became a byword for the office park, the ring road and the roundabout. Plenty of comics have made jokes about that.

What to do in Basingstoke today

The Anvil, opened in 1994, is the town's concert hall and brings in orchestras, comedians and pop acts. The Willis Museum, housed in the old Town Hall, is famous for its collection of clocks and watches. Milestones Museum recreates Hampshire streets from the Victorian era onwards, with shops, a pub and vehicles. It also tells the story of Thornycroft's lorries. Basingstoke Town FC, known as the Stokes, left the Camrose in 2019 and moved to the Winklebury Football Complex in 2020. The Basingstoke Bison, the town's ice hockey club, suspended senior-league participation after the 2022–23 season pending refurbishment of their rink. Meanwhile, the canal towpath is where many locals go for a Sunday walk.