Hampshire Leasing

Did You Know?

Hampshire is a county on the southern coast of England. The county town is the city of Winchester. Its two largest cities, Southampton and Portsmouth, are administered separately as unitary authorities; the rest of the county is governed by Hampshire County Council.

The region is believed to have been continuously occupied since the end of the last Ice Age about 12,000 BCE. At this time, Britain was still attached to the European continent and was predominantly covered with deciduous woodland. The first inhabitants were Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. 

First settled about 14,000 years ago, Hampshire's history dates to Roman Britain, when its chief town was Winchester. When the Romans left Britain, the area was infiltrated by tribes from Scandinavia and mainland Europe, principally in the river valleys. The county was recorded in the 11th century Domesday Book, divided into 44 hundreds.

Hampshire takes its name from the settlement that is now the city of Southampton. Southampton was known in Old English as Hamtun, roughly meaning "village-town", so its surrounding area or scīr became known as Hamtunscīr.

From the 12th century, the ports grew in importance, fuelled by trade with the continent, wool and cloth manufacture in the county, and the fishing industry, and a shipbuilding industry was established.

Keats wrote The Eve of St Agnes, and spent his last night in England, in Bedhampton in Hampshire. In 1819 he and a friend walked there from Chichester in late January, and Keats already troubled by the first signs of TB had to recuperate at The Old Mill, guest of the wonderfully named John Snooks.

Gabardine waterproof clothing was invented by a Hampshire Man. His name? Thomas Burberry! Burberry was a draper who came up with a process for proofing yarn as well as finished cloth after a chance conversation with a shepherd. That man’s clothing had seemingly become waterproof through contact with lanolin - he claimed during sheep dipping.

The first English commercial vineyard of the modern era was established at Hambledon in Hampshire? In 1951 the grand-sounding Major-General Sir Guy Salisbury-Jones planted a one acre site with Seyval Blanc grapes, which duly produced their first crop for wine-making in 1954.