• Parts of St Mary’s Church on Watford High Street date back to the Anglo-Saxon period.
  • The only Englishman to ever become pope, Pope Adrian IV, was born Nicholas Breakspear in Abbots Langley in 1100.
  • In 1315, Piers Gaveston – rumoured to have been Edward II’s lover – was buried in a Dominican Priory on the top of Langley Hill, Kings Langley.
  • Edmund of Langley, son of King Edward III and a major character in Shakespeare’s Richard II, was born (1341) and died (1402) at Kings Langley Palace.
  • Following the annulment of her marriage to Henry VIII in 1533, Catherine of Aragon lived at the Manor of the More, a 16th century palace in Rickmansworth.
  • Conspirators in the Rye House Plot of 1683 – a plan to assassinate King Charles II and his brother James – included the Earl of Essex, owner of Cassiobury House, and the Duke of Monmouth, owner of Moor Park mansion near Rickmansworth.
  • Duke of Monmouth James Scott, owner of Moor Park mansion, was executed in 1685 for leading a rebellion. However, some say that King James II took mercy on him and arranged for Monmouth to be taken to France. It is rumoured that Monmouth is the legendary The Man in the Iron Mask, having been imprisoned by King Louis XIV.
  • The founder of the American province of Pennsylvania, William Penn, married his first wife at King John’s Farm in Chorleywood in 1672.
  • Thomas Monro was Principal Physician at Bethlem Royal Hospital – also known as Bedlam – in the 18th century. For much of his life he lived in Merry Hill, near Bushey.
  • In the 1770s, Captain Cook presented Thomas Villiers, Earl of Clarendon, with a sapling of Black Walnut Tree. The tree still stands today in the grounds of the Grove Hotel.
  • It is said that the commercial strawberry – a hybrid of the European strawberry and a Chilean species – was first cultivated in the kitchen gardens of Moor Park mansion.
  • In the 1860s, the gardens of Cassiobury House were one of the first places in Britain in which croquet was played.
  • The road from Bushey Heath to Stanmore was a notorious haunt of highwaymen in the 1860s.
  • Watford Football Club was formed as Watford Rovers in 1886. One of its first members was Charlie Peacock, who became the proprietor of the Watford Observer.
  • In 1888, the policeman to find the body of Jack the Ripper’s fourth victim, Catherine Eddowes, was Detective Constable Daniel Halse, who grew up in Abbots Langley.
  • In 1890, the winter was so harsh that the ice on the Grand Union Canal grew to 2ft 6in deep.
  • In 1894, a man named Aaron Kosminski was admitted to Leavesden Asylum. In 2014 author Russell Edwards claimed to have proved Kosminski’s guilt for the Jack the Ripper murders using DNA evidence.
  • In the early 20th century, the Trewin Brothers shop – which would later become John Lewis – was provided with electricity two days before the rest of Watford.
  • In 1900, a mob attacked shops in Market Place with stones and wooden clubs after the celebrations for Edward VII’s coronation were cancelled due to the King becoming ill with appendicitis.
  • From September 1908 to June 1910, future author C.S. Lewis attended Wynyard Boarding School in Watford.
  • During World War I, students of Watford High Elementary School completed a contract for 1,000 hand grenade boxes to send to the army.
  • In 1911, Dr Lightfoot was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude for performing an ‘illegal operation’ on a woman. After the doctor’s release, 7,000 people crowded in front of Watford Junction to see him return, singing ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’.
  • In 1913, the building and platform of Croxley Green station were destroyed in an arson attack suspected to be carried out by suffragettes.
  • In Windsor Castle, there is a display of miniature furniture. In 1922, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Marie-Louise, asked Lucy Kemp-Welch, who attended and later owned Bushey Art School, to paint a postage stamp-sized painting for the collection.
  • In 1939, 30,000 children passed through Watford on their way to safety in the countryside as part of Operation Pied Piper.
  • In 1939, when the London, Midland and Scottish Railway decided to transfer its headquarters out of London to the Grove estate in Watford, the move was completed in two days.
  • Wulf Schmidt, a photographer at the Watford Observer during the 1940s, parachuted into England as a member of the German intelligence, and later became a spy for Britain.
  • Boxing matches were frequently held at Watford Town Hall in the 1940s and 50s.
  • In 1941, a model of the Möhne dam in Germany was built behind the Building Research Station in Watford, in order to test explosives for the Dam Busters Raid.
  • Charles Fraser-Smith, a gadget designer during World War II and the man believed to be the inspiration for the character of Q in the James Bond novels, was fostered by a Christian missionary family in Croxley Green.
  • Ovaltine, manufactured in a factory in Kings Langley, was the official drink of the 1948 Olympics. It was also carried up Mount Everest by Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953.
  • Six air raid shelters dating from World War II can still be seen in the grounds of the Grove Hotel. They are now home to one of England’s largest colonies of Pipistrelle bats.
  • The Earl of Essex, who lived at Cassiobury House, purchased a Cartier diamond tiara, known as the ‘Essex Tiara’, for his wife, American heiress Adele. The same tiara was later worn by Clementine Churchill, wife of Winston, at the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
  • When the Odeon in Watford showed The Exorcist in 1974, there were picket lines outside. Protesters claimed the film would ‘affect young people in Watford susceptible to demon power’.
  • The chestnut staircase which once belonged to Cassiobury House is now on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
  • Alumni of Merchant Taylors School in Northwood include Lancelot Andrewes (Bishop of Winchester, 1619-26, and translator of the King James Bible), William Juxon (Archbishop of Canterbury, 1660-3, who attended Charles I at his execution), and comedian Michael McIntyre.
  • The Colosseum in Watford is renowned for its acoustic qualities. It has been used to record the soundtracks of The Lord of the Rings, The Sound of Music and Star Wars.