Lillington today is home to over ten thousand people, and is sometimes thought to be simply a suburb of Leamington Spa. But it has not always been so. Until the 1780’s, when two enterprising inhabitants began to promote the salty spring water to aristocratic visitors, Leamington was a village not much bigger than Lillington. Still longer ago, DOMESDAY BOOK in 1086 listed sixteen households in Lillington, against Leamington’s eleven, though Leamington was more profitable, being taxed at four pounds against Lillington’s three.

Settlers from East Anglia first reached this place, on high ground between the rivers Leam and Avon about AD 570 towards the end of the second wave of Anglo Saxon migration. They were farmers and their homesteads would have been widely scattered across all the land which could be cultivated. It seems certain that the burial ground of those Lillingas, the people of Lilla, is the site of the present churchyard. At the edge of a prominent hilltop, it would be a likely place also for a hilltop shrine or hearg, a centre for the rituals of Anglo Saxon pagan religion, about which we know almost nothing, except that it made its followers so receptive to the preaching of the Christian missionaries who followed Saint Augustine after AD 597, that within eighty years the whole of England had been firmly converted to the Gospel.

The devastation of the Viking invasions after 800, followed by the temporary supremacy of Wessex, brought radical change to the settlements of England. To be more defensible and productive, the scattered homesteads of the old settlers were abandoned. New nucleated towns and villages were built in a central grid-pattern of streets, surrounded by great common fields. Lillington is clearly of this type, with its two main streets, Cubbington Road and Church Lane/Farm Road, and two cross streets – Lime Avenue and Vicarage Road. This is the time, about 920, when Lilling-tun becomes recognisable as a village in the sense we know today.

In 1086, Domesday Book gives us the first written record of Lillington. Robert Beaumont, the Count of Meulan and a Norman hero of Hastings, had been granted four hides and the 720 acres of woodland in Lillington (that’s a lot of wood – about half the parish). Thorkell of Warwick, one of only two Saxon overlords left in England, held half a hide. Not recorded in Domesday, but known from the records of Kenilworth Priory, (Leek) Wootton Church had two hides at Lillington, which it had owned before the Conquest. A hide is used as a unit of taxation rather like a rateable value, but is usually equivalent to about 120 acres of farmland.

At the foundation of Kenilworth Priory in 1122, the minster church at Wootton with all its lands, along with many other Warwickshire properties and churches, were given by King Henry I to Geoffrey de Clinton who in turn gave them to the priory to provide an income for the canons.

Lillington church and a quarter of the land of the parish became priory property. Geoffrey and his heirs, the Earls of Warwick, held the rest. As the woodland was gradually cut down the priory increased its holding to two thirds of the parish, and so it remained until the Dissolution of the monasteries, which reached Kenilworth in 1538.

After the Dissolution, the Lillington property of Kenilworth Priory passed through various hands until in 1709 it was bought by Henry Wise, the keeper of the royal gardens to Queen Anne and George I. Under Henry Wise the common fields of Lillington were enclosed in 1730. The secular part of Lillington remained with the Earls of Warwick until near-bankruptcy forced George Greville, second earl (of the fourth creation), to sell in 1805.

The original salt spring by the church at Leamington had been known for centuries, but after Benjamin Satchwell and William Abbott found a second saline spring in 1784, the spa at Leamington began to develop as a resort. And soon, for the leisured visitor no stay at Leamington would be complete without a walk up the hill and across the fields to Lillington, to the little church where Benjamin Satchwell had been married in 1764.

What those visitors came to see can still be found in the churchyard opposite the vestry door - the ‘Miser’s Grave’.

The headstone of William Treen, who died aged 77 on 3rd February, 1810, bears this epitaph, quoted in many nineteenth-century guides to Leamington, and most famously by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 'Our Old Home' in 1863:

Treen was a labourer and road scraper, who lived by begging potato peelings and turnips according to legend. When he died he was found to be a man of more than average wealth, to the surprise and annoyance of his neighbours, and his executor Benjamin Satchwell, the co-founder and poet of the spa at Leamington, who is thought to have composed the famous verse on his grave.

Returning by the road to Leamington, visitors would have paused to see the Midland Oak, which once stood in the highway at the junction of Lillington Road and Lillington Avenue, marking the Centre of England (Meriden please note). It survived until 1967. A new tree grown from one of its acorns now grows nearby in the verge.

The Wise family obtained an act of parliament in 1835 to permit them to begin development of new roads and housing, a brewery and a brickworks in Lillington, though a bank failure in 1837 delayed matters until the late 1840’s. In anticipation of respectable new residents, the parish church of Saint Mary Magdalene was greatly enlarged at the expense of the Wise family in 1847. Restrictive covenants forbade the holding of Dissenters’ and Roman Catholic meetings in the new properties, to encourage only adherents of the established church to move in. Public Houses and beer shops were also forbidden.

Genteel retirement would become the order of the day in these quiet avenues of villas, with no place for the rakishness of the early days of the spa, and certainly no call for public houses. It is the manners of this period which still endured into the 1920’s which John Betjeman so evocatively describes in his first published poem, ‘Death in Leamington’.

Everything changed after the First World War. New firms supplying the motor industry at Coventry, Birmingham and Oxford moved into Leamington, and the need for new houses was very great. So too was the need to eliminate slum properties in the centre of Leamington.

The Waller family, of Woodcote near Leek Wootton, who had inherited the Wise estate in 1888, sold the last of their Lillington land in 1926. Two of their three farms were bought by Edward McGregor and his sons Sydney (Village Farm, Cubbington Road) and Edward (Manor Farm, Lime Avenue) who were then instrumental in the development of the southern and eastern parts of the village from around 1928 up to the 1970's, with the Willes family of Newbold Comyn and Leamington Corporation. Church glebe land to the west and south of Saint Mary Magdalene's was also sold for development from 1927 onwards.

Development accelerated from the 1920's either side of Cubbington Road, and from 1947 with the creation by Leamington Corporation of a new neighbourhood centre around Crown Way and Buckley Road. The Stud Farm estate around Valley Road and Parklands Avenue was developed in the 1970's. South of the Midland Oak, development continued into the 1980's off Heemstede Lane.

Since the 1980's most housing development in Greater Leamington has been south of the town, but this will change with the adoption of the South Warwickshire Local Plan, which envisages 1455 new houses in Lillington south and east of Buckley Road (Site LEA.3) and another 1043 (Site LEA.1) north of Leicester Lane, increasing the number of residential properties in Lillington by around fifty per cent by 2050.