Guildford Audio Tour: Cloth, Keys and Waterways

Guildford's High Street belongs to the merchants and the mayors. The streets and waterways between them belong to a different town — the fullers who racked Guildford Blue cloth to dry at Millmead, the castle constables who kept the King's prisoners in the keep, the chalk-quarry cutters whose spoil built the castle and named the street, the London clockmaker John Aylward who gave the Guildhall its projecting timepiece in exchange for trading rights, the lawyer John Childe who built the finest house on the High Street and served as mayor three times, the almshouse brethren in their blue caps who swept the chapel and tended the garden under Richard Abbot the first Master, the grammar-school boys chained to the library that grocer Robert Beckingham's will funded in 1509, the brewer Charles Hoskin Master whose copper vessels made Friary Meux ale for a century, and the barge builders Edwin Edwards and his four sons who hammered the hull of the Wey Navigation's last working barge at Dapdune Wharf. These are the working people whose names made it into the ledgers — and the ones who didn't.