page_title: Kidlington
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Kidlington / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Parish church of St Mary the Virgin, Kidlington, Oxfordshire, seen from the south
context_page_description: Kidlington is a large village and civil parish in Oxfordshire, England, between the River Cherwell and the Oxford Canal, 5 miles north of Oxford and 7 ¹⁄₂ miles south-west of Bicester. The 2011 Census recorded the parish's population as 13,723.
context_section_description: Kidlington's toponym is derived from the Old English Cudelinga tun: the tun (settlement) of the "Kidlings" (sons) of Cydel-hence. The Domesday Book in 1086 records Chedelintone, and by 1214 the spelling Kedelinton appears in a Calendar of Bodleian Charters.
  The Church of England parish church of St Mary the Virgin dates from 1220 but there is evidence of a church on the site since AD 1073. St Mary's has fine medieval stained glass and a 165-foot (50 m) spire known as "Our Lady's Needle". It is a Grade I listed building.
  The tower has a ring of eight bells. Richard III Chandler of Drayton Parslow in Buckinghamshire cast the seventh bell in 1700. Abraham I Rudhall of Gloucester cast the tenor bell in 1708 and the fifth bell in 1715. Mears and Stainbank of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry cast the treble, second, third, fourth and sixth bells in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.
  Behind the church are archaeological remains of a three-sided moat, and a causeway recently discovered may be of Roman origin. St Mary's Rectory is Tudor.
  Beside the church are almshouses built by Sir William Morton in 1671 in memory of his wife and children, whose names are inscribed above the windows. Sir William was a Royalist Commander in the Civil War and lived in nearby Hampden Manor in Mill Street. Other residents of Hampden Manor have included Sir John Vanbrugh, who lived here during the building of Blenheim Palace in Woodstock. The square tower-water closet in the front garden of Hampden Manor was built by Vanbrugh. It drains into a brook that now runs underground along Mill Street into the nearby River Cherwell. Thomas Beecham formulated his pills while living in a cottage near the manor and worked for a time as a gardener for John Sydenham.
  The settlement listed in Domesday grew from an ancient village close to the church. It has as many 18th-century Georgian buildings as modern houses. Until the Enclosure acts in 1818, a large area south of the village was unenclosed common land and the village widely known as Kidlington-on-the-Green. The land was built up as Garden City just before the Second World War.
  In the 1920s and 1930s, Kidlington was subject to ribbon development along the main (now A4260) road through the village. Since 1945 many housing estates have been built behind this on both sides.
  Oxford Zoo was once located in Kidlington, where the Thames Valley Police headquarters now stands. It was open only from 1931 to 1937, when the animals were transferred to Dudley Zoo. In 2018, an elephant sculpture was installed on a roundabout at the southern end of Kidlington to commemorate the zoo and an elephant that lived there.
  In the 20th century, Kidlington grew to be a contender for largest village in England (even in Europe), with a population of 13,723, compared with 1,300 in 1901. Its residents have so far resisted proposals to change its status to a town, though it clearly qualifies as such. After a peremptory change by the Parish Council to town status in November 1987, this was voted down by 83 per cent three months later in a ballot of the local electorate.
  In June 2016, the BBC reported weekly coachloads of sightseers from China arriving on Benmead Road, Kidlington, who were seen posing for photos in front gardens and against parked cars, with no apparent reason for their interest. The story attracted worldwide interest, with Kidlington locals offering interviews about their experience.
  In November 2016, after analysing results of a Chinese-language questionnaire given to some of the tourists, the BBC found that "looking for the true sense" of Britain was one reason for the visits. An investigative journalist determined that in fact Chinese tour operators charge $68 extra for Chinese-language tours of nearby Blenheim Palace. Tourists who do not want to pay to visit Blenheim are dropped off in Kidlington, which they find charming, but which tour operators select because it is too far from Blenheim to enable tourists to walk to the Palace and pay the cheaper £25 price for public tours in English.
caption: Parish church of St Mary the Virgin. Its tall spire is a local landmark, nicknamed "Our Lady's Needle"
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