History
There is a stone age barrow in the town, and evidence of Roman settlement in the second and third century CE. The town was really established by the saxons.
The name Gillingham was used for the town in the saxon charter of the 10th century, and also in the anals of 1016 as the location of a battle between Kind Edmund and the Danish Vikings. In the Domesday book of 1086 it is Gelingham, and later spellings include Gellingeham in 1130, Gyllingeham in 1152 and Gilingeham in 1209. The name implies a 'homestead of the family or followers of a man called Gylla', a model consistent with the occupation of Dorset by the saxons from the seventh century.
In the middle ages Gillingham was the seat of a royal hunting lodge, visited by King Henry the First, Henry the Second, King John and Henry the Third. A nearby royal forest was set asside for the King's deer. The lodge fell into disrepair and was destroyed in 1369 by Edward the Third.
Edward Rawson, the first secutary to the Massachusetts Bay Colony was born in Gillingham.
Gillingham became a centre for local farming, gained the first Grammar School in Dorset in 1526 and a mill for silk in 1769. Gillingham's church has a 14th century chancel, though most of the rest of the building was built in the 19th and 20th centuries. Many other buildings in the town are of Tudor origin.
In the 1850s the arival of the railway to the town bought prosperity and new industries including brick making, cheese production, printing, soap manifacture and at the end of the 19th century one of the first petrol engine plants in the country. In the second world war Gillingham's place on the railway, which went from London to Exeter, was key to its rapid growth. In 1940 and 1941 there was large scale evacuation of London, and other industrial cities, to rural towns, particularly in the north, southwest and Wales. Gillingham, being on the railway, grew rapidly because of this, and has not stopped growing since. Gillingham's position 4 miles south of the A303, the main London to southwest England road, means it remains a popular commuter town.
John Constable's painting of the old town bridge is in the Tate Gallery