Whaddon is a village and also a

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government. Civil parishes can trace their origin to the ancient system of parishes, w ...

Buckinghamshire Buckinghamshire (, abbreviated ''Bucks'') is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South East England and one of the home counties. It is bordered by Northamptonshire to the north, Bedfordshire to the north-east, Hertfordshir ...

, England, within the

Buckinghamshire Council Buckinghamshire Council is the Local Government in England, local authority for the Buckinghamshire (district), Buckinghamshire district in England. It is a Unitary authorities of England, unitary authority, performing both county and district- ...

unitary authority area A unitary authority is a type of local authority in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Unitary authorities are responsible for all local government functions within its area or performing additional functions that elsewhere are usually performed ...

. It is situated just outside of

Bletchley Bletchley is a constituent town of Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England, in the south-west of the city, split between the civil parishes in England, civil parishes of Bletchley and Fenny Stratford and West Bletchley, which In 2011 had a com ...

, a constituent town of

Milton Keynes Milton Keynes ( ) is a city status in the United Kingdom, city in Buckinghamshire, England, about north-west of London. At the 2021 Census, the population of Milton Keynes urban area, its urban area was 264,349. The River Great Ouse forms t ...

. The village name is

Anglo Saxon The Anglo-Saxons, in some contexts simply called Saxons or the English, were a cultural group who spoke Old English and inhabited much of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to Ge ...

in origin, and means 'hill where wheat is grown'. The village is referred to several times in the ''

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle The ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'' is a collection of annals in Old English, chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons. The original manuscript of the ''Chronicle'' was created late in the ninth century, probably in Wessex, during the reign of ...

'', generally in the form of ''Hwætædun''. The village is at the centre of the ancient Whaddon Chase, the site for many centuries of royal hunting lands. Whaddon Chase is designated an area of 'Special Landscape Interest'. The Church of St Mary is a grade I

listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building is a structure of particular architectural or historic interest deserving of special protection. Such buildings are placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Hi ...

. Whaddon Church of England School is a mixed

Church of England The Church of England (C of E) is the State religion#State churches, established List of Christian denominations, Christian church in England and the Crown Dependencies. It is the mother church of the Anglicanism, Anglican Christian tradition, ...

primary school A primary school (in Ireland, India, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, South Africa, and Singapore), elementary school, or grade school (in North America and the Philippines) is a school for primary ...

. It is a

voluntary controlled A voluntary controlled school (VC school) is a state-funded school in England and Wales in which a foundation or trust (usually a Christian denomination) has some formal influence in the running of the school. Such schools have less autonomy th ...

school, which takes children from the age of four through to the age of eleven. The school has approximately 50 pupils. Richard Cox ( 1500–1581), an English clergyman, who was

Dean of Westminster The Dean of Westminster is the head of the chapter at Westminster Abbey. Due to the abbey's status as a royal peculiar, the dean answers directly to the British monarch (not to the Bishop of London as ordinary, nor to the Archbishop of Canterb ...

and

Bishop of Ely The Bishop of Ely is the Ordinary (officer), ordinary of the Church of England Diocese of Ely in the Province of Canterbury. The diocese roughly covers the county of Cambridgeshire (with the exception of the Soke of Peterborough), together with ...

, was born at Whaddon. Whaddon Hall, the village manor, was once home to the Selby family (also known as Selby-Lowndes), whose ancestor William Lowndes built the larger and grander

Winslow Hall Winslow Hall is a country house, now in the centre of the small town of Winslow, Buckinghamshire, England. Built in 1700, it was sited in the centre of the town, with a public front facing the highway and a garden front that still commanded i ...

. Both mansions are still private houses. During the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

, Whaddon Hall served as headquarters of Section VIII (Communications) of

MI6 The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 ( Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligenc ...

, as an outpost of Bletchley Park.

References

External links

{{authority control Villages in Buckinghamshire Civil parishes in Buckinghamshire