1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Staines

STAINES, a market town in the Uxbridge parliamentary division of Middlesex, England, on the river Thames at the junction of the Colne, 19 m. W.S.W. of London on the London & South Western and Great Western railways. Pop. of urban district (1901), 6688. Breweries and mustard mills employ many hands. A rifle range for the Metropolitan Volunteers and others was opened in 1892. A British village was situated here at the crossing of the Thames on the main road from London to south-western Britain, and the crossing was certainly one of the earliest bridged. A grant of oaks from Windsor forest for the repair of the bridge is recorded in 1262. The existing bridge, from the designs of George Rennie, was opened in 1831, after three bridges had failed in the previous forty years. The name of Staines appears in the Domesday Survey, and it has been supposed that the town is so called from a stone which marks the limit of the former jurisdiction of the City of London over the lower Thames. This is still considered to be the boundary between the upper and lower Thames. In the immediate neighbourhood, though included in the parish of Egham, Surrey, is Runnimede Island, where King John signed the Magna Carta.