Place Name
Directional, the road to West Wickham. Wickham is a Saxon word meaning a settlement on the site of an earlier Roman settlement – a Romano-British site. A Roman road that heads to Lewes passes through the town and it has been suggested recently that the lost Roman city of Noviomagus may have been located here too. The West was added sometime around 1284, to create Westwycham, to avoid confusion with the other Wickham (now East Wickham) near Welling. It was first recorded as Wic hammer gemæru as early as AD973 and later Wicheham in the Domesday Book of 1086. David Mills in A Dictionary of London Place Names writes it is probably: “[A] homestead associated with a vicious, ie an earlier Romano-British settlement”.
