Place Name
Industrial heritage. This lead from the village to the Lower Colham flour mill which stood at a fork in Fray’s River, variously known as the Cowley stream or Colham mill stream. This was a long established mill – a watermill was first recorded around here in the Norman’s Domesday Book. During the medieval period the two mills belonging to Colham manor were called Port mill and Bury mill: later they were known as Colham or Lower Colham mill and Yiewsley mill respectively. The immediate area later expanded becoming an industrial site before being bought by Alfred Mc Alpine Partnership Housing and developed for residential use. The name itself was first recorded as Colanhomm in an Anglo-Saxon charter of AD831 (some sources put it later AD883), meaning the pasture or river meadow belonging to a landowner called Cola. By the time the Domesday Book was being compiled in 1086 it had mutated to Coleham, and was contracted further still sometime around 1180 to Colam.