The Roman road Stane Street, connecting London to Chichester, passed directly through Dorking, establishing it as a crossroads settlement nearly two thousand years ago. The Domesday Book records it as Dorchinges. The town became famous for its weekly market and the Dorking fowl, a distinctive five-toed breed of chicken mentioned by Roman writers including Columella in the 1st century AD. The breed was prized for its meat and became a symbol of the town. A statue of a Dorking cockerel now stands at the junction of the High Street and South Street.
During the English Civil War, Parliamentary forces passed through in 1643, and there was a minor skirmish nearby. The town developed as a coaching stop on the road between London and the south coast, with several inns serving travellers. Deepdene, the large estate above town, was home to Thomas Hope, the wealthy collector and patron of the arts, who rebuilt the house in a Romantic style in the early 19th century. The house was later demolished, but the gardens, designed partly by Hope himself with features inspired by his travels in the Ottoman Empire, survive in fragmented form.
In the Victorian era, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace lodged in Dorking while developing his ideas on evolution. The area's varied geology, where chalk downs meet clay vale, influenced his thinking about the distribution of species. George Meredith, the novelist and poet, lived at Flint Cottage on the slopes of Box Hill from 1867 until his death in 1909. Box Hill itself was acquired by the National Trust in 1914 after a public fundraising campaign. Denbies, the large estate on the chalk slopes above town, has been a vineyard since 1986 and is now England's largest single estate vineyard, producing award-winning sparkling wine. The town is unusual in having three railway stations for a population of around 17,000, a legacy of Victorian competition between the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway and the South Eastern Railway.
