[2] During Edward the Confessor’s time, Hanworth was a sparsely populated manor and parish held by Ulf, a "huscarl" of the King.

The majority of huscarls in the kingdom were killed at Hastings in 1066, and William the Conqueror granted Hanworth to Robert under Roger de Montgomery, the Earl of Arundel and Shrewsbury.

In 1512, Hanworth came to the Crown, and Henry VIII, who enjoyed hunting on the heath surrounding the village, gave the manor to Anne Boleyn for life.

After her execution, the manor returned to the King who held it until his death in 1547 but passing to Catherine Parr, who lived in the house with her stepdaughter Princess Elizabeth.

In 1784, General Sir William Roy, the military draughtsman, supervised the Principal Triangulation of Great Britain project.

That measured a base line from King's Arbour, across Hounslow Heath passing through Hanworth Park, to Hampton Poor House.

In 1827 the house and estate of c. 680 acres (known as Hanworth Great Park), including three farms was sold outright to Henry Perkins.

Renamed Hanworth Farms, these supplied all the produce for the store's food hall having been transported daily by horse and cart.

The manor was inherited by his son and heir, Aubrey, in 1781, who succeeded his cousin as Duke of St. Albans six years later but who sold it shortly after 1802 to James Ramsey Cuthbert.

After the death of his heir Algernon Perkins it passed to a firm of solicitors, and the main home was acquired in the early part of the next century by Court of Appeal judge turned politician Ernest Murray Pollock, 1st Viscount Hanworth.

However, when the architect Nugent Cachemaille-Day was approached, he decided that a proper church should be built, and a site on the opposite side of Hampton Road West was chosen.

[15][better source needed] Forge Lane Infants and Junior School was built on the south side of the new road, and the war memorial was relocated.

Soil in Hanworth varies between gravel close to the surface and a clay-rich loam, with very narrow belts of alluvium closest to the streams.

The land is relatively flat and drained by two watercourses heading southward and eastward respectively to meet the Thames in neighbouring historic parishes, the River Crane marking much of the northern border with Twickenham, and the Port Lane stream matching approximately the western boundary.