Guildford )
is a town in Surrey, England, 27 miles southwest of London on the A3 trunk road midway between the capital and Portsmouth.The town has a population of about 80,000 and is the seat of the wider Borough of Guildford which had an estimated 147,889 inhabitants in 2018.Guildford has Saxon roots and historians attribute its location to the existence of a gap in the North Downs where the River Wey was forded by the Harrow Way. By AD 978 it was home to an early English Royal Mint. The building of the Wey Navigation and the Basingstoke Canal in the 17th and 18th centuries, respectively, connected Guildford to a network of waterways that aided its prosperity. In the 20th century, the University of Surrey and the Anglican Guildford Cathedral were added.Due to recent development running north from Guildford, and linking to the Woking area, Guildford now officially forms the southwestern tip of the Greater London Built-up Area, as defined by the Office for National Statistics.
