Wallingford has a long history, with evidence of prehistoric and Roman occupation, but it was probably not until the late ninth century that it became a major settlement. This is the original date of the surviving earthwork defences and the town is mentioned in the Burghal Hidage (c.919), which lists defended strongholds in Wessex. The creation of the defensive rampart and ditch was accompanied by the formal laying out of an internal street pattern.

By the time of the Domesday Book (1086) the town was of some importance with its own mint and market. The survey mentions 491 houses, some of which were destroyed by the building of the Norman castle in the north-east corner of the town. The castle was used as a royal residence from the early thirteenth century until c.1385, when it began to fall into decay.

Indeed, the town itself had begun to decline from its former importance as early as the mid-thirteenth century, reaching its nadir in the mid-seventeenth century following the siege of the re-occupied castle and the destruction of houses in the Civil War. Happily, revival stirred in the nineteenth century with the opening of railway connections and in recent years Wallingford has once more become a prosperous small market town.

Much of the town´s early medieval topography is reflected in its street pattern and open spaces. The extensive earthworks of the castle and the masonry fragments of the College of St Nicholas survive in the north-east corner of the town and in the north west lay the Benedictine priory of Holy Trinity. In addition to the chapels attached to the castle and priory, there were at one time at least 11 parish churches, only 3 of which survive. Many fine buildings of all periods remain in Wallingford. The George Hotel is a good example of a later medieval timber-framed structure and No. 18 High Street has a fourteenth-century vaulted undercroft. The Town Hall (1670) is the centre piece of the rejuvenated Market Place and, as one would expect, there are many attractive eighteenth and early nineteenth-century re-frontings of earlier buildings, both here and in the other principal streets of the town.