Bridge Road was unimaginatively named after a bridge that carried it over the Redhill to Reading railway line.

Many of the bridges in the town were very narrow and five of them were widened at considerable expense in the first few years of the 20th century. The one in Bridge Road, originally a wooden structure, was one of them.

Probably laid out in the 1850s or 1860s, Bridge Road was later divided into Bridge Road Upper and Bridge Road Lower, these names eventually becoming Upper Bridge Road and Lower Bridge Road. Lower Bridge Road once joined the High Street between the Pavilion Cinema and the Old Oak public house. Both of these buildings have been demolished and the old road end built across.

The houses that once stood in Lower Bridge Road have been replaced by flats and only the Salvation Army Citadel remains from the road's earlier days.

One fairly significant change was the removal of the large ash tree that grew close to the bridge. Presumably it pre-dated the road, the pavement being built around it.

Upper Bridge Road, which ends near the common, has not changed as much and retains many of the original houses built on either side of it.

Some have been replaced by more modern buildings and one was demolished after a bomb fell in front of it during World War Two. For many years there was an allotment where it had stood.

A more recent change has been the renumbering of the houses from the bridge towards the common. One might have expected Upper Bridge Road to have started immediately beyond the upper side of the bridge but in fact Lower Bridge Road extended to the Grovehill crossroad and Upper Bridge started from there.

This was something dating back to when the road was simply Bridge Road and the Upper and Lower prefixes were added but not as a reference to the Bridge' part of the name, which came later.

It was nevertheless suggested that this was an anomaly that ought to be rectified and the council agreed, renumbering houses so that number one Upper Bridge Road is now the first house after the bridge, not the first house after Grovehill Road as was originally the case.

- Article by Alan Moore, author of A History of Redhill volumes 1 and 2, www.redhill-reigate-history.co.uk.