Beech
  Beech is a small parish found in the North eastern part of the county, and sits in a narrow valley not far from Alton Abbey below one of the highest points off the Alton to Basingstoke road and lies about ten miles south of Basingstoke, 15 miles east of the city of Winchester and approximately two miles from Alton and is just outside of the South Downs National Park.

The area is mainly rural and the parish covers around 1261 acres of a mix of woodland and farmland, the village itself is mainly residential , though it serves the local business areas that were once mainly agricultural and has now declined and there are no modern farming practices there, though it is still growing with around 200 houses and a population of around 600.

The opening of the South Downs National Park is hoped to be a prosperous intrusion  on Alton which lies just outside the park and this  means that more houses will be needed and hence built in the surrounding villages.

The village can be traced back to about the 12th century but the modern village came into being during the latter decade of the 19th century when the local landowner sold off small parcels of land for housing. Many of the houses were in the colonial style of wood and corrugated iron which continued during the peace between WWI and WWII.
Pictured left: One of the thatched cottages
Photo kindly submitted by  Margaret Brook, New Zealand

The church was built in 1902 and the village hall thirty years later, and since the 1960s most of the colonial style has been replaced by more modern brick built houses.

Alton Abbey is at the top of Kings Hill, and is a Benedictine Monastery in the Church of England, and the community goes back to the ordainment of the Rev Charles Plomer Hopkins who was later appointed River Port Chaplain of Rangoon in Burma in 1884.

To get land to build a house a parcel of land was was bought at Beech called Kingswood Copse in 1895 and the first inhabitants there lived in wattle built huts or tents until a corrugated iron monastery was built. These wattle and iron buildings were gradually pulled down and the last was in the beginning of the 1980s.