STAINES  , a

market town in the Uxbridge parliamentary division of Middlesex, England, on the river Thames at the junction of the Colne, 19 M . W.S.W. of London on the London & South Western and Great Western railways . Pop. of urban district (1901), 6688 . Breweries and mustard mills employ many hands . A rifle range for the Metropolitan Volunteers and others was opened in 1892 . A British village was situated here at the crossing of the Thames on the main road from London to south-western Britain, and the crossing was certainly one of the earliest bridged . A grant of oaks from Windsor forest for the repair of the bridge is recorded in 1262 . The existing bridge, from the designs of George Rennie, was opened in 1831, after three bridges had failed in the previous forty years . The name of Staines appears in the Domesday Survey, and it has been supposed that the town is so called from a stone which marks the limit of the former jurisdiction of the City of London over the lower Thames . This is still considered to be the boundary between the upper and lower Thames . In the immediate neighbourhood, though included in the parish of Egham, Surrey, is Runnimede Island, where King John signed the Magna Carta .