Whitmoor Common
nature preserve in England

Whitmoor Common is a 166-hectare (410-acre) biological Site of Special Scientific Interest on the northern outskirts of Guildford in Surrey. It is part of the Thames Basin Heaths Special Protection Area and the 184.9-hectare (457-acre) Whitmoor and Rickford Commons Local Nature Reserve, which is owned by Surrey County Council and managed by the Surrey Wildlife Trust.
This site on the heath of the London Basin has a variety of heathland habitats, as well as areas of woodland, meadow and still and running water. The heath has a nationally scarce spider, Oxyopes heterophthalmus and beetle Hyperaspis pseudopustulata and there are nationally important populations of several bird species.
The site is open to the public.
History
The common has had many fires including 21 June 2018, 22 April 2019, 12 August 2020, 2 July 2026 and 6 July 2026. Some of these fires have been attributed to disgarded rubbish such as glass and cigarette ends. This site remains a high-risk area for wildfires during summer heatwaves.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7996632. Authority coordinates are 51.271, -0.591. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2026.
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This entry incorporates text from “Whitmoor Common” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.