Ham could soon take on a new identity as a place of Christian pilgrimage.

For Cardinal John Henry Newman, who is set to become the first new British saint since 1970, lived his early years in the village, and loved it for the rest of his life.

Newman was born in London in 1801. Three years later the family moved to Grey Court House, an 18th century mansion that still stands in Ham Street, but has been re-named Newman House.

The future cardinal only lived there for three years but it became engraved on his memory. Revisiting it 54 years later, he wrote: "I have been looking at the windows of our home at Ham near Richmond, where I lay aged five looking at the candles stuck in them in celebration of the victory of Trafalgar.

"I have never seen the house since September 1807 - I know more about it than any house I have been in since, and could pass an examination in it. It has ever been in my dreams."

Built in 1742, the house was already a school before Newman died in 1890. Now it forms part of Grey Court, the school built in its grounds some 50 years ago.

Newman began his religious journey as a modest evangelical Anglican and ended it as a leading Roman Catholic. He was ordained in 1824 and, after years as a parish priest, and a hugely influential preacher, writer and theologian, was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1845. He was created a cardinal in 1879.

The Cardinal will qualify for sainthood if Vatican doctors and theologians are satisfied that there is no scienticic explanation for at least two supposed miracles.

Leading Catholics in America believe the Cardinal intervened last year to save a 17-year-old New Hampshire schoolboy who was on the point of death after a car accident. Earlier this month, a Massachusetts student was about to give up training for the ministry because of a spinal disorder. He prayed to the Cardinal to help him, and the next day the pain had gone.