Ashtead Group plc (LSE: AHT) is a British industrial equipment rental company formerly based in Leatherhead, Surrey but which has since moved to new offices in the City of London. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.

Ashtead was founded in 1947 in the village of Ashtead, Surrey, as Ashtead Plant and Tool Hire. In 1986 it was first listed on the London Stock Exchange. 1n 1990 it bought Sunbelt Rentals. In 2006 it acquired NationsRent Inc for $1bn. In 2008 it sold Ashtead Technology in a management buyout deal.

The Company operates internationally, with the majority of its business coming from the United States. It hires out large industrial items such as aerial work platforms, backhoes, excavators and forklift trucks, and smaller equipment such as power saws, ladders, and pumps.

Ashtead Plant has become known as A-Plant and is split into the following divisions:

In the US Ashtead group operates under the name Sunbelt Rentals. Based in Charlotte, it is the second largest equipment rental company in the U.S. and has a large network of locations in 35 states as well as the District of Columbia. A partnership with Lowes Hardware Stores means some locations are within Lowes Stores. As of 2010 Lowe's partnership with sunbelt rentals has diminished leading to closing many locations within Lowe's.

Coordinates: 51°18′36″N 0°17′55″W / 51.3101°N 0.2986°W / 51.3101; -0.2986

Ashtead is a village situated within the Metropolitan Green Belt of Surrey, England, and is just outside of the suburbia of London. It is separated from Leatherhead by the M25, and from Epsom by Ashtead Common.

There has been settlement in Ashtead since at least Roman times, with a Roman villa excavated in what is now Ashtead common. Ashtead lay within the Copthorne hundred, an administrative division devised by the Saxons.

Ashtead appears in the Domesday Book as Stede. It was held by the Canons of Bayeux from the Bishop of Bayeux. Its Domesday Assets were: 3 hides and 1 virgate; 16 ploughs, 4 acres (16,000 m²) of meadow, woodland worth 7 hogs. It rendered (in total): £12. Its main source of water at the time seems to have been the Rye.

St Giles Church in Ashtead Park dates from the 12th century, and Ashtead is mentioned twice in Samuel Pepys' diaries. Part of his entry for 25 July 1663 reads:

Towards the evening we bade them adieu and took horse, being resolved that, instead of the race which fails us, we would go to Epsom When we come there we could hear of no lodging, the town so full, but which was better, I went towards Ashsted, and there we got a lodging in a little hole we could not stand upright in While supper was getting I walked up and down behind my cosen Pepys's house that was, which I find comes little short of what I took it to be when I was a little boy.

Evan Harold Davis (born 8 April 1962) is a British economist, journalist and presenter for the BBC. In October 2001, Davis took over from Peter Jay as the BBC's economics editor. He left this post in April 2008 to become a presenter on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. Evan Davis is also the presenter for the BBC venture-capitalist programme Dragons' Den, as well as The Bottom Line, a business conversation show, also on BBC Radio 4.

Davis grew up in Ashtead, Surrey.^{[citation needed]} He attended Dorking County Grammar School, which in 1976 became The Ashcombe School, Dorking and later studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St John's College, Oxford from 1981 to 1984, before obtaining an MPA at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.^{[citation needed]} While at Oxford University, Davis edited Cherwell, the student newspaper.

Davis began work as an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and while there he was briefly seconded to help officials work on early development of the Community Charge system of local government taxation (better known as the Poll Tax). In 1988 he moved to the London Business School, writing articles for their publication "Business Strategy Review". He returned to the Institute for Fiscal Studies in 1992, writing a paper on "Britain, Europe and the Square Mile" for the European Policy Forum which argued that British financial prosperity depended on being seen as a bridgehead to the European Union.