Many Georgian residences and much earlier buildings, with Georgian frontages, line the streets of Harleston. Although there is no record of a royal charter, Harleston has been a market town since at least 1369 and still holds a Wednesday market.

The right to hold an eight-day fair during the period of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist was granted to Roger Bigod, 4th Earl of Norfolk by Henry III in 1259.

The village of Redenhall was mentioned in the Domesday Book, as part of the Lands of the King that Godric holds, in the Half Hundred of Earsham. It states that in King Edward the Confessor’ time, Rada the Dane held Redenhall, and that his holding was roughly 700 acres, upon which there were forty subordinate tenantries with six plough-teams. The Domesday Book only makes brief reference to Harleston saying that the Abbot of Bury St. Edmunds was lord here then.

One of the plots to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I was to be launched on Midsummer Day 1570 at the Harleston Fair by proclamations and the sound of trumpets and drums. The Elizabethan play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay features this in one of its scenes.

The parish includes two Church of England churches. In the town centre is the church of St John the Baptist, the present building being completed in 1872. The town’s landmark clock tower, was designed and commissioned in 1876 from George Grimwood of Weybread, at a cost of £325 whilst the clock itself was supplied and fitted by Messers Gillet & Bland of Croydon at a cost of £90. The tower is on the edge of the site of the old chapel of ease, demolished in 1873, to the much larger medieval Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Redenhall, the mother church of the parish.

Redenhall and Harleston railway stations previously connected these settlements by rail with Tivetshall St Margaret and Beccles on the Waveney Valley Line. Redenhall Station closed in 1866, and Harleston in 1953; the whole railway line has been taken up.