Reading, abbey, Wilde and the Thames

Reading, pronounced "Redding", is one of the great paradoxes of British geography: with about 175,000 people in the borough and more than 300,000 in the urban area, it is bigger than many cathedral cities, yet officially it is not a city but a town. It has applied for city status at least four times without success. It lies in Berkshire, where the River Kennet meets the Thames, about sixty kilometres west of London, and it is the economic heart of the Thames Valley, home to large computing and technology companies. A king of England and the hand of an apostle were buried here, Oscar Wilde served his most famous sentence here, and every late August tens of thousands of young people arrive for one of the oldest rock festivals in the world.

Fast trains from London Paddington take less than half an hour, and the Elizabeth line also runs all the way to Reading. Heathrow Airport is about forty minutes away.

A name, a tribe

The name Reading comes from the Rēadingas, "the people of Rēada", perhaps "the red one", a Saxon tribe that settled where the two rivers meet. In the winter of 870 a great Viking army camped here and used Reading as a base for raids into the kingdom of Wessex: the following year the brothers Æthelred and Alfred, the future Alfred the Great, attacked the Danish camp and were driven back. In the Middle Ages Reading grew around its great abbey and the trade in wool and cloth, and in the 17th century, during the Civil War, it was besieged and taken by Parliament's troops.

The abbey of kings

In 1121 King Henry I, son of William the Conqueror, founded a great Benedictine abbey at Reading that would become one of the richest in England. Henry was buried here in 1136, in front of the high altar, and the abbey held a relic that drew pilgrims from across the country: the hand of St James, brought from Germany by the king's daughter, the Empress Matilda. In its church, in 1359, John of Gaunt, son of King Edward III, was married, and Parliament met here several times.

Medieval sources also link the abbey with one of the oldest pieces of English music, Sumer is icumen in, a 13th-century round for several voices written in a manuscript probably copied by the monks of Reading: a plaque among the ruins recalls the song, which celebrates the coming of summer and the call of the cuckoo.

In 1539, with the dissolution of the monasteries ordered by Henry VIII, the abbey was closed and its last abbot, Hugh Faringdon, was hanged in front of his own church on a charge of treason. The buildings were stripped and used as a stone quarry for centuries. The ruins, long closed because they were unsafe, were restored and reopened to the public in 2018: you walk among the walls of the chapter house, the dormitory and the transept, huge masses of flint rubble stripped of their facing stone. Henry I's tomb has never been found: the king's remains probably still lie under the lawns and car parks around the ruins, and in 2016 a ground-penetrating radar survey tried to locate the exact position of the altar.

The Abbey Gateway and Jane Austen

The abbey's inner gate, the Abbey Gateway, survives intact, rebuilt in Gothic Revival style by the architect George Gilbert Scott in the 19th century. In the 18th century it housed a girls' school, the Reading Ladies Boarding School, where in 1785 a nine-year-old girl was sent to study for about a year: Jane Austen, together with her sister Cassandra. It was one of the few periods of her life spent away from her family.

Oscar Wilde and Reading Gaol

Next to the abbey ruins rises the massive red-brick bulk of Reading Gaol, the Victorian prison built in 1844 in the shape of a cross. Here, from November 1895 to May 1897, Oscar Wilde was held, sentenced to two years' hard labour for "gross indecency" because of his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas. Prisoner C.3.3., as he was numbered, wrote a long letter to Douglas in his cell, published after his death as De Profundis. After his release, in France, Wilde composed The Ballad of Reading Gaol, inspired by the hanging of a soldier at the prison during his sentence: it was his last work, published in 1898 under the name "C.3.3.".

The prison closed in 2013 and its future has been debated ever since. In 2016 it hosted a contemporary art exhibition for a few weeks, with readings of De Profundis by actors and writers. In 2021 a Banksy mural appeared on the outside wall: a prisoner escaping down the wall on a rope made from typewriter ribbon, a clear homage to Wilde. Banksy later confirmed that the work was his.

Biscuit Town

In the 19th century Reading was famous throughout the empire for the "three Bs": beer, bulbs and biscuits, meaning the beer of the Simonds brewery, the bulbs and seeds of Suttons Seeds and above all the biscuits of Huntley & Palmers. Born from a small bakery, the firm had become by the late 19th century the largest biscuit factory in the world, with thousands of workers and a vast works beside the Kennet. Its biscuits, packed in decorated tins that are now collectors' items, travelled everywhere: they ended up in ships' holds, in the stores of polar expeditions and in shops in the most distant colonies, so that tins bearing the Reading name became a recognisable symbol of Victorian England. The factory closed in 1976, but the town museum tells the story with a rich collection of tins and posters.

What to see in Reading

Reading Museum and the Bayeux Tapestry

In the large Victorian Town Hall, partly designed by Alfred Waterhouse, is Reading Museum, which is free to enter. Its most surprising attraction is a full-size replica of the Bayeux Tapestry, about seventy metres long, embroidered in 1885 by a group of thirty-five women from the Leek Embroidery Society in Staffordshire: it is the only complete replica in the world, with a curious Victorian detail, as some naked figures in the original were "clothed" for modesty. The museum also displays finds from the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum at Silchester, and galleries on the abbey and the biscuit industry.

Forbury Gardens and the Maiwand Lion

Between the abbey ruins and the town centre lie the Forbury Gardens, Victorian gardens laid out on what was once the abbey's outer court. In the middle stands the Maiwand Lion, a huge cast-iron lion from 1886, more than nine metres long, commemorating the soldiers of the Berkshire Regiment who fell at the Battle of Maiwand, in Afghanistan, in 1880. It is the town's unofficial emblem and one of the largest cast-iron lions in the world. In summer the gardens host concerts, open-air cinema and Shakespeare performances.

The Museum of English Rural Life

On the university's town-centre campus, the Museum of English Rural Life, known as MERL, tells the story of life in the English countryside over the last two centuries: painted wagons, ploughs, tools, traditional costumes and original illustrations from children's books. Entry is free, and the museum has also become famous for its humour on social media: in 2018 a photo of an enormous ram from its archives, introduced ironically as "an absolute unit", went around the world.

The Thames, the Kennet and the Oracle

Reading is a town of water. The Kennet runs through the centre and further west becomes the Kennet and Avon Canal, a navigable waterway all the way to Bath and Bristol, busy with brightly painted narrowboats. On its banks stands the Oracle, the large shopping centre with waterside restaurants and bars, named after a 17th-century workhouse. North of the centre flows the Thames: across the river is Caversham, with its parks and locks, and the Thames Path lets you walk along the bank for kilometres, as far as Sonning and Henley.

Churches and the old centre

Next to the Town Hall is St Laurence's Church, the church of the medieval market, which once stood right at the abbey gate. Reading Minster, the church of St Mary, is one of the town's oldest places of worship, while St James' Church, built in the 19th century among the abbey ruins, was designed by Augustus Pugin, the architect of the interiors of the Palace of Westminster. The centre, with Broad Street and Market Place, is largely pedestrianised and lively.

A day in Reading

A possible itinerary: start at the abbey ruins and the Abbey Gateway, walk around the prison walls to see the Banksy mural, cross the Forbury Gardens to the Maiwand Lion and visit Reading Museum for the Bayeux Tapestry. After lunch beside the Kennet at the Oracle, spend the afternoon at the Museum of English Rural Life or on a walk along the Thames at Caversham. In the evening, dine in the restaurants of Oxford Road, with food from all over the world, or in one of the historic riverside pubs.

Reading Festival

Every year, on the late August bank holiday weekend, Reading hosts the Reading Festival, one of the oldest music festivals in the world. Born in 1961 as a jazz festival near London, it moved to Reading in 1971 and over time became a major rock event, then indie, metal and rap. Nirvana, Genesis, Iron Maiden, Muse, Foo Fighters and Metallica are among the acts that have played its stages. It runs at the same time as the Leeds Festival, with the same line-up alternating between the two sites, and for many British teenagers just out of their end-of-school exams it is a real rite of passage.

England's Silicon Valley

Thanks to its closeness to London and Heathrow, since the 1980s Reading has become the capital of the Thames Valley, the so-called "Silicon Valley of England". The British offices of large computing and technology firms are based here, along with energy and insurance companies, and the town has one of the most productive economies in the country outside London. The University of Reading, founded in 1892 as an extension college of the University of Oxford and independent since 1926, is known for agriculture, meteorology and climate science.

People from Reading

Reading is the birthplace of the actress Kate Winslet, star of Titanic, and the comedian Ricky Gervais, creator of The Office, who grew up in the Whitley area and has often joked about the town in his shows. Reading FC, the town's football club, is nicknamed The Royals because of Berkshire's royal links: in the 2005-06 season it won promotion to the Premier League with 106 points, a record for the second tier.

Around Reading

• Henley-on-Thames, about fifteen kilometres away, home of the Henley Royal Regatta in early July, one of the most elegant rowing events in the world.
• Windsor, about half an hour away, with the oldest and largest inhabited castle in the world.
• Oxford, about half an hour by train, with its colleges.
• Silchester, about fifteen kilometres south, with the almost complete walls of the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum, which you can walk around for about two and a half kilometres.
• Mapledurham, on the Thames, with an Elizabethan house and the last working watermill on the river.
• Basildon Park, a Georgian National Trust mansion used as a set for period films and series.
• The villages of Sonning, with its old brick bridge over the Thames, and Pangbourne, linked to Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, who spent his last years there.

Living in Reading

Reading is one of the richest and most dynamic places in the UK outside the capital: many people work for Thames Valley companies, others commute to London, which the Elizabeth line and fast trains have brought even closer. The population is young and multicultural, with large communities of South Asian, Caribbean, Polish and Italian origin, and the town offers a university, sport and lively nightlife. The downside is rents and house prices among the highest outside London, rush-hour traffic, and the contrast between wealthy areas and poorer ones, such as Whitley and parts of Oxford Road.

Getting there and getting around

• By train: from London Paddington in under half an hour on Great Western Railway's fast trains; the Elizabeth line runs directly from central London, including Bond Street, Tottenham Court Road and the City, in about an hour. There are direct services to Oxford, Bristol, Bath, Cardiff, Birmingham and Southampton. The station, completely rebuilt and reopened in 2014, is one of the busiest outside London.
• By air: Heathrow Airport is about forty minutes away on the RailAir coach from the station; Gatwick can be reached by direct train in about an hour and a quarter.
• By car: Reading lies on the M4 motorway, linking London with Wales.
• In town: the centre is walkable; the colourful Reading Buses, each route with its own colour, serve the suburbs and the university.

For travel around the rest of the country see trains and transport, and for other cities British cities. Visitors to London can use Reading as a cheaper base or as a day trip.

Tips for your visit

• How long: one day for the abbey, the prison, the museum and the gardens; another for the Thames, Henley or Windsor.
• When to go: May to September for the river and gardens; late June and early July for Henley Regatta; late August for the festival, but be aware that hotels fill up and prices rise on those days.
• Don't miss: the museum's Bayeux Tapestry, a surprise few visitors expect, and a sunset walk along the Thames at Caversham.
• A tip: if you are staying in London you can reach Reading on the Elizabeth line with the same contactless card you use on the Underground, but check the fare, as fast trains from Paddington are quicker.

Reading on the map

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