Reading, Berkshire
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Reading is quite possibly the dullest town of its size in Britain, although competition is pretty fierce for this honour. It is famous for only one thing: Reading Gaol, in which Oscar Wilde was incarcerated. He wrote a poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, of which everybody has heard but which (to my knowledge) nobody in the town can recite. On a good day escapees from the jail are joined by fugitives from nearby Broadmoor, leading to the amusing spectacle of midnight helicopter searchlight patrols over the area’s dog toilets (officially "parks").
Situated in the Royal County of Berkshire, about 25 miles West of London on the M4, Reading was formerly the home of Berkshire County Council until they were abolished and Reading was made Unitary. One justification for unitary status was the results of a public poll on the proposal "one town, one council, and a fourth Thames Bridge." In fact it could have been "cessession from the United Kindom, annexing the Sudetenland and a fourth Thames bridge" and it would still have been just as strongly supported - everybody in Reading agrees that we need another bridge. Sadly the fight with Oxfordshire (see below) prevents its being built. The excuse for the lack of a bypass is less clear.
Reading is the ancestral home of the Huntley and Palmers biscuit brand, but no biscuits are made there any more. Instead it is now a centre for financial services and high-technology industries, a world centre of expertise in overpriced parking, the site of some impressively nasty buildings (e.g. Apex Plaza, home of NHS Supplies procurement executive) and a national pilot for the Total Traffic Paralysis By Pretending Cars Will Go Away programme.
The town is transected by a railway (the Great Western, London 25 minutes by Inter-City or as little as 3 1/2 hours by Thames Trains), the Thames, the Kennet, the Kennet and Avon Canal, the A4, A329M and the M4. This maximises the potential for traffic bottlenecks, which the council wisely ensures you cannot avoid by strategic use of one-way schemes and inexplicable road closures. Just to ensure that traffic flow is minimised, Berkshire and Oxfordshire disagree on which route people should take to almost anywhere. For example, Reading think that the A4074 is a good route to Oxford, on the spurious grounds that it goes straight there. Oxfordshire on the other hand favour the much more rational selection of the A34, based partly on the fact that you have to drive the wrong way for half an hour in order to join it, and partly on the fact that the A34 is one of the most congested trunk roads in the UK.
On one memorable occasion a lorry caught fire on the M4, within the Reading area boundaries, and casualties had to be taken to Swindon because it was not possible to move an ambulance through the gridlock caused in the town by the M4 closure. This is no exaggeration.
Shops in Reading are so good that many people will drive to Oxford for a day’s shopping (although to be fair it is also cheaper to drive to Oxford and get the bus from the park-and-ride, than to park in Reading for a day). Hickie's music shop and Drew's the Ironmongers are honourable exceptions - otherwise it's all chain stores. I mean, why would there be five shoe shops all selling identical shoes? What is the point?
There are plus points. Unemployment is low (leading to some of the most astronomical house prices in the country – after all, you wouldn’t want unemployed people moving in, would you?) and there is a very good train service to London, as well as Thames Trains. There are even a few civic amenities, such as swimming pools too hot to swim in, and the Chatham Street Vandaldrome where for a modest fee of five pounds or more you can have your car systematically destroyed while you shop.
The town council also have an interesting policy on primary schools. The assignment of catchment areas of Reading primary schools is performed carefully so that no school is actually outside its own catchment area, although several come close. Caversham Primary is one of the "best" primary schools in the UK, so the governors work tirelessly to ensure that the catchment area never strays from the upper middle-class Caversham Heights area, where parents can easily afford the extra maths tuition which proves so helpful to the school’s reputation. The council are willing participants in this, even to the extent of moving the catchment area to include their own homes.
Other areas of special interest include: the Inner Distribution Road, where every on-ramp is situated on a bend so you can't see anything in your mirrors; traffic lights on the roundabouts phased so you actually have to stop at each exit if you are trying to go round them (true!); an Oxford Road which doesn't go even vaguely towards Oxford and which coincides with neither of the above mentioned routes; and some world-beating traffic jams. It takes me 90 minutes from Reading to Gosport, of which the first 35 is spent getting 6 miles from one side of the town to the other, and the remainder gets me over ten times the distance, including through Basingstoke.
Yellow Pages live in Reading, as does the Hexagon (where the snooker used to be), Honda UK and one or two other famous firms too numerous to mention. So do I. Come to Reading some day: if nothing else you'll appreciate your home town more afterwards.
Situated in the Royal County of Berkshire, about 25 miles West of London on the M4, Reading was formerly the home of Berkshire County Council until they were abolished and Reading was made Unitary. One justification for unitary status was the results of a public poll on the proposal "one town, one council, and a fourth Thames Bridge." In fact it could have been "cessession from the United Kindom, annexing the Sudetenland and a fourth Thames bridge" and it would still have been just as strongly supported - everybody in Reading agrees that we need another bridge. Sadly the fight with Oxfordshire (see below) prevents its being built. The excuse for the lack of a bypass is less clear.
Reading is the ancestral home of the Huntley and Palmers biscuit brand, but no biscuits are made there any more. Instead it is now a centre for financial services and high-technology industries, a world centre of expertise in overpriced parking, the site of some impressively nasty buildings (e.g. Apex Plaza, home of NHS Supplies procurement executive) and a national pilot for the Total Traffic Paralysis By Pretending Cars Will Go Away programme.
The town is transected by a railway (the Great Western, London 25 minutes by Inter-City or as little as 3 1/2 hours by Thames Trains), the Thames, the Kennet, the Kennet and Avon Canal, the A4, A329M and the M4. This maximises the potential for traffic bottlenecks, which the council wisely ensures you cannot avoid by strategic use of one-way schemes and inexplicable road closures. Just to ensure that traffic flow is minimised, Berkshire and Oxfordshire disagree on which route people should take to almost anywhere. For example, Reading think that the A4074 is a good route to Oxford, on the spurious grounds that it goes straight there. Oxfordshire on the other hand favour the much more rational selection of the A34, based partly on the fact that you have to drive the wrong way for half an hour in order to join it, and partly on the fact that the A34 is one of the most congested trunk roads in the UK.
On one memorable occasion a lorry caught fire on the M4, within the Reading area boundaries, and casualties had to be taken to Swindon because it was not possible to move an ambulance through the gridlock caused in the town by the M4 closure. This is no exaggeration.
Shops in Reading are so good that many people will drive to Oxford for a day’s shopping (although to be fair it is also cheaper to drive to Oxford and get the bus from the park-and-ride, than to park in Reading for a day). Hickie's music shop and Drew's the Ironmongers are honourable exceptions - otherwise it's all chain stores. I mean, why would there be five shoe shops all selling identical shoes? What is the point?
There are plus points. Unemployment is low (leading to some of the most astronomical house prices in the country – after all, you wouldn’t want unemployed people moving in, would you?) and there is a very good train service to London, as well as Thames Trains. There are even a few civic amenities, such as swimming pools too hot to swim in, and the Chatham Street Vandaldrome where for a modest fee of five pounds or more you can have your car systematically destroyed while you shop.
The town council also have an interesting policy on primary schools. The assignment of catchment areas of Reading primary schools is performed carefully so that no school is actually outside its own catchment area, although several come close. Caversham Primary is one of the "best" primary schools in the UK, so the governors work tirelessly to ensure that the catchment area never strays from the upper middle-class Caversham Heights area, where parents can easily afford the extra maths tuition which proves so helpful to the school’s reputation. The council are willing participants in this, even to the extent of moving the catchment area to include their own homes.
Other areas of special interest include: the Inner Distribution Road, where every on-ramp is situated on a bend so you can't see anything in your mirrors; traffic lights on the roundabouts phased so you actually have to stop at each exit if you are trying to go round them (true!); an Oxford Road which doesn't go even vaguely towards Oxford and which coincides with neither of the above mentioned routes; and some world-beating traffic jams. It takes me 90 minutes from Reading to Gosport, of which the first 35 is spent getting 6 miles from one side of the town to the other, and the remainder gets me over ten times the distance, including through Basingstoke.
Yellow Pages live in Reading, as does the Hexagon (where the snooker used to be), Honda UK and one or two other famous firms too numerous to mention. So do I. Come to Reading some day: if nothing else you'll appreciate your home town more afterwards.
