Today is more or less this.
After the town at the centre of things, we come to an in-betweeny space where not much seems to happen. There are fields. Ducks. Overhead cables. It’s quiet back here.
| Geese on the banks of Rivermead Park, West Reading. |
| The River near Pangbourne. Railways, pylons and other infrastructure crisscross this backstage space for Reading and its surrounding settlements. |
The central Thames thus far has been a procession of castles and palaces, mansions and monasteries, elite schools and sports facilities and sprawling land-grabs by the monied obscene. The Privilege Forts of the English south line up along their valley of imagination: a furnace-belt of willows and glistening water, insulated from its country’s sordid realities by its fortress-walls of inherited wealth as it roars in the manufacture of narratives of high-caste white Englishness.
As we have seen, the hammering from these foundries is loud and relentless. Theirs are the stories they want the whole nation to hear.
And then, on the far side of Reading – they fade.
The upper-middle Thames dispenses with the battlements, searchlights and megaphones. In their place unfurl rolling lowlands, spread with farms and dotted with small villages through which the river comes gliding. Some of these settlements are historic, ancient even, while their surroundings continue to supply the green-and-pleasant backdrop to the English national reverie. Yet now the volume is dialled right down. These settlements merely speak their stories, rather than shout them – except, of course, for one of the loftiest Privilege Forts of all, which waits at the end of this sequence in a certain city known as Oxford.
But there is a more important transition beneath that. Literally.
Oxford sits in a basin whose clay is geologically distinct from that of the lower valley. To push north on this island is as to delve deeper in time. Where London’s surface clay is young – that is, Cenozoic, about 50 million years old – Oxford’s goes back some 100 million years further to the Late Jurassic period. And through the space and time in between runs an outer arm of the great network of Late Cretaceous chalk deposits (from c.65-95 million years ago) which stretch across southern England and northwest Europe – and whose separation, of course, is wholly imaginary.
| One segment of that arm is well familiar by now. The chalk ridge of the Chiltern Hills has overlooked the north bank all the way from Marlow. |
This chalk has dramatically reshaped both the landscape itself and its imagery in English culture, and among those effects have been significant changes to the river’s course. There was a time the Thames pushed straight east into the North Sea. But finding its way blocked during the glaciations of the most recent ice age, it cut a gap through the relatively permeable chalk and has since skewed down through the London Basin instead.
It is through this gap that we now pursue it, with a better look at this realest of deep-history in the next section. For today the goal is the foot of that gap, where the river emerges between the villages of Pangbourne and Whitchurch.
| Thames Water HQ, with its sinister spiral stairs in transparent tubes, hulks over the river at Reading Bridge where today’s progress begins. |
Start:Reading Bridge (nearest station: Reading)
End:Whitchurch Bridge (nearest station: Pangbourne)
Length: 11.2km/7 miles
Location: Oxfordshire – South Oxfordshire; Berkshire – Borough of Reading, West Berkshire District
Topics: West Reading suburbs, Purley, Pangbourne – shifting satellite settlements on the edge-of-centre
Reading outskirts
Our main task today is to escape Reading. The town has an imprint on its surrounding land to match its pivotal historical position, and so most of this walk is spent shaking loose of the suburbs and infrastructure laid down in reference to it.
| The view west from Reading Bridge. Despite carrying the town’s name, this is the more recent of Reading’s two main river crossings. It was built only in 1923 to ease congestion, as part of the political arrangement by which Reading absorbed the north bank village of Caversham as a suburb. |
| A century later the same integrative strategy continues. Christchurch Bridge is one of the river’s newest of all, opened in 2015 to further unify the pedestrian and cyclist bloodstreams of Reading and Caversham. |
| It’s called Christchurch Bridge for the Christchurch Meadows, visible here on the Caversham side. Those in turn are named for the Christ Church College of Oxford University, which used to own farmland in Reading and founded Reading University in 1892 as an extension of itself. Already we begin to sense the tug of Oxford’s gravitational field. |
Between Reading’s principal bridges is an islet, seen here at left. Where it got its name of Fry’s Island is not clear, but it comes with a political anecdote that gives it its other name of De Montfort Island. It concerns a public duel said to have taken place here in 1163 between two nobles from the court of King Henry II – the first king of the Plantagenet dynasty from Anjou, which is now in France but whose state, on his succession, also inherited England. That arrangement was as much a mess as it sounds and resulted from the violent upheaval that followed the death of his father’s uncle, the first Henry, whose Reading Abbey project was at last coming to fruition.
The combat itself arose over an accusation of dishonourable conduct in battle, and its outcome was that the accusing noble, Robert de Montfort, grievously wounded the man he accused, the king’s standard-bearer Henry of Essex. Such a duel having the equivalence of a judicial trial in that period, Henry of Essex was judged guilty and stripped of his lands and titles. But the king had him brought to Reading Abbey, where he was healed by the monks and supposedly joined them afterwards.
Perhaps that’s this incident’s broader significance. The duel took place here at all because Henry II happened to be holding court at Reading Abbey. The monastery’s prominence in this little tale attests that despite the disastrous ructions that followed its founder’s death, despite even his Norman dynasty’s transition to an Angevin one, his grand project at the crossroads had endured and was ready to stand as a stable base of power.
| The island, here at right, is known today for its lawn bowls club – the only one in this country which must be reached by ferry. The main private house on there still carries the name of Demontfort House. |
| Fry’s Island also hosts this boatyard. Coincidentally or otherwise, the lion seems to have been the primary motif in the heraldry of the De Montfort family. |
Approaching Reading’s main crossing of Caversham Bridge, it becomes apparent that this settlement’s role as a centre ground also extends to the river’s bird life.
