Reading has been on the tube map since 2019 despite being 20 miles outside London, thus is an easy place to get to for a rather good day out. However you should never take the Elizabeth line because that takes almost an hour from Paddington whereas a fast GWR train gets you here in just over 20 minutes (and for the same fare). Reading is a significant historic town that's since evolved into a major commercial centre, also the largest English town never to have been made a city despite several attempts. Also they really want you visit, so grab all the leaflets you can from the tourist cart by the station gateline and head off to explore. [Visit Reading][14 photos]
1) Reading Museum
The museum is housed across three floors of Reading's Gothic town hall, a very short walk from the station. Its finest exhibit is a full-sized fully-stitched replica of the Bayeux Tapestry, as blogged yesterday, which stretches around the entire mezzanine. But it has several other interesting galleries, indeed sufficient to keep me within the building for over an hour what with 1066 and all that. The ground floor focuses not unexpectedly on the history of the town, a significant portion given over to Reading's royally significant Norman abbey. After that was pulled down it was Reading's strategic location on the rivers Thames and Kennet that lured people in, also companies like Gillette (who developed the first twin-blade razor here). Apparently Victorians couldn't get enough of Cook's Reading Sauce, a spicy condiment containing mushroom, capers, chutney and anchovy essence, and sooner them than me.
Huntley and Palmers were such a significant employer that they merit an entire gallery on the top floor, crammed with every kind of decorated tin that once flew out of the world's largest biscuit factory. If that feels very much like an art gallery there is also a proper one, also a windowed room bedecked with sculptures and another with splendid Roman-inspired ceramics. Not far from Reading was the major Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum, now known as Silchester, whose story is told in a large artefact-packed gallery on the second floor. Archaeologists hit the jackpot here because the site was never built on after the Empire fell, so even though only the walls remain standing the complete street pattern is known and a full history can be told. Throw in a stag donated to the collection by George V from his Windsor herd and Reading Museum feels like it has several important stories to tell, not just a collection of randomly old things.
2) Reading Abbey
In a further connection to the Bayeux Tapestry, Reading's magnificent Abbey was founded by King Henry I, longest-reigning of the sons of William the Conqueror. He built it to gain salvation for himself and his family, and selected a gravel spur between the rivers Kennet and Thames as the best site for accessibility to other towns and cities. Henry died before it was finished, leaving instructions that he be buried in front of the high altar (which almost all of him was, although his heart and intestines ended up in Rouen). Alas his tomb didn't survive the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the approximate site now marked with a plaque given nobody's quite sure where it is or if he's even still there.
The most substantial of the abbey's remains are now the high walls of the chapter house and refectory, which remain pretty impressive. You wander in from the park with the big lion, past the remnants of Civil War earthworks and a plaque pointing out where the west end of the abbey used to be. Close by is the Abbey Gateway where Jane Austen went to school, which would be more of an astonishing coup for Reading had the standalone building not collapsed in a storm and been rebuilt by the Victorians in artificially Gothic style. Another building erected withing the abbey grounds is Reading Jail, a New Model Prison whose car park overlaps the footprint of the lady chapel. Its most famous prisoner was Oscar Wilde who spent two miserable years in cell C.3.3, and who might just be the prisoner Bansky depicted clambering over the wall opposite the roundabout (now safely secured behind a sheet of perspex).
3) Camino Inglés
Reading Abbey was dedicated to St James and for this reason has been selected as the start of England's only official section of the Camino de Santiago. Officially it begins outside St James's church, a much later Roman Catholic addition, but then weaves off through the Abbey ruins and off down the Kennet. It's so official that a "mouteira" (or stone milestone marker,) was gifted to the town last year and installed down by the river. Galicia may be 690 miles as the crow flies but the Camino Inglés is only 68 miles long, wending its way south through Winchester to Southampton past occasional scallop shell markers. The idea is that you walk this and can then get away with a shorter walk in Spain (from A Coruña) and still be eligible for a certificate. Reading's taking this honour very seriously, thus in the Museum you can pick up an official pilgrim's passport (£6) and get it stamped, and also buy the official A-Z guide to the St James's Way with all the maps you need. Explanatory leaflet here.
4) Riverside Museum
From April to September Reading Museum has an additional outpost half a mile down the river Kennet in former industrial buildings adjacent to Blake's Lock. You get there through the Abbey Gardens, along Oscar Wilde Walk and past the site of the former Huntley & Palmers factory (now inevitably flats). But it's not big, nor indeed generally staffed. One half of the 'museum' is inside the Screen House, most of which is occupied by a brightly painted gypsy caravan, the shelves opposite displaying objects including a medieval millwheel and a copy of Fly Fishing by JR Hartley. The Turbine House overlooks the weir and all you'll normally see there is old machinery, plus during certain summer months a display of local paintings. The artist was on the phone during my entire visit, which was convenient because she never got the chance to ask "do you like them?" and I never had to lie.
5) The Museum of English Rural Life
Otherwise known as MERL, this outpost of the University of Reading is a fifteen minute walk from the town centre and also brilliant. It was founded in 1951 as part of the university's association with agriculture and most recently expanded into ten new galleries that truly display the collection to best effect. The entrance merely looks like a nice cafe but then you set off on a lengthy weaving route to the far end and back, the opening displays all thematically linked to the seasons. Yes that is a sheep wearing a white Arran jumper. It's all very much object-led and wisely displayed against gleaming white walls with just enough information, plus a few well-chosen video interactives (I proved woefully incapable of birthing lambs).
You might thus see horse brasses, ploughs, milk bottle advertising, a case of toy tractors, butter churns, a bowl-turning wood lathe, a waxed jacket, a display of Suttons seed packets, two dozen mouse traps, a recipe book published by the Cheese Information Service, a rural fire engine and an ITV poster announcing the return of Emmerdale Farm. I lingered long. One of the highlights is a massive textile panel originally displayed in in the Country Pavilion at the Festival of Britain, this one depicting the fields of Cheshire (but sometimes they swap it for Kent). Wagon Walk is a 50m-long array of wagons and carts grouped geographically so that you can see how different geologies and farming types affected vehicle design.
But I was perhaps most excited by the promise of heading upstairs to visit The Ladybird Gallery, "the only permanent exhibition space in the world dedicated to the art of the iconic Ladybird Books". However what I actually found at the end of the corridor was a small landing with just two display cases, one a temporary exhibition (now hamster-related) and the other a selection of favourite titles. "I had that!" I said at least ten times, then wandered over to see if I could find it in the reading corner. The archive collection comprises 20,000 original artworks, for example "Here is the draper's shop" and "Carried to the Moon by Swans" and it's a real shame they didn't make room to show more of them. Nevertheless MERL is a real treasure, and I'd never have spotted it was here were it not for the Bayeux Tapestry down the road.
Also the Kennet and Avon Canal (heavily transformed hereabouts into to a restaurant heavy leisure park), also The Hexagon (a concrete bunker formerly full of snooker), also Reading Library (which has just moved to the council offices), also the HQ of Thames Water (somewhere to boo and hiss), also the River Thames (with scenic bridges and waterside meadows), also a heck of a lot of top shops (which is all most people come for), and basically what I'm saying is that Reading is a day trip screaming to be made.
