Burghfield, Berkshire, England

First hand knowledge of Burghfield was collected by Julia Fea when she met Tony Orme 'who has lived in Burghfield for several years and is a parish councillor' for the Where I Live section of BBC Berkshire History website*:

"Being only 20 minutes from Reading, Burghfield provides an excellent balance between town and country life. A collection of ancient woodlands, common lands and canal footpaths create a welcome contrast to the hustle and bustle of the urban environment…

'Evidence of Neolithic Man has been found in Burghfield. These people lived about six thousand years ago and they were farmers who migrated from northern France, living a more settled life than the simple hunter-gatherers already living in Britain.

'More unusually, there are also traces of Bronze Age Man, who appeared around 1,500 BC. These people who grew flax for cloth making inhabited a settlement just outside present-day Burghfield. The town itself is thought to be part of a group of parishes existing on a belt of heathland on the edge of what used to be Windsor Forest. They all have names ending in "feld" (meaning open land) but these days written as "field". Other such areas included Bradfield and Shinfield and they acted as a buffer zone in Saxon times between different parts of the county.

'Medieval Burghfield was a small farming community, overshadowed by its larger and richer neighbours like Thatcham and Newbury. Wealth was unevenly distributed in nineteenth-century society and the agricultural revolution saw agricultural workers eclipsed by machinery.

'Burghfield was one of several places in Berkshire where tension broke out in 1830 in what is considered as "the last labourer's revolt".
'The local militia were assisted by the Grenadier Guards in quelling the unrest, which resulted in 138 Berkshire men being tried at courts in Reading and Abingdon. One man, William Winterbourne of Kintbury, was hanged.

'Burghfield has remained a village and is best known for housing one of two Atomic Weapons Establishments, the main site of which lies just outside neighbouring Aldermaston.'

Pevsner† in his 'The Buildings of England: Berkshire' critically considered the church of St Mary, Burghfield•, built in 1843 by J B Clacy, as 'a rather terrible neo-Noman effort'. This replacement Victorian church is more sympathetically described elsewhere‡ as being in 'the most extraordinary Romanesque style, although it appears to have something of the Italian Renaissance about it too. The old building was rather attractive, with a stepped wooden tower.'



* http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/history/burghfield.shtml
†Pevsner, Nikolaus 'The Buildings of England:Berkshire' (1966) Penguin Books, page 107
‡Ford, David Nash 'Royal Berkshire History' (2004) online
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