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| The
history of Newbury – a tale of corn, wool, horses
and phones. |
| British, Celts, Romans and Saxons had all
farmed the Kennet Valley before a Norman knight hit on
the idea of starting a town at Newbury. |
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| It would doubtless have happened sooner
or later. The busy river crossing was a day’s ride
from the ancient cities of Oxford, Winchester, Salisbury
and Wallingford – a perfect stopover. |
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| Back then, crossing the valley was a treacherous
affair for most of the year. The meandering riverbed was
thick with reeds, and the woods were almost impenetrable
from Thatcham to Marlborough. |
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Fortunately, the Romans had built a
road – now the B4000 – to improve trade
with London, and conquer the Welsh. Roadside settlements
sprang up, and a military outpost was set up at Speen
– though it crossed the Kennet at Thatcham. |
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| No sooner had the Roman empire started
to disintegrate than foreign mercenaries were called in
by native chiefs. As the economy collapsed, the Saxons
were offered land instead of money. Whether massacred,
subjugated, or intermarried, the Celts were soon dispossessed,
and Berkshire became part of Wessex – and run by
Germans. |
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The Kennet Valley remained a backwater,
but still had to see off raiding Danes in the 10th century,
before the Norman warriors – their army stuffed
with German mercenaries – landed at Hastings,
smashed the English army, and took his army marauding
through Newbury to Wallingford. Ten weeks after landing,
he was made king. |
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| Backwater
to boomtown |
| William the Conqueror rewarded victory
by granting land to all his soldiers, and one of his bravest
and most powerful knights, Ernulf de Hesdin, was given
48 settlements, including the hamlet of Ulvritone by the
nutrient-rich river Kennet. |
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| In the 1070s, Ernulf’s local officials
divided up narrow plots on either side of the road crossing
the river – now Northbrook Street – and rented
them to craftsmen and traders. The ‘new burgh’
was a roaring success. In 20 years, more than 50 plots
were taken up and the population reached 250. Two watermills
sprang up at West Mills to grind corn and finish cloth,
and a church was built. |
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| Ernulf grew richer on the back of Newbury’s
success, but carried on living in Gloucester. He gave
most of the rents to the monks of St Peter in Caen, and
died in 1095. |
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| Over the next 100 years, Ernulf’s
descendants were delighted as Newbury doubled in size
to become one of the top 20 towns in the country. However,
this importance ensured the town became a pawn in the
power struggles of the Middle Ages. |
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By 1152, the war of succession between
King Stephen and his half-sister Matilda saw Stephen
embark on a five month siege of Newbury Castle, held
by John Marshall. Victorian rumours placed this castle
on the Wharf, but it is now thought to have been a timber
keep at Hamstead Marshall. |
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| Newbury remained attractive, and Augustinian
monks set up on the old road to Winchester at Sandleford
Priory. After returning from the crusades, warrior monks
were given land and property where the police station
now stands. Finally, a hospital for the sick and elderly
of the town was set up by the ailing King John, on the
corner of Newtown Road and Pound Street. |
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| Prosperity
and plague |
The most powerful man of the day was
William Marshall, who saw off a French invasion of England,
and kept everything running while Henry III grew up.
He also owned prosperous Newbury, which held markets
twice a week, seasonal fairs, and sat on a busy toll
road. |
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| Through the 13th century, improvements
were made to the river flow, trade was organised by merchants’
guilds, and a new road was built through Speen, connecting
London and Bristol. Cloth and wool sales had made Newbury
the richest town in Berkshire, which was the fifth richest
county in England. |
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| But in 1349 the plague struck in Berkshire,
and the town’s standing crashed. Almost 30% of the
town’s wealth vanished, as periodic outbreaks of
Black Death crippled the economy. |
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| Recovery was slow, although there is evidence
of a landgrab by astute nobles. Donnington Castle was
built in 1389 for a medieval squire, but Newbury’s
main advantage lay in its role as a stopover. The road
through Donnington, Newbury and Greenham was packed with
sheep farmers, pilgrims, travelling artisans, and carts
laden with imported wine going to Oxford. Taverns and
inns grew popular. |
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| Rebels,
royalty, and recession |
| Over the next three centuries, Newbury
became a hotbed for anti-establishment views, starting
in 1460 when the town leaders declared for the Yorkist
rebels in the War of the Roses. The Lancastrian force
soon arrived, looted the shops and hanged the ringleaders. |
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| In 1483, local barons gathered in Newbury
to stage a coup – led by the Duke of Buckingham
– to overthrow Richard III, but were swiftly dealt
with. As Buckingham’s men deserted, he fled to Salisbury,
where he was beheaded. In 1490, Newbury clothworker Thomas
Tyler was arrested for challenging church beliefs. |
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| When Henry VII took the crown in 1485,
the country was in bad shape from decades of petty wars.
However, one of the few healthy markets was textiles –
and Berkshire wool was noted for its quality. Newbury
was poised to weave its way back into the record books. |
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| Newbury remained cushioned from recession,
and large numbers of men arrived from across the south
to seek work. One of these was John Smallwood –
later Jack of Newbury – a boy from the Gloucestershire
village of Winchcombe. After securing work on the looms,
his boss died, so he married his widow, and turned the
cottage industry into a huge export market – building
the world’s first factory in Northbrook Street. |
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As one of the richest men in England,
‘Jack of Newbury’ grew friendly with Henry
VIII, and paid for a new stone church for the 3,000
Tudor townsfolk. Trade embargoes were lifted, opening
up other European markets, and still more labourers
arrived in Newbury to train as weavers. |
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| Radicals emerged again in 1556, when three
protestant martyrs were burned at the stake by Catholic
officials of Queen Mary. Newbury was used to royal visits,
and in 1568 Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, was greeted by
ringing bells, though rumour says she had come to secretly
give birth to an illegitimate son at Hamstead Marshall. |
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| On a return visit in 1596, a charter with
new rules for governing the town was approved, creating
officials who would supervise the town from the Guildhall
in the Market Place. This degree of autonomy would help
the town make quick decisions. |
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| By 1625, Newbury’s boom years were
over, and almshouses and charities were set up to cater
for the growing band of impoverished weavers. Unsurprisingly
then, Charles I’s demands for war taxes did not
go down well, and Newbury’s merchants joined the
growing band calling for Parliament to intervene. |
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| War
on our doorstep |
| When the civil war broke out, Charles had
the upper hand initially. Returning from a mauling in
the west country in autumn 1643, the main roundhead army
was tired and hungry as it approached the friendly town
of Newbury – where food, horses and hospitality
awaited. But Charles’ cavalry arrived first, happily
seized the supplies, and formed a line from Wash Common
to Speen. |
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The stakes were huge. If Parliament
was defeated, the King could capture London and win
the war. Both armies numbered 14,000, and slugged it
out for 12 hours, until both sides were exhausted, and
barely had half their forces intact. Parliament had
used every available man and was almost beaten. But
the king was alarmed at his own losses and withdrew
to Oxford in the night, leaving the roundheads to escape. |
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| A year later, the tables were turned. Charles
had garrisoned friendly towns and besieged hostile cities,
leaving him with few troops to defend his base at Oxford.
Conversely, Parliament had trained up new soldiers in
London. As Charles returned from victories in the west
country, he stopped at Newbury to relieve the garrison
at Donnington Castle. Parliament assumed Charles intended
to capture London, and positioned 19,000 men at Thatcham,
against the King’s 9,000. |
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Charles was in a good position, with
the town on his right and castle on his left, but a
traitor gave away his weak numbers, and the young general
Oliver Cromwell was ordered to flank the royalists via
Stockcross. But Parliament, with no overall commander,
struggled to co-ordinate a battle they should have won,
while the King’s men fought well on two fronts.
Once again in the night – the king left his guns
and supplies at Donnington Castle – which had
been half-demolished by Parliamentary guns, and fled
to Oxford. The two sides briefly squared up a month
later at Speenhamland, before retiring to Oxford and
London for the winter. |
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| After 20 years of war, Britain and Newbury
greeted the restoration of the monarchy with enthusiasm.
In 1663, Charles II visited the two battlefields, and
Newbury’s clothing guilds put on a parade. Two years
later, plague gripped the town – at night a horn
was sounded as the wagons of bodies were taken to the
open graves on the downs. |
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| Sackcloth
and coaches |
| The 18th century brought happier times,
helped by Bath’s emergence as Britain’s first
tourist resort. In 1720, the A4 was turned into a toll
road to keep it in good shape, cutting the journey time
to two days. |
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| The number of inns trebled to 27, and cock-fighting,
wrestling and horseracing all provided the bewigged gentry
with gambling opportunities. The rising industrialists
from London began building country retreats in the surrounding
countryside, and in 1740, work began to make the river
Kennet navigable for barges. |
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| This made sure Newbury was not just a stopover
for partying aristocrats. Theatre impresario Henry Thornton
changed all that in 1788, when he set up the town’s
first permanent theatre Northcroft Lane – a squalid
area of rat-infested warehouses, rough pubs and itinerant
labourers. |
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| Theatres were illegal until 1788, so the
venue – on the site of Temperance Hall – was
makeshift, but in 1802 he moved to the new Gilders theatre,
where the Job Centre now stands. |
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| Meanwhile, cargo from London had had to
transfer from boats to wagons at Reading, but after 1760
Newbury was made the last stop, bringing in food and drink
for London’s growing population, and spices, tea
and coffee for Newbury and the west country. Elsewhere,
the first town hall was built in 1742, and in 1772, the
wooden bridge in Northbrook Street was replaced by the
stone one still in use today. |
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By now, the cloth industry had moved
to Yorkshire and Lancashire, and Newbury was only making
sackcloth and ship sails, and periodic riots over food
prices confirm that life was still hard for many, despite
the tourism boost. In 1795, reforms agreed at a pub
in Speenhamland – linking the price of bread to
wages – failed to resolve the problem. |
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| Riots
and sobering reforms |
Local horsemen raised to see off an
expected French invasion spent most of their time quelling
riots in Newbury, Thatcham and Highclere. The Kennet
was turned into a canal in 1810, and granary barns sprang
up at the Wharf and West Mills. |
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| Still, the unrest brought Grenadier Guards
to Newbury in 1830 to round up farm labourers from Kintbury,
rioting against the introduction of new machinery. National
reforms in 1834 saw a workhouse built to house the poor
at Sandleford. |
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| The railway arrived in 1847, providing
fast transport to London, heralding a period of prolific
housebuilding in East Fields, as the jobless farm workers
arrived in droves, looking for work in the shops, the
new Plenty lifeboat factory, or in domestic service. A
thriving brush-making industry grew up. |
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| Social reformers and benefactors built
schools, a hospital, and ordered the clearance of slums
in the ‘City’ – now the St Johns roundabout
area – amid concern that Newbury was sinking into
drunken decay. |
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| By the late 19th century, the town had
75 pubs – one for every 90 people – so the
teetotal Temperance movement set up a series of coffee
shops, and lobbied magistrates to shut down as many pubs
as possible. Today there are 26. |
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Suburbs
and shopping |
| As the 20th century dawned, the new middle
class built elegant town houses further away from the
squalid town centre, and the suburb was born. More infrastructure
was put in place – a library, a racecourse, a new
town hall, new sewers – while clubs and societies
were established. Newbury Show began in 1909. |
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| Race day brought hundreds of visitors roaring
through the town in their motor cars, forcing the Queen
Victoria statue to be moved from the Market Place. Wealthy
landowners would have decorated their house at Alfred
Camps shop, perhaps buying a piano from Alfonso Cary’s,
or snapping up miracle tonics from self-styled chemists. |
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| As with all other English towns, the two
world wars took their toll, but Newbury had a special
place thanks to the requisitioning of airfields at Greenham,
Welford and Aldermaston in 1940. The American decision
to join the war against Hitler brought thousands of soldiers
and airmen into the town. Elliott’s furniture factory
began making thousands of glider planes as the allies
planned the massive D-Day assault on occupied France. |
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| Missiles
and mobiles |
| The town’s battles carried on after
VE day, when plans to flood Enborne to create a reservoir
for London were defeated. As air travel became popular,
the government nearly chose RAF Greenham instead of Gatwick
for a major airport. Newbury also turned down a chance
to become a ‘new town’ to take London’s
overspill population – a request which Swindon and
Basingstoke both accepted. |
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| In 1972, the motorway opened belatedly,
and it suddenly became a lot easier to reach many places
in an hour’s drive from Newbury. Commuting to London
became easier, bringing wealth and business skills to
the town, and laying the foundations for a boom in technical
excellence. |
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| Just as this was taking off, the government
announced it would store an arsenal of 96 nuclear missiles
at RAF Greenham. The Americans arrived to garrison the
high-security airbase, accompanied by thousands of peace
activists, in an issue which divided the town. Forty thousand
peace women ringed the camp, putting Greenham at the heart
of the Cold War in the 1980s. |
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| When the Cold War ended in 1993, the town
split once more over the issue of how to address Newbury’s
worsening traffic problems. A proposed bypass to alleviate
the constant jams would have to pass through the two civil
war battlefields, and some of Britain’s most heavily
protected countryside. |
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| Hundreds of environmental campaigners arrived,
setting up blockade camps along the eight mile route,
and adding £25 million to the bill for the road,
which opened in 1998. |
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| Ironically, one of the technologies used
by the protesters was the mobile phone, which was pioneered
in Newbury. Vodafone set up in Newbury in the early 1980s,
and the first mobile phone call in the UK was made in
1985 between Newbury and London. Today, it is the biggest
employer with 4,000 employees in the town – at a
new £120 million headquarters on the edge of town. |
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| Massive growth and migration into Newbury
on the back of the technological revolution is seeing
the town evolve from a rural market town into a more sophisticated
centre for business and culture, which Ernulf de Hesdin
would hardly recognise. |
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