Asser, the Welsh monk who became King Alfred the Great's tutor and biographer, wrote in 893 that Berkshire takes its name from a wood of box trees called Bearroc, somewhere west of Frilsham near Newbury. Bearroc was Celtic, meaning hilly. The wood is gone now, if it ever existed in quite the form Asser described, but the name has stayed. Berkshire is officially the Royal County, a title granted in 1957 because of Windsor Castle, the official country residence of the British monarch. Windsor sits at the east end of the county. The Berkshire Downs roll across the west, with King Alfred's birthplace at Wantage just over the modern county line. Between the two is one of the densest concentrations of technology companies in Europe and the fastest stretch of the Thames Valley.
Berkshire's history runs deep enough to feel mythic. The Uffington White Horse, that great chalk figure carved into the side of the Berkshire Downs, dates from the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age and was historically in Berkshire until the 1974 boundary changes shifted it into Oxfordshire. Alfred the Great's campaign against the Danes was fought across these hills. The battles of Englefield, Ashdown, and Reading all happened in Berkshire, all before he became king. After his coronation he made the county his power base. The Chronicles of Abingdon Abbey, written there during the Middle Ages, record most of what we know about Saxon Berkshire. Abingdon was the county town until 1869, when Reading took over. In 1867 Reading was granted county town status formally, but the rivalry between the two boroughs had been running for centuries. The town of Newbury, in west Berkshire, was the site of two Civil War battles, in 1643 and 1644.
Windsor Castle was begun by William the Conqueror in the eleventh century and has been a residence of every English and British monarch since Henry I. The fire of 1992 destroyed part of the State Apartments and led to a five-year restoration paid for partly by opening Buckingham Palace to public tours. The castle dominates the eastern half of the county, and its presence is the reason the Royal Berkshire title was granted in 1957. The horse-racing calendar Berkshire holds reflects the royal connection. Royal Ascot, held in mid-June, is the most prestigious flat racing meeting in the British calendar. The Ascot Gold Cup runs on Ladies' Day. The King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes runs in late July. Newbury Racecourse hosts the Lockinge Stakes, one of Britain's thirty-two Group One races, and the Ladbrokes Trophy. Windsor Racecourse, one of only two figure-of-eight courses in Britain, races flat from spring through autumn. The downs around Lambourn are the second-largest centre of racehorse training in Britain after Newmarket. Locals call the area the Valley of the Racehorse.
Modern Berkshire is split economically along an east-west line. The east is densely urban and obsessively networked. Reading, the county town, has been a software and IT hub since International Computers Limited and Digital Equipment Corporation opened sites there decades ago. Their successors, Fujitsu and Hewlett Packard, still operate locally, and Microsoft and Oracle have multi-building campuses on the outskirts. Slough holds the global headquarters of Reckitt Benckiser and the British headquarters of Mars and Nintendo. Bracknell is home to the UK headquarters of Honda and BMW, and the Waitrose distribution centre. Newbury contains the world headquarters of Vodafone, which employs more than six thousand people in the town. Maidenhead and Windsor sit between them. The western half of the county, beyond Reading, is rural and quiet. Newbury and Thatcham are the only sizeable settlements west of the M4 ring. The chalk downs roll up to Walbury Hill at 297 metres, the highest point in southern England south-east of the West Country.
On 25 May 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years' hard labour at Reading Gaol for gross indecency under the Labouchere Amendment of 1885. He served the last eighteen months of that sentence in Reading. He wrote De Profundis there as a long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, his lover, which he was not permitted to send and which was only published in censored form after his death. After his release he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which contains the line each man kills the thing he loves. The poem was published in 1898 under the pseudonym C.3.3., his Reading cell number, and was an immediate bestseller. Wilde died in Paris in 1900. The gaol closed in 2013 and was put up for sale by the Ministry of Justice in 2019. The artist Banksy, in 2021, painted a stencil on its outer wall of a prisoner escaping over the prison wall on a rope made of bedsheets and a typewriter as a counterweight. The future of the building is still unresolved.
Berkshire is a ceremonial county and a non-metropolitan one, but it has no county council. Berkshire County Council was abolished in 1998 and the county now has six unitary authorities: Bracknell Forest, Reading, Slough, West Berkshire, Windsor and Maidenhead, and Wokingham. The 2024 general election returned five Labour MPs, three Liberal Democrats, and one Conservative. The population is approaching 920,000, concentrated in the east. The Thames forms the northern boundary along most of its length. The Royal County retains its lord lieutenant and high sheriff. Reading still hopes to become a city formally. Slough has been the butt of an English joke since John Betjeman wrote his 1937 poem, the one beginning come, friendly bombs, and falling on Slough. The town has heard the joke too many times and the joke has not held up well. Reckitt Benckiser and Mars are mostly built right next to the railway line that John Betjeman travelled.
Berkshire centred at approximately 51.42°N, 1.00°W. The county runs east-west between Reading and Slough in the east and the Berkshire Downs in the west. Visual landmarks at altitude include Windsor Castle on its chalk knoll, the curve of the Thames through Maidenhead and Henley, the M4 motorway, the long straight runway at Heathrow just over the eastern border, and the Berkshire Downs with the Uffington White Horse (now Oxfordshire) on their northern scarp. London Heathrow CTR and TMA cover the east of the county at all altitudes. Class G airspace dominates the west. Active GA airfields include EGLF Farnborough 12 nautical miles south of Reading, EGTB Booker (Wycombe Air Park) 12 nautical miles north of Reading, and EGUB Benson 14 nautical miles north-west of Reading.