Qualla: Newbury, Berkshire

Newbury, Berkshire: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.0. On 1 April 1983, around forty thousand women linked hands around a nine-mile perimeter fence in West Berkshire. They were encircling RAF Greenham Common, the airbase that had just been equipped with American ground-launched nuclear cruise missiles. The Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp had been there since 1981. They would stay until the year 2000. Just over the boundary fence, on the edge of the market town of Newbury, was a town that had been arguing about who passes through it for most of a thousand years. Two English Civil War battles. The Speenhamland Poor Relief System. The London-to-Bath coaching trade. Vodafone. Newbury has spent a millennium being a place where things happen and other things go through.

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Image: CC BY-SA 2.0

Newbury, Berkshire: The New Borough

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Nicholls, CC BY-SA 2.0. Newbury was a deliberate creation. After the Norman Conquest, when most English manors lost value, the manor of Ulvritone in the Kennet valley suddenly multiplied in worth, and a new borough appeared with the name to match: Newbury, the new burh. The Domesday Book of 1086 records...

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Image: Bill Nicholls | CC BY-SA 2.0

Newbury, Berkshire: Two Battles in Wash Common

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Judem12, CC BY-SA 4.0. The English Civil War made Newbury famous in a way no market town would have wished. The First Battle of Newbury was fought at Wash Common on 20 September 1643 between the Earl of Essex's Parliamentarians and King Charles I's Royalists. It was confused, exhausting, and inconclusi...

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Image: Judem12 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Newbury, Berkshire: Coaches, Canals, and the Speenhamland System

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RacingKel, CC BY 2.0. Eighteenth-century Newbury rose again as the perfect halfway stop on the two-day coach journey from London to Bath. The Speenhamland area on the north edge of town filled with coaching inns of competitive grandeur. The George & Pelican advertised stabling for three hundred horses...

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Image: RacingKel | CC BY 2.0

Newbury, Berkshire: The 1943 Bombing

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pam Brophy, CC BY-SA 2.0. At 4:43 in the afternoon on 10 February 1943, a single Dornier Do 217 of the Luftwaffe's KG40 unit, on a nuisance raid from Holland, followed the railway line west from London and dropped eight high-explosive bombs on Newbury without warning. The Senior Council School was destroy...

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Image: Pam Brophy | CC BY-SA 2.0

Newbury, Berkshire: Greenham, and After

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Neil Thompson, CC BY-SA 2.0. After the war, the airfield at Greenham Common became one of the United States Air Force's main bases in Britain, with the longest military runway in the United Kingdom. In 1979 NATO agreed to base ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe, and Greenham was one of two British sit...

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Image: Neil Thompson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Newbury, Berkshire: Modern Newbury

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tom Bastin from Reading, UK, CC BY 2.0. Newbury came back into prosperity in the 1980s when the British electronics firm Racal located its new telecommunications company in the town. That company became Vodafone. The £129 million Vodafone headquarters opened on the outskirts in 2002, employing more than six thousand wo...

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Image: Tom Bastin from Reading, UK | CC BY 2.0