Theale, Berkshire
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Theale is a large village and civil parish in the English county of Berkshire. The village has many of the attributes of a small town, with a high street lined with shops, pubs and restaurants. The name Theale is pronounced to rhyme with peel.
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[edit] Location
Theale is located at grid reference SU644713, five miles west of the centre of the large town of Reading, and is separated from the suburbs of that town by the M4 motorway. The town is located on the old Bath Road, which crosses the motorway here at junction 12 (Reading West). Theale railway station is near the centre of the village and is served by local services from Reading to Newbury and Great Bedwyn.
[edit] Development
Theale owes much of its past and present prosperity to its good road communications links. In the pre-railway era, the village was an important staging post on the old Bath Road, as witnessed by the number of old pubs to be found on its High Street, and the former brewery that served them. One local legend claims that Theale got its name, "The Ale" from when it was the first staging post out of London along the Bath Road. Another claims that the village once held the record for having the most Public Houses in the smallest area - and indeed at one time the village was home to at least nine (The Bull (formerly The Wheel of Fortune), The Falcon, The Angel (now gone, once on the site of the old United Reform Church chapel, now itself replaced by flats), The Crown, The Red Lion, The Lamb, The Volunteer, The Railway Arms (now gone, once opposite the station car park) and The Thatcher's Arms). Most likely neither story is true. The name possibly derives from an original meaning of "crossing over water".
Today the proximity of Reading and the motorway junction has attracted a number of distribution companies and offices; to the south of the village centre, Arlington Business Park is a large modern office campus which is home to the headquarters of Wolseley, which is one of the largest building equipment distributors in the world. The same advantages have brought significant amounts of new housing to the village.
The motorway has had another influence on Theale, in that the land it sterilises provides an effective and obvious psychological boundary between the village and the suburbs of Reading.
[edit] Government
Theale is a civil parish with an elected parish council. The civil parish formerly stretched further to the east, but in 2000 that part that was to the east of the M4 motorway was split off to become Holybrook parish. Theale parish falls within the area of the unitary authority of West Berkshire and both the parish council and the unitary authority are responsible for different aspects of local government. Historically, Theale was part of the parish of Tilehurst.
Theale falls within the Reading West parliamentary constituency.
[edit] Culture
- Theale featured in the film The Borrowers. The Old Brewery was used during the scenes when the two borrower children escape from their home.
- The village High Street was also used to film sequences for the 2004 film The Lazarus Child [1].
- Singer-songwriter John Martyn's highly influential 1977 album One World was recorded across a lake of a house in Theale.[2]
[edit] Sport
Theale's main sporting successes come from local side Theale Tigers who run, among others, football and basketball teams for boys and girls aged 5 to 18. The Theale teams are generally very successful in their relative age groups, and have thereby become renowned throughout the area, particularly their football sides.
[edit] External links
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- Mapping from Multimap or GlobalGuide or Google Maps
- Aerial image from TerraServer
- Satellite image from WikiMapia
