Things to do in Reading

Landmark · Town centre, behind the Forbury

The remains of the abbey Henry I founded in 1121 and was buried in, beside a Victorian public garden with an enormous cast-iron lion in the middle of it.

Local tip: The oldest known song in the English language, 'Sumer Is Icumen In', was written down here in the thirteenth century. The abbey ruins were conserved and reopened to the public in 2018 after years behind hoardings. The Maiwand Lion in the Forbury commemorates an Afghan campaign of 1880 and is, according to a persistent local legend, anatomically wrong — which is the first thing anyone from Reading will tell you about it.

Neighborhood · North of the river, over Caversham Bridge

A village-feeling suburb on the far bank with its own high street, boathouses along the Thames, and a walk out to the meadows at Mapledurham.

Local tip: Caversham was in Oxfordshire until 1911 and has never quite conceded the point. Walk east along the Thames from Caversham Bridge to View Island and Caversham Lock — it is ten minutes from the town centre and feels like open country. The Thames path in both directions is the single most underrated thing about living in Reading.

Culture · Town centre, along the Kennet

The riverside shopping centre built in 1999 over the Kennet, with the water, the bars and the restaurants at its lower level and the town's main shopping above.

Local tip: It is named after the Oracle workhouse, endowed by the clothier John Kendrick in 1628 on roughly this site — nothing to do with the software company, whose Reading operation is a couple of miles away. The riverside terrace is where the town eats in summer; the Kennet itself was the canal that made Reading a trading town long before the railway did.

Landmark · Beside the Abbey ruins, off Forbury Road

The Victorian prison where Oscar Wilde served two years' hard labour from 1895, and where he wrote the letter that became De Profundis. It closed in 2013.

Local tip: Banksy stencilled an escaping prisoner with a typewriter on the outside wall in March 2021 in support of the campaign to turn the building into an arts centre. The campaign lost: the Ministry of Justice rejected Reading Borough Council's £2.6m bid and sold the site to the Ziran Education Foundation for £7m in January 2024, whose owner has talked about a hotel and gallery. It is closed to the public — you look at the wall, not inside.

Nature · A mile and a half south-east of the town centre

A 130-hectare university parkland with a lake, ancient woodland and a herbarium, and next to it one of the strangest and best small museums in England.

Local tip: Whiteknights is a public park as well as a campus, and most of Reading has no idea how good it is. The Museum of English Rural Life on Redlands Road is free, genuinely excellent, and runs the funniest museum social media account in Britain — go for the giant wheel, stay for the wagon collection.

Nightlife · Richfield Avenue, by the Thames, ten minutes' walk from the station

One of the oldest popular music festivals in the world, held on the meadows beside the Thames every August bank holiday since 1971.

Local tip: It happens in the middle of the town, not in a field somewhere — which means the last weekend of August is unlike any other week in Reading, the station is chaos, and half the population either works it, avoids it or has a spare room let out for it. Decide which of those you are before you plan the bank holiday.