A Much-Maligned Town - extracts
In the evening I preached at Reading. How many years were we beating the air at this town? Stretching out our hands to a people stupid as oxen! But it is not so at present. That generation is passed away, and their children are of a more excellent spirit.
John Wesley: Journal, 1777

Distant 39 miles from London, and delightfully situated on a general ascent from the Thames, and washed by the Kennet, which flows nearly through the centre in several streams, and falls into the prince of British rivers, about a furlong below the town. The houses are chiefly built of brick, well built, and commodious; and the streets are spaciously and handsomely paved. An air of gentility is thrown over the place; and there is an elegant sociability in the manners of its inhabitants, which is irresistibly attractive to strangers. Hence villas are constantly rising in its vicinity; nor is this to be wondered at, as there is not a country town in the kingdom that unites so many charms and advantages to persons of independent fortune, and cultivated minds.
William Fordyce Mavor: General View of the Agriculture of Berkshire, 1809
The rowing down from Oxford to Reading, on the Thames, is more charming than I can describe in words. I rowed down last June, through miles upon miles of water-lilies, lying on the water close together, like a fairy pavement. But once arrived in Reading the enchantment is gone. A soporific atmosphere takes command, brought about by enervation, which in turn is ordered by the tranquillity of the river as it drains away with it the energies of the people. It is not unlike a blood-letting, and, like that device, probably drains away with it many of the common fluxes of illness, for I never saw fewer people ill or in any way upset.
Charles Dickens: letter to Angela Burdett-Coutts, c1843

During that day and for many days afterwards he talked of nothing but Reading Prison and it had already become for him a sort of enchanted castle of which Major Nelson was the presiding fairy. The hideous machicolated turrets were already turned into minarets, the very warders into benevolent Mamelukes and we ourselves into Paladins welcoming Coeur de Lion after his captivity…
Oscar Wilde in Dieppe, 1897, reported by Robert Ross, quoted in Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, 1979

Very little of the old town remains and the new commercial buildings are depressing when they are not actually unpleasant to the eye. Over the suburbs there has spread a red rash of buildings, mostly compounded of vulgar vagaries. It’s not too much to say that Reading serves as a compendium of what to avoid.
Country Life, 1909

Caversham, just below, is Reading’s well-to-do residential suburb. Reading as a go-ahead industrial town – rather grimly so for the South country – is awful in bits, but why anyone should prefer to live at Caversham I cannot think. A spiritual slum, full of the worst kind of mental squalor. Rows of pretentiously bad houses stand each in too much ground to be neighbourly, and not enough to give privacy. Everywhere, in the more prosperous streets, is the feeling that appearances are being kept up by gallant and unrewarding effort, on money that could give the owners a riotous good time in a genuine Victorian villa, instead of a pseudo-timbered neo-Georgian mansion, for which it is not quite enough. In the smaller roads, behind well-laundered net curtains, women’s lives are sacrificed to the semi-detached gods – keeping one servant contented without enough assistance, and the children from playing with the noisy ones down the road.
E Arnot Robertson: Thames Portrait, 1937

People avoid Reading but even the streets of terracotta shops and houses in the centre of town have a good deal to be said for them when you know them in different lights. A setting sun with a slight evening mist, or a damp day during open weather in February or March gives them an air that separates Reading in character from every other south country town. The washable weather-resisting surface that will hardly change with centuries of wear, changes its look constantly with the different lights of different days, and has plenty of delights to satisfy an unprejudiced eye.
John Piper, c1939, quoted in Piper’s Places, 1983

Reading, Berkshire, where I live (though I am not a Readingensian) is an overcrowded industrial town of, at the time of writing, some hundred and twenty-five thousand people. The building of the M4 motorway has brought London within a possible forty minutes’ fast driving – always assuming you can extricate yourself from the traffic muddles of the town centre and strike the motorway before you are shrivelled to a bunch of frustrations – and this possibility has encouraged a great many industrialists to hive their offices and factories off from London’s great wen and attach them to Reading’s smaller one; so the great and the small will soon be joined by the carcinoma of twentieth-century conurbation. The town is administratively half-baked, artistically null, and, apart from a very few vistas of decrepit but otherwise pleasing eighteenth-century houses, architecturally hideous. (Even that enthusiastic proponent of Victorian design Mr John Betjeman is said to have blenched and asked for a restorative glass on seeing the town hall for the first time.)
Alan Wykes: An Eye on the Thames, 1966