Biscuits and Hi-Techs and fab shopping, oh my! (Reading in General)

Member Name: archfiend

Product:	Reading in General
Date:	12/01/01 (86 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: swans, great transport, good shopping

Disadvantages: Atrocious traffic

Both the best and worst thing to be said about Reading is that "it's very convenient." And there's the rock Festival!

It almost beggars belief that any town (oops, missed out on the millenium list to be renamed as a city -- better luck next time) should be this convenient in terms of transport. The trains from Reading into Paddington take about 30 mins and leave at a rate of about 4 per hour late into the evening. An airbus shuttles between the station and Heathrow Airport every 30 mins. Trains run through directly to Gatwick airport (a bit slower, but also cheaper.)

For drivers, it's also handily placed for the M4 and M40.

It's the transport links, as much as anything, that have turned Reading into such a boom town over the last few years. The town has become popular with businesses for the easy airport/London access and popular with employees for the relatively cheap housing (compared with London prices). And it's booming in a big way. Especially among high tech companies (I guess venture capitalists approve of it), although the Prudential still seems to own vast quantities of office space.

The city centre has been transformed since the opening of the Oracle Shopping Centre (shurely no link with the humungous database company which seems to own the half of the trackside real-estate on the run in to the station that isn't owned by Thames Water or Micro$oft ...)

Crime is relatively rare compared to London and I've felt safe walking around town after midnight, but as with all places, there are areas you would do better to avoid (parts of East Reading, mainly.)

It was always a fairly compact shopping centre, well served by pedestrianised roads (ie. Broad Street), department stores, and a few smaller shopping arcades, and that hasn't changed.

But The Oracle includes a 10-screen warner village cinema and various new restaurants on the banks of the (massively renova
ted) canals and it has acted like an injection of adrenaline into the already healthy city centre. The most recent development is that pretty much any coffee shop you've ever heard of has just opened a branch on Broad Street (except for Starbucks, which is a shame because I like their eggnog coffee.)

Shopping in Reading is about as good as you'll get outside London, and it's also something of a regional centre for shoppers around Berkshire. Expect it to be very busy on weekends (duh.)

It's all starting to get very generic, which is a shame in some respects. But the town hall still has a quiet little coffee shop which runs a bar in the evening and offers live music on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so it's not all doom and gloom. Also, although not really a brilliant place for restaurants, there are some decent places, often a little away from the main streets.

The traffic situation in the town centre is, however, absolutely atrocious. If anyone is planning on driving in to shop, I'd recommend using one of the park-and-ride carparks out of town and catching the bus in.

I'll add a few words about the Reading Festival (there are other good music festivals held here too, such as WOMAD -- world music -- but the rock festival is the biggie.) The Festival site is a short way out of town, but do expect to see haggard, unwashed festival goers with huge rucksacks hanging around Sainsburys in town at all hours that weekend, and the station is definitely to be avoided. Having said all that, the festival is a lot of fun to attend if there are enough bands playing that you like -- especially because you can go home at night to somewhere where a warm bed and hot shower awaits!

(Ah, you say, but she hasn't mentioned the biscuits yet. What's with that?)

In the pre-hitech days, the town had two major industries. Huntly & Palmer biscuits, and Suttons Seeds. Expect to see signs of this all over the place
, from the name of Palmer's Park (an actual park) and Suttons Business Park (a business estate and not a park at all), to the way that the Museum of Reading has a permanent exhibition of old bisciut tins -- be still my beating heart.

If you don't mind venturing a bit out of town, there is some beautiful countryside and pretty local villages to visit. The Thames around Reading is less polluted than it gets downstream, and there is a LOT of local wildfowl.

Warning: Swans are big nasty mean bastards in the flesh, so treat them with respect (especially when a load of them decide to take over the tow path -- it happens.) I've also seen a lot of coots, mallards, and grebes. They all nest along the river and the chances are that you'll see them swimming around with their babies in the summer if you walk that way.

And now (she says in the tone of Tony Hart introducing the Gallery in Vision-On), here are some handy links:

(Hold me down, it has it's own website!)
http://www.oracle-shopping.co.uk/

http://www.reading-guide.co.uk/

(Warning. They use a lot of Flash on this site.)
http://www.readingfestival.com

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