Reading Audio Tour: Biscuit Town

Reading made things the world wanted and the world rarely thought about who made them. This tour walks the working heart of the town — the stretch of King's Road and the Kennet where five thousand hands mixed dough, painted tins and stoked ovens at the world's largest biscuit factory, where draymen rolled barrels from the Bridge Street brewery into the Oracle's footprint, where seed-packet sorters worked through the night at the Market Place to meet the next morning's post, where a navvy named Henry West was killed by a gust of wind on a station roof six days before the trains began to run, and where the last abbot of Reading Abbey was hanged at his own gatehouse for high treason. Heritage Open Days' theme is Everyday Histories — the working women dismissed without reason in the winter of industrial unrest, the tin-printing apprentice who made the biscuit tin a national institution, the canal lock-keeper on the Kennet, the brewery worker who became a soldier without changing his employer. This is a walk through the places where Reading's name was built, mostly by people whose names were not put on anything.