Quotations about Reading

Any traveller by road in France will be familiar with the first encounter with a new town. On approaching, the visitor is confronted by a sign stating the name of the place, of course, but also the peculiar French expression celebrating the town’s claims to fame: “ses eaux, son chateau”, and so on. The waters, the castle, belong to the town; they are a sign of its identity, and however small the place, it is something to be proud of.

Any town or city needs an identity, and fortunately Reading has some assets here, all sadly lacking in Cambridge. Cambridge probably has a hundred times more visitors than Reading, but few people would be able to state what is distinctive about Cambridge (as opposed to Cambridge University, a very different beast).  You can discover things about Reading at the excellent Reading Museum. Moreover, Reading has its own publisher, a local publisher in the best sense. The Two Rivers Press was founded 1994 by Peter Hay, and since his death in 2003 continues to provide local books in the best sense: informative, quirky, and elegant. They have over 70 books in their catalogue.  The volume in front of me, A Much Maligned Town (1997, second edition 2008), is a charming little book of quotations by travellers about Reading, with woodcuts by Peter Hay himself.  

Quotations about places are a mixed bag. There are of course the curmudgeons who see nothing good in any place they visit – Tobias Smollett is the classic example – and some who sprinkle their praise without regard. Much more interesting for a place like Reading, where fewer people feel obliged to say something about the place they visit (unlike Cambridge), is to dig around and to find some genuine insights into the place.

So, a few examples:

A town of negations that Reading is – no tree – no flowers – no green fields – no wit - no literature – no elegance! Neither the society of London nor the freedom of the country.Mary Russell Mitford, letters, 1813-20 

We came to Reading prepared for anything but charm in that town of biscuits, and we were not inclined to alter our ready-made opinion upon sight of it.Charles G. Harper, 1884 

Very little remains of the old town remains and the new commercial buildings are depressing when they are not actually unpleasant to the eye … It’s not too much to say that Reading serves a compendium of what to avoid.Country Life, 1909 

It is astonishing that so little of the Reading known to history should have survived into our own time. Prosperity swamped it in brick, decorated it with the ephemeral gaudiness of advertisements, and there is hardly enough of the old town left to prove its existence before the nineteenth century.F V Morley, 1926 

Reading is a town struggling to be a city.unattributed, presumably by Adam Sowan, the editor.

The majority of the quotes are negative; I don’t think it is the fault of the book that none of them quite capture some of the quirky appeal of Reading: the decayed but spectacular terraced houses, the proud front of the Royal Berks Hospital, ignored by all the traffic passing in front of it, and the sweet lampstand cum monument by John Soane in the centre of Market Place (the subject of another book from Two Rivers Press). But one visitor, Mary Atkinson, 1973, noticed “the startling war memorial in the form of an enormous lion, over seventeen feet long and sixteen tons in weight, portrayed in the act, apparently, of taking a comfortable stroll with its front legs while running with its back ones”. That seems to capture the peculiar charm of Reading.