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Reading Leasing

Did You Know?

It's comforting to know that people in Reading are well catered for in the extremely unlikely event of nuclear war. The university's Whiteknights campus is home to the Region 6 War Room, which was built during the Cold War. It has room for 50 people and was built to protect the Regional Commissioner and around 50 of his staff during a nuclear attack.

Tilehurst is a pleasant suburb of Reading with a strong community but quite how Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna found himself living there is another story. But the prodigiously talented Brazilian did find himself living in a rented detached house in Chelsea Close in the 1980s. It was in the early stages of his career and he lived with friends in the road.

Believe it or not, the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso has a strong connection to the popular Indian restaurant the Standard Tandoori. He has visited the long-running restaurant on a number of occasions and even met former Reading East MP Rob Wilson to discuss the Tibet situation in 2008.

The year was 1006, and the Danish army - a big, scary band of marauding Vikings - were smashing their way through Hampshire and Berkshire. Eventually the Vikings were paid a very large sum of money by the King to go back to Denmark, but Reading was one of a number of towns that lay smouldering.

It lies on the River Kennet where it joins the Thames. Reading was a Danish encampment as early as 871. Between the 12th and 16th centuries it was dominated by a struggle for privileges between the abbey and the emergent merchants' guild.

The pronunciation of Reading as 'Red-ing' provides a clue to its Saxon origins. Historians believe its name links to a group or tribe of early Saxons, the Rēadingas in Old English, who settled here in the 500s AD. So, it probably means 'Reada's people'. It has been suggested the name Reada means 'the red one'.

The first evidence for Reading as a settlement dates from the 8th century, where the town came to be known as Readingum. The name comes from the Readingas, an Anglo-Saxon tribe whose name means "Reada's People" in Old English

Reading is well known for the 3 Bs – beer, bricks and biscuits, which laid the foundation for its role in the industrial revolution. In the 19th century, Huntley and Palmer’s biscuit factory was the largest in the world and even provided specially made emergency biscuits to the ill-fated British Antarctic Expedition to the South Pole, led by Captain Scott in 1911.

Did you know that Reading was considered a safe town during WW2 and deemed ‘unlikely to be bombed’? Many children from London were evacuated to the town early in the war to try to safeguard them from harm. Unfortunately, although our losses were minimal in comparison with other areas.

The University of Reading was founded in the 19th century as an extension of the college of the University of Oxford and is now ranked within the top 200 universities in the world. Remarkably, the first female university professor in Britain, Edith Morley.