Yes, We Do Still Miss You

Some of our neighbours actually used to have Berkshire addresses – and we’d always welcome that back, says Sue Bromley. Meanwhile, visiting is easy

All kinds of nonsense went on in the 1970s, and we’re not talking about orange and brown sofas, strikes and The Three Day Week, or Slade being the Christmas No1 on and on and on. No, a better musical choice might be the 1974 chart-topper ‘When Will I See You Again’ by the Three Degrees, not only because the lovely Sheila Ferguson used to live at Bray, but because that was the year a whole chunk of our county was shovelled into Oxfordshire.

Now, if a place lies between the Berkshire Downs and the Thames, you’d expect it to be in… Berkshire. It’s the rural landscape with historic towns and villages, ancient battle sites, The Old Berkshire Hunt plus the point-to-point and Pony Club, and the first home of The Berkshire Yeomanry. Lockinge we miss you, and the same goes for Faringdon, once Berkshire’s most westerly town.

If that’s not enough, the clincher must surely be that poet Pam Ayres MBE was born at Stanford-in-the-Vale, definitely then in our county. She may now live in the Cotwolds, but Pam is Berkshire through and through. But back to 1974 when The Local Government Act was implemented, resulting in places up and down the country shifting borders, some even being re-named. For us this meant waving farewell to the likes of Abingdon and Wantage and the villages of The Vale of the White Horse (plus the Uffington chalk horse itself, still a cause of discontent). When all this was proposed the then MP for Newbury tried to halt it and campaigns continue to move the horse back into what was historically Alfred the Great’s powerful land of Wessex, rather than Mercia where it’s ended up.