“A little world of our own,” wrote one Mary Russell Mitford around two centuries ago, about a hamlet called Three Mile Cross in the parish of Shinfield, near Reading in Berkshire. It was, she said in her once-famous book about rural life, Our Village, “close-packed and insulated” like “bees in a hive, or sheep in a fold”. She might struggle to recognise the district now. Some of the “nooks and turns” and “shady lanes and sunny commons” that she described are still there, but so too are junction 11 of the M4, the Thames Valley Science Park (phase II), an expanse of mud awaiting a new supermarket, and the construction sites on which thousands of new homes, directed there by Wokingham borough council in obedience to national government policy, are taking shape. Less than five miles away from Three Mile Cross is the less picturesque Atomic Weapons Establishment at Burghfield.
It’s a microcosm of a certain kind of modern British landscape where Lidl meets idyll, where the logic of travel times and property values and tech investment encounters rural cottages and village greens. With the physical changes goes a social transformation, as the inhabitants of the new areas are typically younger and more diverse than the settled and ageing populations of older, more rustic parts. Many of the newcomers will be attracted here by the affordability, relative to more expensive cities, of homes where they can raise families.
