[1] With your back to the Madejski Stadium and Hotel, cross the car park to the west corner to enter a path with steps leading to a road with a bus stop marked '250 Brook Drive’. Cross the road and turn left for a few yards to follow FP11 towards a watercourse and a footbridge over, with metal railings to each side. Immediately after crossing the bridge, turn right down some steps and over a wooden bridge onto a footpath keeping the lake on your right, and office buildings to your left.
Still keeping the lake on your right, cross a metal and wood footbridge and turn immediately left until you emerge at a road (Longwater Drive). Turn right and, almost immediately by the bus stop, cross over the road and go down a gravel slope that leads to footpath 10 ahead, which eventually passes a large recycling building on your left. When you reach the road take the metalled lane opposite to reach the Kennet and Avon Canal by Fobney Lock.
[2] Here you cross the canal bridge and go behind the Fobney Waterworks and proceed on the north side of the canal going east towards Reading. Continue along the towpath passing under a bridge (carrying the A33 Reading to Basingstoke Road). As you come into the centre of Reading and shortly after passing County Lock and Loch Fyne Restaurant, cross over to the opposite side of the canal near The Oracle Shopping Mall.
(A) HM Prison, Reading was built in 1844 as the Berkshire County Gaol in the heart of Reading. Designed by George Gilbert Scott, it was based on London’s New Model Prison at Pentonville with a cruciform shape and intended to implement the latest penal technique, the separate system. Executions were carried out, the first in 1845 (before a crowd of 10,000!) and the last in 1913. It closed as a gaol in 1920 but was an internment site in both world wars and also at one time, a borstal. Since 1992 it has been a young offender’s institution.
A famous inmate was Oscar Wilde who was there from late 1895 to 1897 and was designated prisoner C.3.3 i.e. cell block c, landing 3, cell 3. In 1898 Wilde’s poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was published.
(B) Reading Abbey, having been largely destroyed in 1538 during Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries – the last Abbot, Hugh Cook Faringdon, was convicted of high treason and hanged, drawn and quartered in front of the Abbey church – parts of the Abbey continued to be used by Reading School and to be Reading’s Town Hall until the 18th century. Now relatively few ruins remain. Henry 1 founded the abbey in 1121 and gave it extensive lands in Reading and much further afield. Monks from the French Abbey of Cluny and from the Cluniac Priory of St Pancras at Lewes in Sussex were resident in Reading and the abbey was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and St John the Evangelist. Wharves were established on the River Kennet and the river also provided power for the Abbey Water Mills, most of which were on the Holy Brook, a channel of the Kennet. Henry 1 died in France in 1135 and was buried in front of the altar of the then still incomplete Abbey.
Because of Royal patronage Reading Abbey was a medieval pilgrimage centre and a very rich religious house. It held many religious relics including, allegedly, the hand of St James. The song ‘Sumer is icumen in’ was first written down in the Abbey in about 1240.
The Abbey was frequently visited by kings notably Henry III. It hosted the weddings of John of Gaunt in 1359 and Edward IV in 1464. Parliament met there in 1453.
(C) Maiwand Lion in Forbury Gardens, Reading. This is a metal sculpture and war memorial, erected in 1886, to commemorate the 329 men from the 66th Berkshire Regiment who died during the Afghanistan campaign 1878-80. It is named for the Battle of Maiwand.
The sculptor was George Blackall Simonds, a member of the Reading brewing family. The sculpture took two years to design and complete and is one of the world’s largest cast iron statues, weighing 16 tons. Rumours persist that Simonds committed suicide – he did not, living another 43 years! – on learning that the lion’s gait was incorrectly that of a domestic cat. In fact he had researched thoroughly and the stance is anatomically correct.
[3] Proceed along this metalled canal path past Blake`s Lock.
(D) The first mile of the River Kennet from its junction with the River Thames has been navigable since the 13th century. Blakes Lock was originally a flash lock known as Brokenburglok. In 1404 the Abbot of Reading Abbey, who controlled the Kennet, made an agreement with the town’s guild to allow craft to pass through the lock between sunrise and sunset on payment of a 1d toll. By 1794 little had changed with John Rennie, the engineer of the Kennet & Avon Canal, describing it as “a very bad and inconvenient staunch lock”.
It was converted to a timber-constructed pound lock in 1802 to improve navigation from the Thames into the River Kennet enabling boats to travel all the way to Bristol using the aforementioned canal. The lock retains its manual beams – new timbers were fitted in 2006 – avoiding, so far, progress to hydraulic power. The Riverside Museum at Blakes Lock tells the story of Reading’s two rivers, the Kennet & Thames.
Pass under two railway bridges until you reach the confluence of the Kennet and the Thames where you turn right along the Thames Path towards Henley. After approximately 500 yards you reach the Thames Valley Business Park, where you turn right to reach the car park.
If you wish to continue on the next section of the Way, don't turn right, but continue along the Thames path.