The Thames market town that gave the world Radiohead and Old Speckled Hen
Abingdon, a small Oxfordshire town on the Thames, packs in surprises. Radiohead formed there in 1985 while its members were pupils at Abingdon School, its brewery made Old Speckled Hen, and a Neolithic axe found locally was carved from stone quarried some 400 kilometres away in the Lake District.
People lived here from the early to middle Iron Age. The Neolithic hand axe, analysed in 1940, turned out to be epidotised tuff from Stake Pass in the Lake District, and axes of the same stone have surfaced in several nearby villages. An abbey was founded in Saxon times, perhaps around 676, though legends invented to raise its prestige muddy its early story. The name seems to mean the hill of a man called Æbba or a woman called Æbbe.
Wool made the town prosperous in the 13th and 14th centuries, supporting a well-known weaving and clothing trade. Abingdon outlived the abbey's dissolution in 1538, and in 1556 Mary I, told of its sorry state, granted a charter making it a borough run by a mayor, two bailiffs and a council of burgesses. It sent one member to Parliament until 1885 and became Berkshire's county town, jostling with Reading for that status; the county hall went up between 1678 and 1682 to press its claim.
Transport kept it busy. Abingdon Lock arrived in 1790, and the Wilts and Berks Canal opened in 1810, linking the town to routes serving Bristol, London, Birmingham and the Black Country. A railway followed in 1856. The canal was abandoned in 1906, though volunteers are now working to reopen it, and passenger trains stopped in September 1963, with goods traffic continuing until 1984, partly for an MG car factory opened in 1929.
Modern changes have been mixed. Local government reorganisation in 1974 abolished the old borough corporation, and the town now belongs to Oxfordshire's Vale of the White Horse district. Morland brewery was taken over and closed in 1999, its site turned into housing. The last cinema, the Regal, shut in 1989 and was demolished in 2003. Nearby Fairacres may well have been Britain's earliest retail park.
Source: Abingdon-on-Thames
