Theale

Theale is what happens when a village sits on a crossroads the Romans liked and the M4 liked even more. The bypass sorts it neatly: houses to the north, office blocks to the south, and the two halves regard each other like neighbours who share a fence but not a Christmas card. The railway killed off the coaching inns, the gravel diggers turned the water meadows into lakes, and Theale shrugged at both, which is the right attitude for a place that has been somewhere on the way to Reading for most of recorded history.