The Nag's Head keeps its walls covered in wonky framed cottage drawings, yellowing maps, thousands of pump clips, and Reading FC memorabilia from the old Elm Park days. It pours up to twelve real ales and thirteen ciders, and CAMRA calls it "one of the best pubs in southern England for the choice and quality of its real ciders and cask-conditioned ales." The pies come from Sweeney & Todd, a pie shop across town that reviewers rate for its Five Nations and its Honey Mustard Chicken.
That is Reading in one pub: a scruffy town centre wrapped around real things.
The town sits where the Kennet meets the Thames, six bridges between them. The Kennet threads through the middle, past the Oracle's riverside dining strip on a stretch called Brewery Gut. The Thames forms the northern edge, dividing the town from Caversham.
Caversham is the leafy side, over Caversham Bridge, with a village-y high street, a Waitrose, delis, and Caversham Court Gardens running to the water. Clay's Kitchen moved here in 2023, a husband-and-wife restaurant cooking the food of the Nawabs of Hyderabad: Andhra cod, mutton claypot, lamb pulao. The critic Andy Hayler called the beef "one of the best beef dishes compared even to Michelin-starred restaurants."
The Oxford Road, west of the centre, is the town's food corridor: Caribbean, South Asian and Middle Eastern grocers and takeaways.
For food without a booking, the Blue Collar market sets up in Market Place on Wednesdays and Fridays — jerk chicken wraps, dry-aged burgers, Peruvian boxes, halloumi. Blue Collar Corner off Hosier Street, a reclaimed derelict yard, has four kitchens and a summer beer garden.
Down by King's Meadow, the Thames Lido is a heated outdoor pool from 1902 with saunas, a spa, and a Michelin-Guide restaurant known for its scallops and wood-roast hake.
You can walk most of it. The Thames Path runs through the town, green even here, past Christchurch Meadows and over three of the six bridges. Keep going east and it's about nine miles to Henley via Sonning. The Kennet & Avon towpath heads the other way, out past the Fisherman's Cottage, a canalside pub with open mic on Wednesdays.
The station puts Paddington about twenty-six minutes away on a fast train, or the Elizabeth line straight through to the middle of London.
The history is close to the surface. Reading Abbey was founded by Henry I in 1121, grew into one of Europe's largest royal monasteries, and holds his grave — somewhere under the old prison car park, lost since the Dissolution. Next door stands Reading Gaol, where Oscar Wilde served two years' hard labour and afterwards wrote "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." Banksy painted a prisoner escaping its wall in 2021.
In Forbury Gardens there is a cast-iron lion three times life size, a memorial to the dead of the Battle of Maiwand. Local legend says the sculptor killed himself on realising a lion can't stand in that pose. He didn't. The anatomy is correct, and he lived another forty-three years.
The town was built on biscuits, beer and bulbs — Huntley & Palmers, Simonds, Suttons — all three long gone. What's left is a good pub arguing over pickled onions. The Retreat hosts the local contest every year, and Kate Winslet's mother reportedly once won a pickled-onion contest herself.