THE VILLAGE of Grazeley is one of the less known on the outskirts of Reading.

Where Pangbourne curries favour through its wharf-side views and cheese shop and Mortimer attracts with its sweeping recreation areas bequeathed to the village as part of the Palmers fortune, Grazeley has long been defined by its proximity to infrastructure.

The Greenpark windmill turns to the North and the constant stream of A33 traffic hums in the background while 100 or so pupils file out of the Parochial primary school on a Monday afternoon.

As of last Thursday, when documents outlining plans to put Grazeley at the centre of a 15,000 home garden settlement first surfaced, this little conurbation has once again found itself in the midst of a rapidly expanding town's needs to house, employ and transport its residents.

“There's about 100 homes in the village if you go all the way along Grazeley Green Road,” explains Colin Hearn, who spends his retirement looking after the community hall with his wife Sue.

“Most of the land here has been bought by developers already. Millers used to own a lot of it, but he passed it on to his son who's not interested in farming.

“The land behind the school was bought up two or three years ago now.”

When Colin and Sue aren't making the hall ready for badminton, yoga and birthday parties, they live down the road in Three Mile Cross. A stones-throw from Shinfield, Sue's birthplace and the edge of the proposed settlement.

Although the pub has long packed up business and the village church closed almost ten years ago due to lack of demand, the mere notion of change in the couple's home of 41 years sparks a sincere reaction.

It's not just the strain on the roads and the hospital that worries Sue, it is a further shift in the dynamic of a village that has changed greatly of late.

“The whole of Lower Earley and Shinfield is already a building site and a lot of the people that are moving in to these places just to commute straight to London,” she says.

“If these 15,000 homes happened, I don't know how we'd cope.”

Colin pulls less punches: “The place is just not the same as it used to be. Let's just say if my lottery numbers came up, we'd be out by the weekend.”

The hall locked up and the couple out the parking lot, their suggestion to visit Jim Clark, a man who will “have something to say about all this”, is briefly waylaid by a woman from Whitley waiting for her grandson at the school gate.

This woman would set the tone for the remainder of the afternoon encounters – namely, a general disinterest in the as-yet-hypothetical development and a stoic understanding that things change.

Neither diminish her view that the primary school is “lovely”.

The young man that walks halfway down Mereoak Lane in his socks to point towards the Clark household is similarly non-committal in his views as, it turns out, is Jim.


Stumping round the porch of his house from a beautifully maintained garden, his views on the future of his home of 53 years are simple: “The communities already gone. It is what it is, isn't it.”