Local & Reliable Skip Hire in Newbury.

Local area guide

Skip hire in Newbury

Newbury is a market town in Berkshire, sitting on the River Kennet around 17 miles west of Reading, with a population of around 40,000. It was founded as a new borough after the Norman Conquest — hence the name — and grew wealthy on cloth. Its greatest figure was John Winchcombe, known as Jack of Newbury, the sixteenth-century clothier whose works reputedly employed hundreds of weavers under one roof, making him one of the first large-scale industrial employers in England. He is said to have led a contingent of his own men to Flodden in 1513, and his house survives on Northbrook Street.

Two battles of the Civil War were fought at Newbury, in 1643 and 1644, both around Donnington Castle just north of the town. The castle's gatehouse survives, battered by artillery, after a siege lasting nearly two years — one of the longest of the war. The Cloth Hall of 1626, built as a workhouse for the cloth trade, now houses the West Berkshire Museum.

Newbury Racecourse, opened in 1905, is one of the leading flat and National Hunt courses in Britain, hosting the Lockinge Stakes and the Coral Gold Cup. The surrounding Lambourn Valley, a few miles west, is one of the two great centres of British racehorse training alongside Newmarket, with hundreds of horses in training on the downs — the area is known as the Valley of the Racehorse.

The town became nationally known in the 1990s for the Newbury bypass protest, when the felling of woodland for the A34 relief road prompted one of the largest direct-action environmental campaigns in British history, with tree camps, tunnels and thousands of protesters. The road opened in 1998. Newbury is also home to Vodafone's global headquarters, a major local employer, and the Kennet and Avon Canal runs through the town with a busy wharf and towpath.

Newbury sits on the A34 with the M4 at junctions 13 and 14 close by, and Newbury station gives services to London Paddington in around an hour and west to Bedwyn. The North Wessex Downs National Landscape surrounds the town, with Highclere Castle — familiar as Downton Abbey — a few miles south.

Housing ranges from Georgian and timber-framed property around Northbrook Street and the Market Place — the centre is a conservation area with a substantial number of listed buildings — to Victorian terraces, interwar and post-war estates, and very substantial modern development at Sandleford and on the town's edges, with values well above the national average.