ABSTRACT
Modern Reading has become a favourite town for market researchers. ‘Typical’ in its employment patterns, physical presence, and degree of affluence, it has fewer inconvenient quirks than other places. Studying the place, such typicality was one of the problems. Walking round the town, looking at its buildings, reading its records, talking to its people, it was difficult to step back and see anything as strange or accidental. Everything about it seemed so normal as to be inevitable and worthy of special observation. One aid to an over-view is to realise the relative novelty of a phenomenon like Reading, as it was by the early twentieth century. The Edwardian journalist and Liberal politician C.F.G. Masterman used the phrase ‘unique in world history’ to describe ‘the city type’ in the late nineteenth century. Long before becoming ‘biscuitopolis’, Reading had had some economic importance in the sixteenth century as a clothing town.
