Beedon, lying six miles north-east of Newbury, was formerly a chapelry of Chieveley, later an ecclesiastical parish in its own right. The civil parish formed in the 1890s was enlarged in 1934 by gaining land from Hampstead Norreys.
Beedon includes the tithing of Stanmore. Other local place names include World’s End, Mount Pleasant and Purton. Lysons’ Magna Britannia says the village was formerly known as Budon.
There were two commons, Beedon Common and Stanmore Common, both enclosed in 1854.
A branch of Ermine Street crossed Beedon en route to Wantage. It was known in the nineteenth century as the Old Street Way.
Size
2,012 acres in 1924 (815 hectares)
Population
331 in 1851; 459 in 2011
Hundred
Faircross
Poor law union
Wantage
Registration district
Wantage, sub-RD East Ilsley
Present-day local authority
West Berkshire
Grid reference
SU 48 78
Adjoining parishes in 1851
Catmore, Chieveley, East Ilsley, Hampstead Norreys, Peasemore
Genealogical resources
See Berks FHS Books for coverage of this parish in the society’s range of CDs.
See also Berkshire Record Office holdings.
Links
www.beedonparishcouncil.org.uk
Published local history
- G Timmins Beedon a village history (Lola Print, 2010)
- Iris Lloyd Homespun: the Beedon book (Beedon Book Committee 2002)
- V J Pocock St Nicholas Church Beedon 1220 – 1994
Anglican church and parochial organisation
Beedon is a vicarage in the diocese of Oxford, archdeaconry of Berkshire and the deanery of Newbury. The church of St Nicholas dates from 1220 and is Grade I-listed.
Other churches
A Wesleyan Methodist Chapel existed at World’s End, and the Berkshire Record Office holds some of its records (excluding registers).
Schools
Beedon C of E Primary School www.beedonschool.co.uk was founded as a National school, records of which are held by the Berkshire Record Office back to 1877.
Pubs
- The Coach
- The Langley Hall Inn at World’s End, was for a short time in the 1990s called the Blue Parrot. Langley Hall was recorded as an address in Beedon in 1803 (probably not an inn, as the occupants were gentry).
Other local history
Oliver Sansom, the Quaker famously persecuted by the vicar of Boxford in the seventeenth century, was born in Beedon in 1636.
Brick-making was noted in the Victoria County History (1924) based on clay deposits in the south-east of the parish.
South Stanmore Farm, formerly Beedon Manor, is a Romano-British site, excavated in the nineteenth century.
