Upton is a small village on the Streatley to Wantage road, formerly a chapelry of Blewbury, promoted to parish status in 1862. The civil parish was in Berkshire until 1974, when boundary changes moved it into Oxfordshire.
The Icknield Way passes through the north of the parish and the Ridgeway passes a few hundred yards to the south. Two other ancient tracks are the Lynch Way and Alden Farm Road.
The Didcot-to-Southampton Railway, constructed in 1881, passed through Upton in a cutting two miles long and 40 feet deep. The village shared a station with Blewbury, but it was situated in Upton. The railway closed in 1962.
Local place names include Nottingham Fee, Butlers Farm, Alderns, Humphreys Farm and Humphreys Lower Farm, Frogey Alley, Whitehorns Farm. Old Tommies and Pitts Close.
There ia another Upton in Oxfordshire — a hamlet about a mile west of Burford — and there is also an Upton which is a suburb of Slough.
Size
1,413 acres (581 hectares) in 1851
Population
337 in 1851; 421 in 2011
Hundred
Moreton
Poor Law union
Wantage
Registration district
Wantage
Present-day local authority
Vale of the White Horse, Oxfordshire County Council
Grid reference
SU 51 86
Adjoining parishes in 1851
Blewbury, Chilton and East Hagbourne
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
village website with a photo gallery and a history section that includes the 1841 census for Upton transcribed, extensive extracts from the diary of a nineteenth-century rector of Upton, and some interesting details from the parish register.
Published local history
Juliet Gardiner A random history of Upton in the county of Berkshire (2004)
Anglican church and parochial organisation
The living of Upton is a rectory. Probate falls within the Peculiar of the Dean of Salisbury.
The Norman church of St Mary the Virgin was restored 1885.
Other churches
A Methodist chapel stood on the east side of the village high street. It is due to close in the Spring of 2013.
Schools
In 1863 Upton’s first school, funded by the church, was opened by the bishop. It closed in the 1970s.
Pubs
A publican was enumerated in the 1841 census. In 1851 the George and Dragon and the Red Lion (in Nottingham Fee) were named.
