Walk from the new Green Park station back into Reading, 4.4 miles

Sunday 9 July 2023

Amazed that this new little railway station actually opened in May this year, as I’m sure it was proposed years ago but I’d started to assume that it wouldn’t actually happen.

The new Reading Green Park station

Green Park is a business park on the south side of Reading that opened in the late 1990s. Much more recently, a large amount of housing (being marketed as ‘Green Park Village’) has been built alongside. The business park is quite pleasant – landscaped around a lake, etc – but I’m not sure of its state of health since the big move to homeworking.

I had no particular reason to be going to Green Park but I had the free time on a Sunday in July and fancied a bit of a walk, so I took a train out to the new station. On the ticket machine and on rail apps, the new station is labelled ‘Reading Green Park’, I assume to avoid confusion with the London tube stop.

I walked from the station around the lake and stopped at Triple Two Coffee for a peach iced tea. Not the sort of thing I normally consume but it was a warm morning. The café looked to have quite a nice breakfast menu.

After leaving the café I walked through some of the new residential streets. Not really a fan of the ‘New England’-style boarded housing – and the streets felt very cramped – but I’m sure it’ll have its takers. I walked along Longwater Avenue out of Green Park to the A33. Crossed this and walked along Smallmead Road into the Kennet Island development, built a few years back on the site of the old sewage works. Came out onto the 'old' Basingstoke Road (the former A33) and turned left towards town.

This stretch of road has never been the smartest but I always find urban streets quite interesting. The picture is of the lingering pub sign outside what’s now flats. The former building was most recently a grotty-looking Chinese restaurant called the Eastern Pearl, which had been empty for some time, and was originally a pub called The Four Horseshoes.

Pub sign on the site of The Four Horseshoes

Followed the road to where it joins Christchurch Road at the Hindu temple and then turned down Southampton Street to the Oracle Riverside.

Old and new street signs

Route below. Start point in green bottom left.