Burghfield Common

Burghfield is in Domesday as Borgefelle, with eighteen households in 1086, and for most of its history the parish meant the village by the river, where St Mary's church stands. The church was rebuilt in 1843 in a Norman revival style, and it keeps three effigies from the old building, one of carved wood from the fourteenth century said to be Sir Roger de Burghfield.

The Common was exactly that, open heath on the higher ground to the south west. Much of it was enclosed by Act of Parliament in the nineteenth century, and smallholdings, a few larger houses, schools and chapels followed.

What made it the size it is came in the Second World War. A Royal Ordnance Factory was built beside the Common from 1940 and was filling shells by 1942. It was rebuilt in the 1950s for weapons work and became AWE Burghfield in 1987, and houses for its workers, among them the Ministry of Supply houses on Abbots Road and Woodman's Lane, were the start of the modern village. The population has roughly doubled again since the 1980s.