Mortimer Common

The name is two names. Stratfield is Old English for the open land by the Roman road, the road from Silchester to Dorchester on Thames, and Mortimer is the family who held the manor after the Conquest. Domesday records Ralf Mortimer there in 1086, with forty one households.

St Mary's, the parish church by the station, was rebuilt in 1869. When the old tower was pulled down in 1866 a Saxon coffin lid was found beneath it, carved with an inscription recording that Aegelward, son of Kypping, was laid there on 24 September, in the early eleventh century. It is inside the church today.

The railway came in 1848, and Mortimer station, designed by Brunel for the Great Western, is one of the least altered of his small wayside stations, listed Grade II*. The Common itself was heath until the second half of the nineteenth century, when houses began to go up along what became Victoria Road and West End Road. St John's church was built there in 1881 as the village grew, and St John's Hall in 1908.

Most of the rest of the village is twentieth century, with estates of the 1950s and early 1960s and more since. The Fairground, which gives the middle of the village its open space, belongs to a charity and is looked after by the parish council.