The older houses and farm buildings of these districts are timber, brick and cob, and generally thatched or red-tiled. The towns are all built of brick and are all, except for Reading, comparatively small.

      Until the end of the 19th century, when transport from London turned half of the county into a semi-suburb, Berkshire was thinly populated. There the churches were cottage-like with wooden belfries, thatched barns, farms and houses of downland hamlets. A few small flint towers arose from pleasant red-brick towns beside the Thames and Kennet, and there still are a great many commons and heaths, such as were so beautifully described in the 1820s by Mary Russell Mitford in Our Village. The brickwork in Berkshire was never so impressive as that of Kent and Sussex. The eastern and London half of the county was transformed first by railways and again by buses, bringing more monied people from London, who settled down in detached residences wherever the train service was convenient. These people built themselves new churches, and rebuilt old ones.

      Berkshire is not a great county for ancient churches. The only grand example is St George’s Chapel at Windsor (Perpendicular). Avington and Padworth have complete and small Norman churches. The best old churches will be found not in the Kennet valley, where these two are, but along the north slopes of the downs, to which stone for building could be brought fairly easily by river and then by trackway. The few big medieval churches of Berkshire, with the exception of Lambourn and Newbury, are in the northern half of the county. The churches on the downs and commons were nearly all small cottage-like buildings. One may see aquatints of some of them in Views of Reading Abbey and the Principal Churches Connected Therewith (1805), and in Buckler’s drawings in the British Museum. They had flint and rubble walls, rendered (or plastered) outside (the flint Norman tower of Great Shefford) were built circular, like many church towers in East Anglia, because of the lack of stone for the corners); the roofs were of tile with dormer windows, and there was usually a wooden belfry at the west end, and a 17th- or 18th-century porch in brick. Such buildings must have seemed very unecclesiastical to rich and pious landowners long or newly settled in Berkshire, which by the 19th century had become a ‘home county’ influenced by the prosperity of the metropolis. So they were pulled down or else vigorously restored, stripped of their external and internal plaster, retaining perhaps only an arcade or a window of the original building. Some churches of this small cottage type survive, as at Avington, East Shefford and Padworth.

      The great Victorian architects left their mark on Berkshire. But because the county was not much industrialized until the 20th century, there is less Victorian building than in old Middlesex, Surrey or Kent. The architect G. E. Street, who lived at Wantage at the beginning of his successful career, designed many charming church schools and vicarages in the area and a bold new church and adjoining buildings at Boyne Hill, Maidenhead. Butterfield beautifully and conservatively restored Shottesbrooke and published a monograph about it. The best work of Victorian architects, together with that of the 18th and 19th centuries, is noted in the entries that follow. On the whole Berkshire has not been well served by those who rebuilt its churches. They had more money at their disposal than sensibility. But at least they built churches.