The Wantage Engineering Company and the Vale of White Horse Iron Works
Wantage's biggest Victorian industry: an ironworks that won prizes around the world for threshing machines and steam engines.
Notable People
Stories from Wantage, Grove and the villages, from the wantage.com archive.
Williams Racing, Grove
The Formula One team founded by Frank Williams and Patrick Head in 1977, based at Grove since the 1990s, with 9 constructors'…
St Mary’s School, Wantage
Girls' boarding school founded by William John Butler in 1873 and run by the Wantage sisters; it closed in 2007 after 134…
King Alfred’s Academy (the grammar school)
Wantage's secondary school, descended from a Tudor grammar school chartered in 1597 and renamed after King Alfred in 1849.
Thomas William Shore
Wantage-born geologist and antiquary who ran the Hartley Institution at Southampton and founded the Hampshire Field Club in 1885.
George Edmund Street
Leading Gothic Revival architect who began his independent career in Wantage, designing the vicarage, convent and grammar school for Butler.
Captain Tim Forster
Racehorse trainer at Letcombe Bassett from 1963 to 1994, who won the Grand National three times: 1972, 1980 and 1985.
Community of St Mary the Virgin
Anglican sisterhood founded in Wantage in 1848 by the vicar, William John Butler; one of the oldest surviving religious orders in the…
Isaac Kimber
Wantage-born Baptist minister, historian and journalist, author of a popular Life of Oliver Cromwell (1724) and editor of The London Magazine.
Edmund Campion at Lyford Grange
The Jesuit priest and martyr was arrested at Lyford Grange on 17 July 1581 after a spy attended his Mass; he was…