Grove

Grove today

Grove is a large village immediately north of Wantage, with around 8,000 people and growing. Letcombe Brook runs through the old village, past a small green crossed by footbridges, and many 17th-century brick and timber cottages survive along Main Street. Around this core are post-war estates and, to the west and north, the new housing on the former RAF Grove airfield. The village has shops, primary schools, a Church of England parish church dedicated to St John the Baptist, and Methodist, Free Evangelical and Elim churches. The headquarters of the Williams Formula One team is on the northern side of the village. Grove has been in Oxfordshire since 1974, and was part of Berkshire before that.

The A338 Wantage to Oxford road runs along the east side of the village, and footpaths along the old canal link Grove with Wantage.

History

Name and early history

The name comes from the Old English for a grove or copse. Grove is not named in Domesday Book, as it was then part of the royal manor of Wantage. In 1142 King Stephen granted Grove to the Cluniac abbey of Bermondsey, but it never became a separate manor. It stayed a township of Wantage parish for centuries, with farms such as Tulwick and Grovewick marking old estates within it. A Thomas Grove held a house and a water-mill here in 1622.

Churches and chapels

Grove had a medieval chapel of St John the Baptist, which was destroyed in 1733. A new church was built in 1832 and Grove became a separate ecclesiastical parish in 1835. A church of St James the Great, designed by P. A. Robson, followed around 1900 but had become derelict by the 1960s, when the present St John the Baptist church was built. It reuses the font and stained glass from St James. A Baptist chapel was in use by the early 18th century, and a Wesleyan chapel by the early 20th.

Enclosure, roads and the canal

The open fields of Wantage and Grove were enclosed under an Act of 1803, with the award made in 1806. In the later 18th century a turnpike road towards Oxford, now the A338, was laid through the village. The Wilts and Berks Canal was dug between 1796 and 1810 to link the Kennet and Avon Canal at Semington with the Thames at Abingdon. Its main line passed through Grove, and a short arm branched off at Grove to a wharf in Wantage. The canal declined once the railway arrived and was formally abandoned in 1914.

The railway and the tramway

The Great Western main line opened through the north of the parish in 1840, and Wantage Road station was built on Grove’s northern edge. From 1875 the Wantage Tramway ran beside the turnpike road through Grove to link the station with Wantage, carrying passengers until 1925 and goods until 1945. The station closed to passengers in December 1964; its buildings have gone. Proposals for a new Wantage and Grove station have been studied by Oxfordshire County Council.

RAF Grove

Farmland west of the village was requisitioned for an airfield, which opened in 1942 as a Bomber Command training station. In 1943 it was handed to the United States Army Air Forces as Station 519, and it became a major supply and repair depot, also used by transport aircraft. The RAF took it back in 1946 for storage and disposal work, and from 1955 the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority used part of the site in support of the research establishment at Harwell.

Modern Grove

After the airfield closed, housing and laboratories spread across parts of it and Grove grew into one of the largest villages in the district. In 1996 the Williams Grand Prix team moved from Didcot to a site in Grove previously used by the Admiralty and by the pharmaceutical company Janssen; the Princess Royal opened it in October 1996, the year Williams won the first of two consecutive constructors’ championships from Grove. The former airfield was allocated for about 2,500 homes in the district’s local plan, with outline permission granted in 2017, and building has continued since.

Things to see

• Letcombe Brook and the small green in the old village, with its footbridges.
• Listed 17th and 18th-century houses along Main Street, including The Manor and The Old Post Office.
• Grove Top Lock and the Elms Farm stretch of the Wilts and Berks Canal, restored by volunteers and now a footpath towards Wantage.
• St John the Baptist church, with the font and glass brought from St James the Great.
• Monks Farmhouse, Tulwick Farmhouse and Grovewick Farmhouse, reminders of the old farming estates (private, seen from the road).