Enclosure and the canal
The century began with the enclosure of the open fields. An Act for Wantage and Grove was passed in 1803 and the award made in 1806. The old strips were replaced by compact fields and hedges, and the lord of the manor and the larger owners gained most. Even the town bellman, who rang the church bell at five each winter morning, was given a small plot in Grove Meadow in place of land he had used ‘from time immemorial’.
At about the same time the Wilts and Berks Canal arrived. A branch about a mile long ran into a basin in the town, and the canal opened throughout to Abingdon in September 1810. It brought coal from Somerset and carried out farm produce. The Sack House beside the old wharf survives.
The end of tanning
In 1809 William Mavor, reporting on Berkshire agriculture, said Wantage had the largest tannery in the kingdom. The boom did not last. A failed attempt to introduce a French tanning process led to a bankruptcy in 1811, leather duty doubled in 1812, and demand collapsed when the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815. By 1825 tanning in the town had stopped.
Improvement
In 1828 an Act of Parliament set up Improvement Commissioners, made up of the local magistrates, the vicar and thirty named residents, to pave, light and clean the town. The old town hall in the middle of the Market Place was pulled down in 1835 and replaced with a brick building. The same year the Wantage Poor Law Union was formed, one of the earliest in the country, with a new union workhouse south of the town. Grove became a separate church parish, with a new church built in 1832. In 1868 the commissioners bought the manor itself, with its market and fairs, so the town at last controlled its own Market Place. In 1894 an elected urban district council took over.
The railway
The Great Western Railway’s main line crossed the north of the parish in 1840, and Wantage Road station opened in 1846, more than two miles from the town in Grove parish. The canal’s trade drained away to the railway. In 1875 the Wantage Tramway was opened to link the town to the station.
Butler’s Wantage
William John Butler, vicar from 1846 until 1880, changed the town. In 1848 he founded the Community of St Mary the Virgin, one of the first Anglican sisterhoods, which grew to run schools and training homes in Wantage and branch houses as far away as India and South Africa. He rebuilt the town’s schools. A national school opened in Church Street in 1850, and the grammar school, which had closed in 1832, was refounded in 1850 as King Alfred’s School in new buildings on the Portway designed by G. E. Street. Street also restored the parish church, and a chapel of ease was built at Charlton in 1848.
A Victorian Market Place
Colonel Robert Loyd-Lindsay VC of Lockinge, later Lord Wantage, reshaped the town centre. He presented Count Gleichen’s marble statue of King Alfred, unveiled by the Prince and Princess of Wales on 14 July 1877 on the site of the 1835 town hall. A new town hall was built on the corner of Grove Street on the site of the Falcon Inn. A Corn Exchange opened in 1865 in the roofed-over yard of the Red Lion. In 1900 Lord Wantage filled it with Louis Desanges’s paintings of Victoria Cross actions, and it was renamed the Victoria Cross Gallery.
Work
With tanning gone, the town’s industries served agriculture. A Wantage ironworks traced to the 1820s grew, under a series of owners, into the firm later called the Wantage Engineering Company, which won awards for steam engines and threshing machines. From 1857 Nalder & Nalder built farm machinery at East Challow. In 1884 Percy Smith left £5,000 to found a cottage hospital.