A new century
Lord Wantage, the Crimean War VC and landowner who had done so much to reshape the Market Place, died in 1901, a few months after giving the town the Victoria Cross Gallery. The early years of the century saw new churches in the outlying hamlets. St James’s at Grove was rebuilt in 1900. At Charlton the brick chapel of ease was taken down and rebuilt in 1906, with the chancel of 1891 kept. In 1901 Tanner Street, the last reminder of the old tanning trade in the town’s street names, was renamed Priory Road.
The town in the 1920s
The Victoria County History, published in 1924, gives a snapshot of the town between the wars. By then, it said, Wantage’s industries were simply those of the centre of a large farming district. The weekly market had recently moved from Saturday, its traditional day, to Wednesday. Fairs were held on the first Saturdays of March and May and the first Saturday after 11 October. There were four elementary schools, an industrial school and the girls’ schools run by the Sisters of St Mary’s, as well as King Alfred’s Grammar School. The Wesleyan Methodists had a chapel in Newbury Street and the Baptists one in Mill Street. The trustees who had bought the manor now held it for the urban district council, and the market tolls helped to pay for the Victoria Cross Gallery, used as a public hall.
The town was still small. The urban district counted 3,628 people in 1911. Work was mostly on the land, in the shops and inns, and at engineering works making farm machinery, among them the Wantage Engineering Company, which had taken that name around 1900.
Roads take over
Motor transport changed the town’s links with the outside world. The Wilts and Berks Canal was formally abandoned by Act of Parliament in 1914. The Wantage Tramway, which had carried passengers to and from Wantage Road station since 1875, lost them to buses and cars and closed to passengers on 1 August 1925, though goods trains carried on.
After the Great War
The town marked the end of the First World War with a gift for the living. On 13 May 1920 the War Memorial Recreation Ground off Manor Road, presented by E. B. Ormond, was opened. In 1922 former pupils of King Alfred’s School gave the school a lych gate.
A larger town
In 1934 the boundaries of the urban district were extended to take in Charlton, formally joining the old hamlet to the town it had long adjoined. In 1938 St Katherine’s School, one of the sisters’ schools, merged with St Helen’s at Abingdon. By the late 1930s Wantage was still a quiet market town. The changes that would transform it, beginning with an airfield at Grove, were only a few years away.