Science on the doorstep
Wantage’s post-war story begins a few miles east on the downs. In January 1946 the former RAF Harwell was handed to the Ministry of Supply to become the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Britain’s main centre for atomic research. It needed staff, and staff needed homes. Wantage and Grove grew with new housing estates, and from 1955 the UK Atomic Energy Authority also used part of the old Grove airfield for its work. The research campus at Harwell and, later, the science park at Milton Park have been major employers for the district ever since. Milton Park was bought by MEPC in 1984 and from 1988 concentrated on science and technology firms.
A growing town
The urban district’s population rose from 3,628 in 1911 to 5,949 in 1961, and by the 2021 census the town parish had 13,106 residents. Industry changed too. In 1948 the Munsey family, whose Oxford mill had burned down, bought Clarks flour mill in Wantage. As Wessex Mill it produced flour until the end of 2024. Schools multiplied: Icknield opened as a separate school in 1956, Segsbury in 1963, and in the 1970s and 1980s the town’s secondary schools were combined into the comprehensive King Alfred’s. The poet John Betjeman lived at The Mead in Wantage from 1951 to 1972.
A new county
Wantage Road station, the town’s link to the main line since 1846, closed to passengers on 7 December 1964 in the Beeching cuts. Ten years later local government was reorganised: on 1 April 1974 Wantage moved from Berkshire into Oxfordshire, the urban district was abolished, and a new Wantage Town Council and the Vale of White Horse District Council took over. A Civic Hall opened in January 1975; it is now The Beacon. The Vale & Downland Museum grew from a town collection begun in 1958. A trust formed in 1972, and the museum settled in the old surgery in Church Street, opposite the parish church, in the mid-1970s. It was formally opened in 1983.
Williams at Grove
In 1996 the Williams Formula One team moved from Didcot to a site at Grove that had previously been used by the Admiralty and a pharmaceutical company. The Princess Royal opened the new factory on 20 October 1996. The team has built its cars there ever since, and Williams has become one of the best-known names associated with the area.
The Market Place
The Market Place remains the heart of the town, with King Alfred’s statue at its centre and markets on Wednesdays and Saturdays, much as in the Middle Ages. The Betjeman Millennium Park beside the Letcombe Brook opened in 2002. In 2014 the town won the government’s Great British High Street award. The brook also brought trouble: in July 2007 exceptional rain flooded parts of Letcombe Regis, Wantage, Grove and East Hanney.
Wantage and Grove grow together
Since the 2010s the district plan has made Wantage and Grove one of the main places for new housing in the Vale. At Crab Hill, now Kingsgrove, on the north-east edge of Wantage, up to 1,500 homes were approved together with a school, a local centre and the Wantage Eastern Link Road between the A417 and the A338. On the former Grove airfield around 2,500 homes are planned, with schools and a park. The largest part is Wellington Gate, named after the bombers that flew from the airfield in the war. Proposals for a new Wantage and Grove station on the main line have been studied repeatedly. The two places that were a town and a straggling village a century ago are growing into one of the largest communities in the Vale.