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Reading sits on the Thames and Kennet rivers in Berkshire, about 40 miles west of London, and has been a transit point long enough that it is easy to pass through without registering what is actually here. Henry I founded Reading Abbey in 1121, was buried there, and turned it into one of the wealthiest Benedictine monasteries in medieval England. The ruins still stand in the Forbury Gardens, a public park in the town center, where the great gatehouse arch survived the dissolution under Henry VIII and still frames a view that has not fundamentally changed in five centuries.

Oscar Wilde spent two years in Reading Gaol from 1895 to 1897, imprisoned for gross indecency.

He wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol afterward, naming the prison explicitly and with a kind of bitter irony that the city has learned to wear as a distinction. The prison closed in 2013 and has since hosted art exhibitions including a major Banksy show in 2016. The Victorian brick building on Forbury Road still looms over the surrounding streets.