Reading Audio Tour: Biscuit Town

Reading Audio Tour: Biscuit Town starts at Reading Railway Station on Sunday 8 November, and it's a self-guided walk that takes you through the town's industrial heart. It's run by AudaTours via their free app, so you just download it and go at your own pace. The route covers about 5.5km across 14 stops, following public streets and pavements around the town, with no interior access to the sites themselves.

The tour focuses on the working life that once defined Reading, particularly along King's Road and the Kennet. The big name here is the biscuit factory — at one point the largest in the world, employing five thousand people — and the tin-printing apprentice who helped make the biscuit tin a national institution. From there, it opens up to the everyday workers who kept the town running: biscuit tin painters, brewery draymen on Bridge Street, night-shift seed-packet sorters at the Market Place, abbey corn millers, gaol turnkeys, canal lock-keepers and railway navvies. It's the work that filled the town with noise, heat, barrels, paper, coal and rail.

Along the way, the tour brings up the people whose names rarely made it into the records: the working women dismissed during the winter of industrial unrest, the brewery worker who became a soldier without changing his employer, and the navvy Henry West, killed by a gust of wind on a station roof. There's also a darker turn when the route marks where the last abbot of Reading Abbey was hanged at his own gatehouse for high treason.

It takes about two hours to complete, and tickets start from £4.99. Since it's self-guided, you can set off whenever suits you.