City Status For Reading

EDM number 619 in 1999-00, proposed by Jane Griffiths on 06/04/2000.

That this House welcomes the Home Office's clarification that applications for city status from a number of English towns are still being actively considered; and believes that Reading, which has been a settlement on the confluence of the rivers Thames and Kennet at least since Saxon times, which has the great Reading Abbey, where Parliament has sat and where both King Henry I and the hand of St.James are buried, where musical notation was invented by the monks of the Abbey, where one of the great battles of the English Civil War was fought at the Forbury Mound, whose stature has grown over the centuries and whose prosperity gave rise to the building of the Waterhouse Town Hall, which is noted for its fine patterned brickwork and for its pre-eminence in the 'three Bs' industries of beer, biscuits and bulbs, which is the site for the first iron-framed building in Europe at Caversham Park, now the home of BBC Monitoring, whose first-class transport links and location at the heart of the Thames Valley have continued to attract cutting-edge companies such as Microsoft, Prudential, J.D. Edwards and others in the IT, financial services and high-quality manufacturing industries, which is noted in the arts for its associations with Jane Austen, Alma Cogan, Marianne Faithfull and especially its least willing inhabitant Oscar Wilde and as the crucible for Britain's finest acting talent as the hometown of both Kenneth Branagh and Kate Winslet, and also as the home of the WOMAD and Reading music festivals, and which is home to one of the United Kingdom's premier universities and to the South of England's supreme shopping and leisure experience at the Oracle Centre, presents a compelling case for the award of city status.

This motion has been signed by a total of 4 MPs.