Town in Berkshire, England

Maidenhead

Maidenhead has a railway arch that answers back, a football ground older than the FA Cup, and a name that has nothing to do with maidens' heads.

Key information

County: Berkshire
Nation: England
Known for: Brunel's Thames railway bridge, Boulters Lock, Edwardian riverside weekends
Famous people: Theresa May (MP for the town 1997 to 2024), Isambard Kingdom Brunel, J. M. W. Turner, Jerome K. Jerome
Football clubs: Maidenhead United (the Magpies), York Road

About Maidenhead

The railway arch that talks back

Walk under the easternmost arch of Brunel's railway bridge at Maidenhead and clap your hands. The brick shouts it back at you, which is why the arch is known as the Sounding Arch. The Great Western Railway reached Maidenhead in 1838, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel needed to cross the Thames. His answer was two brick arches, each spanning 128 feet and rising only about 24 feet. They were the flattest and widest brick arches yet built, and the critics said they would fall down. The story goes that Brunel left the timber supports in place long after they were needed, and the doubters assumed the bridge depended on them. A gale blew them away in the winter of 1838 to 1839 and the arches stayed up. Trains still cross them today.

Turner's storm and the Thames

J. M. W. Turner put the bridge in one of the most famous paintings of the railway age. Rain, Steam and Speed, painted in 1844 and now in the National Gallery, shows a train charging over the Thames towards the viewer through a haze of weather. The road bridge a few hundred yards away is older. It was built in 1777 to a design by Sir Robert Taylor and replaced a string of wooden ones. For centuries Maidenhead existed because travellers had to cross here on the old Bath Road.

Why it is not named after a maiden's head

The popular legend involves a maiden's head, and some versions bring in St Ursula's 11,000 virgins. The likelier origin is far less dramatic. Maidenhead comes from 'maiden hythe', meaning a new landing place, a wharf on the river. The Thames gave the town its trade, its coaching inns and later its reputation. Just outside, Maidenhead Thicket was a place travellers dreaded, with highwaymen said to lurk among the trees on the road west from London.

The weekend that never quite happened

In Victorian and Edwardian times, Maidenhead was where Londoners went to misbehave, at least in gossip. Skindles, the famous riverside hotel, gained a reputation for discreet weekends, and the very name of the town became a music-hall joke. Jerome K. Jerome made fun of this in Three Men in a Boat (1889). He described Maidenhead as a dressy, showy place, the haunt of fashionable river-goers rather than the quiet boating of the upper Thames. Boulters Lock was the social centre. On Ascot Sunday, crowds in their best clothes packed the lock and the water around it in a tradition that lasted into the twentieth century. Edward Gregory's 1897 painting of the scene, Boulter's Lock, Sunday Afternoon, is a record of a day when boats were so thick that you could nearly walk across the river.

Football before the FA Cup

Maidenhead United's York Road is a contender for the oldest football ground in the world still used by the same club. The club dates from 1870 and has played at York Road since 1871. Maidenhead were among the original entrants in the first FA Cup in 1871 to 1872. The team is known as the Magpies. Their place in football history is a quiet one, but it gives a town best known for boats and bridges a claim to be at the start of the organised game.

Town on the Elizabeth line

Today Maidenhead is a commuter town with a long riverside. The Thames Path runs past Ray Mill Island and Boulters Lock, and the Elizabeth line now brings passengers from central London on the same route Brunel built. Theresa May was the town's MP from 1997 to 2024, and she was Prime Minister from 2016 to 2019. The route that began as a coaching road and a railway to Bristol still shapes the town, which has lived off the Thames and the road beside it for nearly a thousand years.