About Shinfield
Shinfield is a village and civil parish in the English county of Berkshire, just south of Reading. It contains 4,313 acres (17.45 km2) and is administered by the unitary authority of Wokingham District. Shinfield Park is the northern part of the parish, becoming physically separated when the M4 motorway was constructed in 1971.
Shinfield village lies to the south of the M4 motorway. To the east of the parish the land slopes down towards the flood plain of the River Loddon and the fields that flood regularly have led to the name Shinfield, a derivative of “Shining Fields”.
The earliest known settlement at Shinfield was in Anglo-Saxon times and is recorded in the Domesday Book. Shinfield had good farmland with a mill and fisheries on the River Loddon and was chosen as the site for St Mary’s Church, A Grade I listed church and the oldest building in the parish. It was built at the command of King William I in the eleventh century after the Norman conquest and in 2019 it celebrated 950 years since its foundation.
St. Mary’s has been restored, but still retains a Norman doorway and a 17th century tower of patterned brickwork. The fine old timbered roofs of the nave and south aisle are of interest, as are two seventeenth-century wall monuments with sculptured figures kneeling in prayer. There is evidence that the original settlement of the village was around the church and remained there into medieval times.
School Green Shinfield grew from the late Victorian period, around an old common where, in 1707, Richard Piggott, a local boy who had become a cutler of Westminster, founded the School (now Shinfield Infant School).
The Parish Community Centre is called the ‘School Green Centre’, it opened to the public in November 2021. There are rooms to hire, a café run by SPC ‘Tin Roof Cafe’ which offically opened 13.10.25, includes a WBC self-serve library and Parish Council staff are available to assist the public with any enquiries.
Shinfield Cinema opened 1st November 2024
Facilities and useful information
- Allotments
- Tin Roof Café
- Happy Trails Play Nursery
- Honeysuckle Day Nursery
- Lidl (Closed until March 25)
- Local walks
- Petrol Station (Esso)
- Pharmacy
- Post Office
- School Green Centre (Community Centre & Room Hire run by SPC)
- Shinfield Medical Practice
- Shinfield Dental (NHS Welcome)
- Swallowfield Medical Practice (Millworth Lane Site)
- Shinfield Community Church
- St Mary’s Church
- Schools
- Shin Barbers
- Shinfield Cinema
- Shinfield Studios
- Shinfield Tennis Club
- Thames Valley Science Park
- WBC Self-Service Library