For seventy years Berkshire was run from a red brick building on The Forbury in Reading. The Shire Hall, completed in 1911 for Berkshire County Council, held the county’s officers and committee rooms until the council moved out in 1981. Today it is The Roseate Reading, a townhouse hotel of 55 rooms, and couples marry in Eden, the old council chamber, where the walls are covered in flowers painted by hand. Across the road lie Forbury Gardens and the ruins of Reading Abbey, on whose land the hall was built, and two of the hotel’s three wedding packages carry their names: the Abbey and the Forbury.
A county hall on abbey ground
Berkshire County Council was formed in 1889 and held its meetings in the Assize Courts, the Baroque revival courthouse that the county surveyor John Clacy completed in 1861. As the council’s work grew, it commissioned a building of its own next door for its officers and departments. The architects Septimus Warwick and H. Austen Hall designed it in the Queen Anne style, E. C. Hughes of Wokingham built it, and it was finished in 1911. The courthouse beside it is now Reading Crown Court.
Shire Hall has been listed at Grade II since 1973. Its five bay front is red brick above a channelled Portland stone ground floor, with a Doric portico, steps rising to a round headed doorway set between two niches, and cast iron lamp standards on the walls either side. Inside, the entrance hall is groin vaulted, and the wide corridors are floored in Purbeck marble beneath vaulted ceilings and cornice mouldings.
From county offices to hotel
When the council left for a new Shire Hall at Shinfield Park in 1981, the building passed into commercial use. The developer Waterbridge Group renovated it and opened it in 2006 as the Forbury Hotel, with the council chamber turned into a restaurant named the Eden Room. The hotel went into administration in 2009 and was bought that year by von Essen. The Bird Group acquired it in 2017, converted 17 apartments into 34 further bedrooms, and reopened it in June 2019 as The Roseate Reading.
The original lift shaft has been restored and runs the full height of the building, and an Italian chandelier of 86,000 glass beads now hangs inside it, down through the stairwell. Every bedroom has one of Claire Norrington’s animal bronzes, and paintings by Paul Ambille, Isabelle de Ganay and Alain Bonnefoit hang in the rooms.
Vows in the old council chamber
The hotel is on Reading Borough Council’s list of approved premises for civil marriages and civil partnerships, and ceremonies are held in one of two rooms. Eden, the former chamber, seats up to 50; it keeps its fireplace and the carving on its doors and mantelpiece. The Library, with large windows onto Forbury Square and a fireplace of its own, takes up to 20 for a smaller ceremony. Couples agree the date with the hotel first, then telephone the council’s registration service to book the registrars.
The Library opens into the Lounge, where guests take a glass of Prosecco on arrival. For dinner, Eden seats 40 and the Library 24. The Cellar, a contemporary private dining room with deep, comfortable chairs, takes 14 at a single long table for the smallest parties.
The Reading Room and the Secret Garden
The largest room is The Reading Room, the hotel’s restaurant and bar, which seats 80 for a wedding breakfast and holds 105 for an evening reception. Catering is in house. The kitchen cooks modern European food from fresh, seasonal ingredients sourced across the south of England, and the wedding breakfast can be a seasonal set menu or à la carte, with fish, meat, vegetarian and vegan dishes. The day before, the hotel can serve a Roseate Afternoon Tea that includes a selection inspired by “Biscuit Town”, the old nickname Reading earned as the home of Huntley & Palmers, once the largest biscuit maker in the world.
The restaurant opens onto the Secret Garden, an open air courtyard with a small waterfall and a pomegranate tree for shade, used for drinks after the ceremony. Within the bar, the Whisky Room keeps more than 60 blends and single malts.
Evening hire of The Reading Room runs from half past six until half past midnight, and the hotel’s suggested running order works back from there: the ceremony at one o’clock, photographs outside, the wedding breakfast in the afternoon, then speeches and a slideshow in Upstage Mini, the hotel’s private cinema with 30 seats, before the evening guests arrive. The same cinema can show a film for the wedding party the night before.
Photographs in the abbey precinct
The Forbury was the outer court of Reading Abbey, the open ground between the monastery and the town. Henry I founded the abbey in 1121 and, after his death in Normandy in 1135, was buried in front of the altar of its unfinished church. “Sumer is icumen in”, the earliest known six part harmony from Britain, was first written down at the abbey around 1240. The abbey was largely destroyed in 1538, and its last abbot, Hugh Faringdon, was executed for treason the following year.
The flint cores of its walls still stand, and after a £3 million restoration the ruins reopened to the public in June 2018. Forbury Gardens, laid out on part of the abbey site in the nineteenth century, hold the Maiwand Lion, George Blackall Simonds’s memorial of 1886 to the soldiers of the 66th Regiment who died at the Battle of Maiwand in Afghanistan in 1880. Gardens and ruins sit across the road from the hotel steps, and in the hotel’s running order this is where the photographs are taken, between the ceremony and the wedding breakfast.
The whole wedding under one roof
The 55 rooms are split between two buildings. The Roseate building, the old Shire Hall, holds 23 of them, including four poster suites with painted panelling and the Roseate Bridal Suite. The rest are in The House, which is contemporary in style, with oak floors and handmade furniture, and its rooms have direct access to the gym and the Aheli Spa, a rooftop spa with three treatment rooms. Every room has Penhaligon’s toiletries and a Nespresso machine. The bridal party gets ready in the House suites, with a spa treatment if wanted, and every package includes a wedding suite for the couple’s night, with breakfast the next morning.
Packages start at £145 a guest plus VAT, for at least 15 guests. For a wedding that takes the whole building, exclusive use of the hotel costs £15,000 for one night and includes all 55 bedrooms with breakfast and a cocktail reception for up to 100; the Roseate building alone, with its 23 bedrooms, costs £7,000 a night with a reception for up to 60. Guests who prefer to book their own rooms can use a wedding rate code.
Reading station is about five minutes away on foot, with trains to London Paddington taking around half an hour, and Heathrow is 26 miles east, roughly 36 minutes by taxi. Parking at the hotel is very limited and cannot be reserved, so guests who drive use the Queens Road car park or the station car park on Vastern Road. For more of the county, see our wedding venues in Berkshire and the United Kingdom Wedding Atlas.
A room, or the whole hall
The choice at the old Shire Hall is how much of it to take. A package reserves Eden or the Library for the day, with The Reading Room hired for the evening against a minimum spend. Exclusive use gives them every room in the building the county once governed from, with the abbey ruins across the road. Read The Roseate Reading profile and check your date.
