Padworth is a dispersed settlement and civil parish in the English county of Berkshire, with the nearest town being Tadley. Padworth is in the unitary authority of West Berkshire, and its main settlement is at Aldermaston Wharf or Lower Padworth, where there is Aldermaston railway station. It has its southern boundary with Mortimer West End, Hampshire. The south of the parish is wooded towards its edges and the north of the parish is agricultural with a hotel beside the Kennet and Avon Canal. In the centre of the parish is a Georgian manor house, later used as a school, Padworth College.
Geography and amenities
Padworth is built around the Norman church and the manor house, which from 1748 was the home of the Darby-Griffith family. In 1963 the house was converted into Padworth College, an independent school. In spring 2025, the school announced it would close at the end of the 2024–25 academic year, and the building put up for sale.
The two halves of the parish can be separated thus:
- Lower Padworth or Aldermaston Wharf, is mostly concentrated along the A4 Bath Road – this area has the vast majority of homes. It is a built-up nucleated village and low rise locality.
- Padworth Common sometimes describes all of the scattered south but strictly speaking only includes land outside of the farmland of the former manor centred on the site of Padworth College.
thumb|Riding horses at Padworth College's Riding School at Home Farm.
Economy
A 'fishery in the Kenette' was among the possessions of the manor in 1586, and a fishery is mentioned as early as 1378. There is a Scheduled Monument fish-pond north of the former manor house. In 1870 its property was valued at £1,839 () while its population was much smaller than today, 298, living in 59 houses.
The whole parish is noted by the 1920s to be very well watered, and the north-eastern part draws on the natural advantage of a fairly flat landscape and water close to the surface from the River Kennet. The soil retains a strength from its inorganic layers being gravel and the subsoil impermeable clay.
Manors
A full descent of the manor, including its earliest known grant of 956 and during the Black Death, is provided by the fully referenced text of the Victoria County History for this parish, compiled here in 1923. It was built afresh in 1769 by the designs of John Hobcraft, and has plasterwork by Joseph Rose. Its entrance is a double-height space, and has a staircase with a wrought iron balustrade to three sides. It has a vaulted 3-bay arched arcade on each floor to one side with Doric columns on the ground floor and columns with Adamesque capitals on the floor above. It is grade I listed building.
The church's advowson was from Pamber Priory in 1291 when various tithes and donations provided the Prior's pension. By 1923 the rector's patron was the Lord Chancellor.