Emmer Green (Hanover) Chalk Mine

Overview

An abandoned chalk mine under a Reading suburb, dug beneath a brickfield for chalk to mix into the brick clay and burn for lime. Its galleries run five metres high on irregular pillars. It was lost until 1977, when earthmoving machinery on a building site broke into a shaft.

History

Emmer Green sits on an outlier of chalk north of the Thames, capped by the sandy clays of the Reading Beds — the combination that made this a brickfield. Chalk was added to brick clay before firing to counteract shrinkage, and it was burnt for the lime that went into mortar; both were got by mining under the brickyard rather than by stripping the clay off it. A brick kiln appears in the surviving records here in 1645 or 1654, and the bricks of Emmer Green's older buildings, and the lime in their mortar, will have come from this ground. The principal brickfield and chalk-mining site was known as Rose Hill and lay in the V between Kiln Road and Peppard Road; two brickyards, a southern and a northern, were already referred to there by 1872. There are three distinct sets of accessible workings. The two northern mines partly underlie land managed by the Scout Association and are connected underground; one or both were used by Reading Council during the Second World War for the secure storage of documents, and corrugated iron shelters, a brick-built stove and chimney and tea chests are said to remain below. Names and dates written on their walls run from the 1890s onwards. Reading's growth reached Rose Hill in the late 1970s, and the site is now housing — Jefferson Close, Wordsworth Court, and a scout hut. The southern mine, the one this record is named for, lies closest to Peppard Road under land owned by the Hanover Housing Association. Its shaft was rediscovered in 1977 by earthmoving machinery working on the surface, and the site and mine were investigated over the following five years; a new lining was put into the shaft and the workings inspected and surveyed. Access now is by a fifty-foot fixed steel ladder in a narrow vertical shaft under a locked iron cover.

Geology

The whole of Reading is underlain at shallow depth by the Upper Cretaceous chalk, here the Seaford Chalk Member — white, soft and nodular, with abundant flint seams — beneath the sandy clays of the Reading Beds, in modern terms the Lambeth Group, with the Upnor Formation at their base and its Bullhead Bed of large glauconite-coated flint nodules resting on a chalk sea floor riddled with borings. In the mine the chalk is blocky, in beds of about a third of a metre and upwards, with very prominent layers of flint nodules every half-metre or so. There are strong joints in at least two orientations, and small faults, none displacing the beds by more than about a third of a metre.

Geological setting: Sedimentary Beds and Seams (well documented example)

Workings

Galleries of the order of five metres high and three to four metres wide, reaching perhaps nine metres at the deepest point, on roof-support pillars of irregular shape and size which to some extent follow the joint pattern — joint planes were used as pillar sides, which saved work at some cost to the roof. Floor levels vary by several metres and the original floor is buried through much of the mine under waste chalk, piled right across galleries no longer needed and banked along one side of those still in use. A few galleries end in recognisable low miners' benches. Almost no flint was left underground: it was taken out and sold for building and for roads. The shaft used for access since 1977 is about a metre across and is clearly a ventilation shaft, too narrow and too badly placed to have been the working one; the main entrance was probably a brick-lined haulage shaft now lost behind a fall. The two northern mines have passages up to twenty feet high averaging fifteen wide, and two wide brick-lined shafts, capped and locked.

Closure

No closure date is recorded. The dates written on the walls of the northern mines run from the 1890s onwards, and the brickfield had gone before the housing arrived in the late 1970s.

What remains

Intact and accessible to permit holders, by a fixed steel ladder of about sixteen metres in a narrow shaft below a locked iron cover, arranged through the local caving club. Subterranea Britannica visited and reported on the southern mine in 2003. The ground above is housing and a scout hut. Chalk mines elsewhere under Reading have not fared as well: those at Field Road, Coley partly collapsed in the first two years of this century and caused extensive damage, and further ground collapses followed at Palmer Park.

Nothing of the brickworks but a length of old brick wall in rat-trap bond along part of the Kiln Road frontage; the mine shafts are capped and locked.

Redevelopment

The Rose Hill brickfield site is now residential development, protected housing and scout land in Jefferson Close and Wordsworth Court.

Recorded claims

Individual factual claims, each attached to the source(s) that support it below. Where sources disagree, both are kept.

• Chalk mining around Reading was often done in conjunction with brickmaking, chalk and clay occurring together; a percentage of chalk was added to the brick clays before firing to counteract shrinkage, and chalk was also burnt for lime and spread raw on the fields. ^1,2
• The shaft now used for access was rediscovered in 1977 by earthmoving machinery working on the surface, and the site and mine were investigated over the following five years. ^1,2
• The mine's tunnels are generally about five metres high and three to four metres wide, reaching perhaps nine metres at the deepest point, on irregular roof-support pillars that to some extent follow the jointing. ²
• Very little flint was left in the mine, most having been taken out and probably sold for local buildings and as roadstone, while large volumes of small chalk remain piled on the floors and across disused galleries. ²
• One or both of the interlinked northern mines on the same site are known to have been used by Reading Council for the secure storage of documents during the Second World War, and corrugated iron shelters, a brick-built stove and chimney and tea chests are said to remain below ground. ²
• The shaft rediscovered in 1977 is clearly only a ventilation shaft, being too narrow and badly placed within the mine to have been the working one; a brick-lined vertical haulage shaft, now lost behind a fall, is the more likely main entrance. ²

Photographs & further reading

Sources

1. (secondary) Emmer Green (Hanover) Chalk Mine — Wikipedia
2. (observational) Hanover Chalk Mine, by Paul Sowan, 2 November 2003 — Subterranea Britannica

Record created: 9 September 2026 · Last researched: 9 September 2026