It is bordered by Oxfordshire to the north, Buckinghamshire to the north-east, Greater London to the east, Surrey to the south-east, Hampshire to the south, and Wiltshire to the west.

The population is concentrated in the east, the area closest to Greater London, which includes the county's largest towns: Reading (174,224), Slough (164,793), Bracknell (113,205), and Maidenhead (70,374).

The historic county included the parts of Oxfordshire south of the River Thames, which formed its northern border, but excluded Caversham and Slough.

There is evidence of prehistoric settlement on the Berkshire Downs, including the Iron Age Uffington White Horse, now in Oxfordshire.

The proximity of the east of the county to London led to development from the nineteenth century, when Slough became an industrial centre and Bracknell was designated a new town.

[3][4] According to Asser's biography of King Alfred, written in 893 AD,[5] Berkshire takes its name from a wood of box trees, which was called Bearroc (a Celtic word meaning "hilly").

It was the only substantial military action in England during the Glorious Revolution and ended in a decisive victory for forces loyal to William of Orange.

The area has historical ties to royalty dating back to the Norman Conquest, when William the Conqueror established Windsor as a royal residence.

The original Local Government White Paper would have transferred Henley-on-Thames from Oxfordshire to Berkshire: this proposal did not make it into the Bill as introduced.

[citation needed] On 1 April 1998 Berkshire County Council was abolished under a recommendation of the Banham Commission, and the districts became unitary authorities.

North-east Berkshire has the low calciferous (limestone) m-shaped bends of the Thames south of which is a broader, clayey, gravelly former watery plain or belt from Earley to Windsor and beyond, south, are parcels and belts of uneroded higher sands, flints, shingles and lightly acid soil and in the north of the Bagshot Formation, north of Surrey and Hampshire.

The open upland areas vie with Newmarket, Suffolk for horse racing training and breeding centres and have good fields of barley, wheat, and other cereal crops.

Less consolidated Palaeogene clays, sands, gravels and silts of the Lambeth, Thames and Bracklesham Groups overlie these rocks in some areas.

[22] The early Eocene London Clay (Thames Group) generally gets thinner as we proceed westwards, though the thickness of beds can vary considerably over short distances.

[18] Where rivers have cut through these beds Lambeth Group layers are found (notably, the Palaeocene Reading Formation, used for brick-making since Roman times but now increasingly scarce in the area after which it was named).

After the Thames broke through the Goring Gap that river and its tributaries the Loddon, Emm Brook, Blackwater and (to some extent) Wey[21] shaped the geography of eastern Berkshire but have not yet eroded away its Eocene cover.

The population is mostly based in the urban areas to the east and centre of the county: the largest towns here are Reading, Slough, Bracknell, Maidenhead, Woodley, Wokingham, Windsor, Earley, Sandhurst, and Crowthorne.

This is a chart of trend of regional gross value added of Berkshire at current basic prices published by the Office for National Statistics with figures in millions of British pounds sterling.

[29] Reading has a historical involvement in the information technology industry, largely as a result of the early presence in the town of sites of International Computers Limited and Digital.

As with most major cities, Reading also has offices of the Big Four accounting firms Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Other major brands with offices in the town include Nintendo, Black & Decker, Amazon, HTC, SSE plc and Abbey Business Centres.

Bracknell is a base for high-tech industries, with the presence of companies such as Panasonic, Fujitsu (formerly ICL) and Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Siemens (originally Nixdorf), Honeywell, Cable & Wireless, Avnet Technology Solutions and Novell.

Bracknell is home to the central Waitrose distribution centre and head office, which is on a 70-acre (280,000 m2) site on the Southern Industrial Estate.

[32] Newbury is home to the world headquarters of the mobile network operator Vodafone, which is the town's largest employer with over 6,000 people.

[33] As well as Vodafone, Newbury is also home to National Instruments, Micro Focus, EValue, NTS Express Road Haulage, Jokers' Masquerade and Quantel.

In Compton, a small village, roughly 10 miles from Newbury, a chemical manufacturing company called Carbosynth was founded, in 2006.

Local news and television programmes are covered by BBC South and ITV Meridian for the Thames Valley from the Hannington TV transmitter.

The course is closely associated with the British Royal Family, being approximately 6 mi (10 km) from Windsor Castle, and owned by the Crown Estate.

[39] Ascot today stages twenty-five days of racing over the course of the year, comprising sixteen flat meetings held between May and October.

A local pub team from the Old London Apprentice took over the ground temporarily and now compete in the Hellenic Football League as Newbury F.C.