Wantage
Coordinates: 51 ° 35 ′ N , 1 ° 26 ′ W
Wantage is a small town and civil parish in the English county of Oxfordshire . It is located about 25 kilometers south of Oxford in the Vale of White Horse district and has 9767 inhabitants (as of 2001). The Letcombe Brook flows through Wantage and the Woodhill Brook emerges in the northwest of the village.
history
On the basis of potsherds that were found while gardening in Wantage, it can be assumed that the place was already inhabited in pre-Roman times. (See also the nearby Uffington White Horse .) Since Wantage is on the route of an important Roman road from Oxford to the south, it can also be assumed that the place was a Roman settlement. However, a son of the city, King Alfred the Great, who was born in 849 AD, made the town more famous . It is also worth noting that in 2007 one of the hands of the statue of Alfred the Great was removed by strangers. Despite camera surveillance of the entire marketplace, no culprit could be identified.
economy
Wantage has the typical infrastructure for a well-frequented tourist city: There are museums, well-developed restaurants and a lot of arts and crafts. 1982 saw the birth of an early protagonist in the UK solar industry. The initially quite small company "Crystalox Ltd." started developing crystal growing systems in Wantage , but was taken over by the Norwegian company Elkem ASA three years later . Wantage, which was not particularly open to industrial settlements, was soon abandoned as a location. In the nineties "Crystalox" bought itself off from "Elkem" and devoted itself mainly to the development and manufacture of production systems for the production of polycrystalline ingots , before the company itself finally became a supplier to various wafer and solar cell producers in Germany and Japan. After years of cooperation with "PV Silicon AG" in Erfurt, the decision was made in 2002 to found a joint venture and in mid-June 2007 made its stock market debut as "PV Crystalox Solar PLC" based in the neighboring town of Abingdon .
Town twinning
There is a town partnership with the German town of Seesen am Harz in Lower Saxony and with the municipality of Mably in the French Loire department .
Born in Wantage
- Alfred the Great (848 or 849–899), from 871 king of the Western Saxons (Wessex) and from around 886 of the Anglo-Saxons
- Joseph Butler (1692–1752), English bishop of the Anglican Church in Durham
- Lester Piggott (* 1935), jockey and gallop trainer
- Frances O'Connor (* 1967), British-Australian actress
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ The Wantage Website - Wantage Twinning , accessed June 8, 2017