The parish church of St Mary is a grade II listed Victorian gothic building, built in 1869 by Richard Armstrong on the site of a much older church, including the remains of a Saxon tomb.[3]
Geography
The south and south-east half of the parish consists of farms with a small percentage of woodland and is bisected by the Foudry Brook and is adjacent to the Reading to Basingstoke Line which is more than 40% on raised embankments but in the far south is in a cutting. The linear village of Stratfield Mortimer climbs Mortimer Hill which rises westward from the Foudry Brook. It has no fixed formal or historic boundaries with Mortimer Common (often colloquially referred to simply as Mortimer), the more populated parts of the parish are located at the top of the hill.
The main settlement in this parish is Mortimer Common which has a surgery, dentist, pharmacy, a post office, a hardware shop, Co-op supermarket, Morrisons convenience store, travel agent, Chinese/fish and chips take away, the Church of England parish church of St John the Evangelist and Mortimer Methodist Church. St John's Church was built in 1881 by Richard Benyon of Englefield House.[2]
Next to the church is St John's Infant School, now federated with St. Mary's Junior School which is down the hill, nearer the station. At the centre of Mortimer Common, in The Fairground, are 20 acres of land managed by the parish council for public recreation.
The large house, Mortimer Hill, is the historic home of the Hunter family. There are three pubs in the village, each on one of the three main roads through the village: The Horse and Groom in The Street opposite Mortimer Fairground, The Victoria Arms in Victoria Road and The Turner's Arms in West End Road. A new Mortimer village hall with a cricket pavilion has been constructed on the Fairground, it is available for hire. There is also the St John's Hall, that houses the Mortimer Pre-School, holds amateur dramatic shows and is available for hire.
Mortimer West End
Before the mid-nineteenth century when parishes were only ecclesiastical, Stratfield Mortimer was a cross-county parish: the Hampshire part was known as Mortimer West End.[citation needed] It became an ecclesiastical parish in 1866> and acquired its own civil parish in 1894.[6] A faint vestige of this is that Stratfield Mortimer ecclesiastical parish today includes Wokefield Common and a small uninhabited fraction of Mortimer West End.[7]
Mortimer Tennis club, play from 2 courts on the Fairground. Mortimer Cricket Club, play out of the Mortimer village hall on the Fairground. Mortimer Football Club, play on the Alfred Palmer Memorial Field to the west of Mortimer, beside The Turners Arms. The local golf course is at Wokefield Park.
Demography
2011 Published Statistics: Population, home ownership and extracts from Physical Environment, surveyed in 2005[1]