Didcot is mainly a nineteenth-century creation. The arrival of the Great Western Railway in 1839 and the creation of a junction at Didcot in 1844 had a profound influence on the development of the town, the results of which remain clearly visible to this day.

The station was built about half a mile to the east of the existing village and the development which followed was initially concentrated in the immediate environs of the junction. A link between the nineteenth-century railway village of Northbourne and the station complex of hotels, corn exchange and coal depot did not come until 1903, when the Railway Company constructed the long row of terraced housing on the west side of Station Road. At about the same time the Broadway began to be developed for housing.

By the 1930s the Broadway had become the principal shopping centre for the town, serving the new residential areas which had grown up to the south during the previous decade.

All these momentous changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took place in an area surrounding the original village, but largely separated from it. Even the modern estate developments of the 1950s onwards were principally confined to those pockets of open farmland which still survived at that date and by and large avoided an excessively urban encroachment on the nucleus of the village.

In consequence, it is one of the unexpected charms of Didcot that the village character of the medieval settlement survives unimpaired, even though it is surrounded on all sides by the visible evidence and the causes of its post-industrial expansion.