Old Photographs: Frome Road
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.The Three Horseshoes pub, at the beginning of Frome Road, in the 1890s. Externally at least, little has changed in more than a century; apart from the transport, the main difference is the loss of the large gas lamp.
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Floods
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The River Avon at Bradford on Avon has always been liable to burst its banks. The river rises quickly with heavy rainfall and usually falls just as quickly after a brief flood.
It spills fairly harmlessly over the floodplain above Bradford, with the roads to Staverton Bridge becoming inundated very easily. At Bradford it is...
Read MoreUnclaimed World War 1 Medallions
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After the end of the Great War, in July 1919, Bradford on Avon Urban District Council arranged for medallions to be given to each person from the town who had served in the armed forces. Each was inscribed with the person’s name.
However, a couple of years ago, the present Town Council discovered a box which contained...
Read MoreA New Museum Publication: The Hall
Bradford on Avon Museum’s publications group has come up with another in our series of booklets about local subjects, in conjunction with Ex Libris Press.
Pamela Slocombe’s booklet, which is in a slightly larger format than the previous ones, is about The Hall, the ancient and beautiful mansion on the eastern side of Bradford. It gives a history of the development of the...
Read MoreExplore Bradford: Views
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Bradford Town Bridge with Abbey Mill beyond and the terraces of Tory and the hillside in the background.
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The hillside seen from the railway station. Directly...
Read MoreTwin Town: Norden
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Norden is a town on the North Sea coast of Ostfriesland, Niedersachsen, Germany, on low land near the Dutch border. Its port was once important in foreign trading and still supports a fishing fleet and ferries to the Frisian islands. It had a population of 25,019 at the end of 2011.
Norden and Bradford became twinned in 1969...
Read MoreTwin Town: Sully-sur-Loire
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The small town of Sully-sur-Loire in the Départment of Loiret lies a little upstream on the river Loire from the city of Orléans. It is dominated by its enormous moated château, the seat of the Dukes of Sully. It was originally built to defend a place where it was possible to ford the Loire at low water, but bridged since the 10th...
Read MoreOld Photographs: Trowbridge Road
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Trowbridge Road looking north towards the centre of town.
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At the junction of Trowbridge Road with St Margaret’s Street...
Read MoreIron Age Bradford
The pre-Roman Iron Age in Bradford is represented by an enigmatic site on the top of the hill at Budbury. The name itself includes the Old English word burh, which was used of a fortified site and suggests that there was a recognisable fort there in the Saxon period.
At the time when the land at Budbury was threatened with development in the 1940s, local...
Read MoreOld Photographs: Bradford in the 1960s
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A small collection of black-and-white photographs which belonged to a former Museum Steward and Treasurer. Structurally little has changed since these were taken, but the cars give the date of the pictures -many of which would be regarded as “classic cars” now.
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Read MoreOld Photographs: The Church Lads’ Brigade
The Church Lads’ Brigade was a Church of England organisation that was first set up in 1891. A Bradford on Avon Company had come into existence by 1907 and was associated with Christ Church and with O.P. Skrine. Osmund Percy Skrine (1858-1924) was the seventh son of Henry Duncan Skrine of Warleigh Manor, Bathford and moved to Kingsfield Grove in Bradford in 1905 after a career in Ceylon...
Read MoreGreengrocers & Fruiterers
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Chief among the greengrocers and fruiterers of Bradford was George Brown, who went on to build up a large business that eventually outgrew its premises and moved to Trowbridge and still exists. The advertisement is from 1911, when he was selling from two of what are now known as Pippet Buildings in Market Street.
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Canal Quarry, Frome Road
Canal Quarry had a special significance in the history of science. It was one of the places in the area where the Bradford Clay was found and the fossils that were collected there in the early nineteenth century found their way into collections all over the world. It has gone now, except for a small exposure which is classed as a Regionally Important Geological Site, with an...
Read MoreThe Hall, Holt Road
The Hall, situated on the eastern outskirts of the town, is one of the most important of Bradford on Avon’s buildings.
A house existed here in the mid-13th century and the family who owned it took their name of Hall from it. John Leland, who was reporting on the state of the nation for King Henry VIII, in about 1540 described it as “a pratie stone house...
Read MoreThe Memorial Baths, Bridge Street
As a memorial for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897, it was decided to erect a building containing a swimming pool and baths, for the many people who then did not have one in their own homes. The site was a shabby area of ramshackle workshops in Bridge Street, next to the Town Bridge- so it would be an exercise in both tidying up an eyesore and providing a new facility. The...
Read MoreExplore Bradford: Conigre Hill-Huntingdon Street
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Conigre Hill is part of an ancient line of paths and roads that leads from Church Street via Rosemary Lane to Huntingdon Street and across the fields to Monkton Farleigh and beyond. Conigre is the Wessex word for rabbit warren and there are several localities in Bradford that include the name. The road, now traffic-free, is of...
Read MoreKelston
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Kelston, now a village on the north-western side of Bath in Somerset, was, like Bradford, a manor that belonged to the Abbey of Shaftesbury in the Middle Ages. It seems to have been run as a part of the Abbey’s holdings in Bradford.
No charter granting Kelston to the Abbey has been found, but it was listed in the...
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Churches and Chapels in Bradford
No remains of a Christian church in the Roman period have yet been found, but it has been suggested that a circular structure built on top of a mosaic floor in the St Laurence School Roman Villa was a palaeo-Christian baptistery.
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The Saxon Church, called St Laurence, in Church Street is a small...
Read MoreSchools in Bradford
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Schooling was provided by the priest of Thomas Horton’s chantry from 1524 and survived the chantry’s dissolution in 1540, however its funds were appropriated from the Crown in 1559 towards funding a school in Salisbury. Rents on some pieces of land were given over by Edward Norton [Horton?] to support the foundation of a Grammar School...
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