New Museum booklet: Bradford on Avon 1500-1700
This booklet in our more detailed and referenced Monograph Series follows up on Ivor and Pam Slocombe’s previous volume about the Medieval town, covering the developments over the next 200 years during the reigns of the Tudor and Stuart dynasties when the woollen cloth industry was growing.
Profusely illustrated as usual and crammed with detailed and well-researched...
Read MoreThe lock-up on Bradford on Avon Town Bridge
.
Bradford on Avon Museum Trustee, Ivor Slocombe, has welcomed the Prison History group from the Open University to Bradford to show them the lock-up that sits one of the cutwaters of the Town Bridge. They filmed the interior which you can see here, on the Prison History website page (the link opens on a new...
Read MoreGreat War medallion finds a home
.
.
A second Bradford on Avon Great War medallion has been handed over to the family of a man who did not receive it in 1919.
Jesse Francis Fletcher, who was born in Ashley Road, died from a poison gas attack in France on the 9th August 1916. On 9th August 2018, on the 102nd anniversary of...
Read MoreExhibition: What we bought in the 1950s and 60s
Wednesday 1st August until Friday 31st August.
Bradford on Avon Museum has gone shopping crazy! We have another exhibition on shops showing what housewives were buying in the 1950s and 60s.
As an extension to our current shops exhibition – Brylcreem and Broken Biscuits – in every shop in the town, the Museum is...
Read MoreDiscussion Group: The History of the Bradford on Avon Fire Brigade
Wednesday 4th October, 7:30pm, Library Meeting Room
In October’s Discussion Group, our Hon. Curator, Roger Clark, will talk about the history of the Bradford on Avon Fire Brigade. The Museum holds a collection of items and photographs from the Fire Brigade through the ages, and it promises to be an interesting evening.
Discussion Group covers a...
Read MoreNew booklet: The Medieval Town
Bradford-on-Avon: the medieval town is the latest addition to the Museum’s stable of booklets and the second of our Monograph Series, in which words take precedence over pictures and includes full references. It is the work of Ivor Slocombe, a dedicated researcher of historical archives and his wife Pamela, who draws on years of experience with the Wiltshire Buildings...
Read MoreOld Photographs: Hunting
Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire
.
These three photographs were taken by the chemist Richard Christopher from the upper floor of the building that is now the Dandy Lion public house. They show a meeting of a hunt outside the Town Hall, at the junction of Market Street and Church Street. Some of the population has turned out to see the Duke...
Read MoreA Brewery Outing in 1899
.
.
The photograph shows the members of a party from the Newtown brewery of Willkins Brothers & Hudson on a trip to Ilfracombe on the north coast of Devon in July 1899. We haven’t yet found the exact location, but it is pretty reasonable to assume that it is a pub.
It is not...
Read MoreNew Museum booklet: Bridges of Bradford-on-Avon
The latest in Bradford on Avon Museum’s series of publications is a well-illustrated historical survey of the town’s bridges -across the river, canal and railway. Ivor Slocombe has included new research from his delving into records in the Wiltshire & Swindon Archives and has section on the footbridge which (so far) never was.
The booklet is on sale at the Museum,...
Read MoreOld Photographs: Frome Road
Click on the thumbnail pictures to get a bigger view
.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.
Floods
.
Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire
.
.
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...
Read MoreUnclaimed World War 1 Medallions
.
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 on Avon: Views
.
Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire
.
.
Bradford Town Bridge with Abbey Mill beyond and the terraces of Tory and the hillside in the background.
.
.
Twin Town: Norden
.
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
.
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, once 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
Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire
.
A view towards the centre of town in about 1905 from outside the Plough public house, whose sign can be seen on the right. Further on can be seen the sign of Milsom’s iron foundry, by this time being operated by Berkley Uncles.
.
Click on the...
Read MoreOld Photographs: Bradford in the 1960s
.
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.
Click on the thumbnail pictures for a larger...
Read MoreOld Photographs: The Church Lads’ Brigade
. Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire . 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...
Read MoreGreengrocers & Fruiterers
.
Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire
.
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. The advertisement is from 1911, when he was selling from two of what are now known as Pippet...
Read More