.
Bradford on Avon Museum Publications
Bradford on Avon Museum, Wiltshire
.
Bradford on Avon Museum publishes a series of booklets and books about subjects that relate to the heritage of the Town and the Hundred of Bradford and to the Museum’s collection. The list grows steadily and new titles appear frequently.
Copies are usually available from the Museum and the Library, or contact Museum Trustees Val Holden (tel: 01225 869159) or Chris Dale (07791 589801). Ex Libris Bookshop in the Shambles in Bradford also holds copies of most titles (the link opens a new tab).
.
The first in the Museum’s series of booklets is, appropriately, about the chemist shop, the preservation of which provided the stimulus for founding the Museum.
“The Christopher Pharmacy”, by Ivor Slocombe and Roger Clark, outlines the history of the chemist shop and gives information about some of its contents and how the shop functioned.
£2.50
.
Our second booklet- “Lost Pubs of Bradford on Avon, a walker’s guide” by Roger Clark, the Honorary Curator- is a guided trail around the town looking at the many places where pints are no longer pulled. It is illustrated with old and new colour photographs and a map.
£2.50
.
.
Bradford on Avon printers and town directories is the work of Roger Jones, who as the publisher Ex Libris Press has himself had plenty of experience of the printing industry. He gives a history of some of Bradford’s printers, illustrated by examples of their work, drawn from some of the town directories they produced.
£2.50
.The booklet Abbey Mill gives a history, illustrated with many photographs, both historic and full-colour new ones, of the the factories that made up Abbey and Church Street Mills through their three careers as woollen mills, rubber factories and residential flats. The author, David Gazard, is a resident of the complex. Now in its second edition, with a newly-discovered plan of the buildings.
£3.00
The booklet about Bradford’s Saxon Church has been specially written by David Hinton, Professor of Archaeology at Southampton University and is the author of several books on the medieval period. He carried out an excavation at the church which established that there had been a room beneath the site of the southern porticus. He describes the building in detail and discusses its age and purpose. The booklet is beautifully illustrated, including some drawings that were made by the architect James Irvine in the 1860s, before the building was ‘restored’. 2nd edition £3.50
A booklet about The Hall, an ancient mansion in Bradford, is yet another Museum publication, which has been produced in a slightly larger format, in association with Ex Libris Press. It gives a detailed history of the house and its owners, with beautiful illustrations.
Second print run: £4.50
.
Ivor Slocombe’s booklet about Bradford’s bridges -over the river, canal, roads and railway- includes new research from his delving into the Wiltshire & Swindon Archives and many photographs and diagrams.
£3.00
.
.
.Roy Canham details some of the results of the Museum’s recent Heritage Lottery-funded project to map ancient features in part of the landscape of the Bradford Hundred area with amazing images produced by analysing data from the aerial laser survey.
£3.00 This edition has sold out
.
The ninth in Bradford on Avon Museum’s series of booklets focuses on the early development of the woollen cloth industry around Bradford and is written by Kenneth Rogers, who is a well-known expert in this field and a former Archivist of the Wiltshire Record Office. As with our other publications, it is full of authoritative information and is well illustrated.
£3.00
.
This publication, Geology, landscape and building stone around Bradford-on-Avon, is about the foundations of our local area. It has been written by Isobel Geddes who was the author of a book about the geology of Wiltshire a few years ago.
Like the others in the series, this booklet is lavishly illustrated.
£3.00
.
This Museum publication is slightly different from its predecessors, because it is a scholarly work that goes deep into its subject and is full of information about a fascinating time in our history.
Anglo-Saxon Bradford-on-Avon, by Martyn Whittock and his daughter Hannah, experts on the history of the period, is the first of our Monograph Series.
It is on sale at the Museum and Ex Libris Bookshop at £3.00
.
Bradford-on-Avon: the medieval town is 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 Record.
It is on sale in the Museum and at Ex Libris bookshop for £3.00
.
.
The buildings of Barton Farm, Bradford-on-Avon by Pam and Ivor Slocombe is a booklet about the important group of medieval farm buildings that formed the centre of the Abbey of Shaftesbury’s Bradford estate. It has been produced in a slightly larger format, like The Hall booklet and contains many photographs, drawings and plans and scholarly information.
It is on sale in the Museum and at Ex Libris bookshop for £4.75
.
Bradford Leigh Fair: 200 years of trade revelry, wickedness and vice by Robert Arkell was published in April 2018 tells the history of what was once one of the largest fairs in Wiltshire, accompanied by all manner of goings-on that are suggested by the subtitle.
Price £4 at the Museum and Ex Libris bookshop.
.
.
.
.
The Museum is also selling Barton Farm: the last thousand years by Margaret Dobson and Gareth Slater, published by the Bradford on Avon Preservation Trust £4.00
The Iron Duke by Roger Clark – a short illustrated history of the rubber calender machine which has been returned to Bradford on Avon £1.00
Riding on rubber; the story of Bradford on Avon’s world-renowned rubber industry by Dan Farrell is the Museum’s biggest publication so far, more a book than booklet with 112 pages. It charts Bradford rubber from the early days to the end of production in the 1990s with much original archival research and profuse illustrations. Publication, as part of the Iron Duke project, has been funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Price £9.75
.
.
.
.
.
.
,
Rubber Town by Dan Farrell of the Moulton Bicycles Company. Following on from the success of Dan’s Riding on Rubber book, which appeared in the wake of bringing the Iron Duke calender machine back to Bradford on Avon, he has produced a new edition with more information about the founding and development of the town’s pioneering rubber industry.
134 pages with many illustrations. Price £10
.
.
.
.
Gill Winfield, once a Trustee of the Museum, has written Whoosh! a book to help children explore the long and interesting story of Bradford on Avon. Billy and Bella, new residents of the town, are guided through it by the Memory Keeper, who shows them a series of episodes in town life from the Iron Age to modern times, all beautifully illustrated by local artist, Mike Dickinson.
The book’s publication is a collaboration between Bradford on Avon Museum and Bradford publisher Ex Libris Press and is available from the Museum and Ex Libris Bookshop in The Shambles, price £5.
The publishers are grateful to the Colonel William Llewellen Palmer Educational Charity for a grant towards the book’s production.
The third in our larger format scholarly Monograph Series is about the archaeology and history of the one-time Manor of Budbury, which occupied land on the hillside and plateau above the town. The booklet details the development of the town in that direction, covering an area from the Bath Road almost to Winsley and down to Newtown, including the Roman Villa at St Laurence School, the surviving manor house, Bearfield, Winsley Road and Tory. Well-illustrated with photographs, old and new and maps.
Second printing, price £8.50
.
.
.
New for 2021 is the fourth in the Monograph series -in-depth treatments of selected subjects of local interest- is this book by Ivor Slocombe, one of the Museum’s Trustees. Bradford-on-Avon Probate Inventories offers a unique insight into the way people used different rooms within their homes, by giving details of the contents of every room in the house and outbuildings. These intimate records come from examination of 89 local inventories of the property and possessions of a deceased person that were required for probate.
136 pages in A5 format. Price £6
..
.
Ivor and Pamela Slocombe’s Bradford on Avon 1500-1700 follows on the story of the town from their previous Bradford on Avon: the Medieval town. As a volume in our Monograph Series, it is full of detail and research and referenced, together with many illustrations.
58 pages, price £7.50
.
Another booklet from Ivor Slocombe, this one is a very useful reproduction of the information on owners, occupiers and size of properties in Bradford on Avon that was gathered for the Tithe Map of 1841. It comes in A4 format, so the six pages of enlargements of the town section of the map are much easier to read than the map published by Gee Langdon in 1976.
32 A4 pages, price £5.00
.
A vanished world by Margaret Dobson follows on from Dan Farrell’s histories of the rubber industry in Bradford on Avon by examining the social history of the men and women who worked for it and its importance to the people of the town. Using oral history interviews with former workers, it describes the industrial relations and conditions within the company and the effect of its demise. There is a section about the Spencer Moulton-Avon Sports club, which still exists.
.
.
.
.
The deserted village of Rowley is now represented by earthworks just to the south of the modern village of Westwood. It and another adjacent manor called Wittenham became depopulated during the late medieval and Tudor periods. In a book in the Museum’s scholarly monograph series, Robert Arkell examines what is known of the history and archaeology, including the investigations by him and members of the Museum’s Research Group to find Rowley’s parish church and manor house.
.
.
.
Bradford Millennium Embroidery
.The Museum’s very first publication, before the current series, was a booklet about our Millennium Embroidery Project. It gives background information and an illustration and description of each of the 12 panels that were based on paintings by the late Jeanne Walpole.
£3.00
A series of postcards based on some of the Millennium Embroidery panels has almost sold out.
..
.
The Museum has close associations with two substantial books about the casualties from Bradford and surrounding villages in the two World Wars of the 20th century. “Names in Stone” 1914-1918 (now sold out) and 1939-1945 by local historian Jonathon Falconer are full of biographical detail and are on sale in the Museum, which has already received a donation from profits on sales.