Bradford on Avon
Mar. 3rd, 2025 06:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
puddleshark
Town Bridge, Bradford on Avon.
The bridge at present has nine arches, of which the southern two are ribbed pointed gothic and date from the 13th or 14th centuries. On the upstream cutwater between these two arches is a small early 18th century building with a stone dome, which was the town’s two-cell lockup. At the top is a weather vane in the shape of a fish, which is known as the Bradford Gudgeon, although it does not really resemble a real gudgeon. An occupant of the cells was said to be “below the fish and above the water”, referring to the weather vane. John Aubrey, writing in 1660-1670, noted that it was then a chapel...
www.bradfordonavonmuseum.co.uk/town-bridge
From the park at Barton Farm, a riverside path takes you under the railway bridge (where you have to admire the ingenuity of the local graffiti artists), behind the railway station and the swimming pool, to the town centre.
From the riverside path, views of the old riverside mills, and the fine 17th and 18th century houses on the hill above.
Abbey Mills (now converted to retirement flats).
Taking the little footbridge over the river brings you to Church Street, where Holy Trinity Church (grand and medieval) stands opposite the Chapel of St Laurence, a tiny Saxon church that only survived because everyone had forgotten it ever existed.
The twelfth century historian William of Malmesbury reports that the church was standing in the 1120s, but thought it dated back to the time of St Aldhelm (d. 709). A charter of King Æthelred granted Bradford to the nuns of Shaftesbury in 1001, and the church’s architecture suggests it was built for the nuns early in the eleventh century.
St Laurence’s is a characteristic Anglo-Saxon building: tall and narrow with small windows. The extent and richness of its decoration, however, are rare, perhaps suggesting it was designed partly for the relics of Æthelred’s brother Edward the Martyr, which were housed with the nuns at Shaftesbury. Some time later the church, being no longer required, was lost amidst other buildings and only came to notice again in the nineteenth century.
saxonchurch.org.uk/
At the top of the wall, a pair of angels in flight.
Spring.
From Church Street, as you head uphill, you enter a maze of steps and alleys and footpaths.
The steep hillside on the north side of the town, beneath the Budbury plateau, was developed piecemeal for housing in the 17th century out of the estate belonging to the manor of the Methuen family... Until the late 17th century, the only building here was a chapel that had been built at a high point of the hill.
Three new terraces of houses were laid out for the Methuens: Newtown at the bottom, Tory or Top Rank at the top, and Middle Rank between them. Rank is the word used for terraces of houses in this area. There are no roads, only footpaths in front of Tory and Middle Rank, and all three ranks benefit from facing south and have a microclimate that is warmer than the surrounding area and sheltered from winds from the north.
https://www.bradfordonavonmuseum.co.uk/hillside
Tory or Top Rank.
The houses have little walled terrace gardens on the other side of the path, with wonderful views of the town below.
The water-powered mills that gave the town its wealth. Cloth mills at first, and later rubber mills
The Iron Duke is a large rubber calender machine that has been restored and set up in Kingston Road as a memorial to Bradford on Avon’s 150 year association with the rubber industry. It is the largest, certainly the heaviest, object in Bradford on Avon Museum’s collection.
A calender is a machine that is used for rolling materials to give an accurate thickness, or to produce a hard finish, or to bind materials together. Calenders are used in many industries, such as paper-milling and making plastic sheeting. The origin of the name is obscure, perhaps coming from “cylinder” -referring to the rollers.
The Iron Duke is important nationally and internationally as the earliest of its kind outside America and as the foundation stone of the pioneering industry that Stephen Moulton set up here in 1848-9.
Its purpose was to roll rubber into sheets and to bind rubber and reinforcing textile together. It was designed in the USA by William Frost of the Vulcan Ironworks, New York, based on a machine that had been designed in the 1830s by Edwin Chaffee for the Roxbury Rubber Company, near Boston in Massachusetts. All the parts were, however, made in England: the rollers of 3 tons each were cast and machined, with some initial difficulty, by the Thomas Perry & Sons Highfield Foundry in Bilston, Staffordshire...
www.bradfordonavonmuseum.co.uk/iron-duke-2
After exploring the quiet sunlit paths and alleys of the hillside, it is a shock to return to the town centre where the traffic on the main road is ceaseless, a constant flow of nose-to-tail cars in both directions.
To escape the traffic, I nipped down the Shambles, once the medieval marketplace of the town, and now an alley of little independent shops.
The Shambles, with a view of what was once the very grand town hall, but which is now a Catholic church.
On the wall of the old Post Office, a rare survival - the cypher of King Edward VIII (the one who abdicated).
I stopped for tea. The mismatched crockery was nicer than the tea (made with the same superheated water used for coffee, with all the flavour scalded out of it). Perhaps I should have ventured into the posh tea rooms across the bridge instead.
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Date: 2025-03-03 07:15 pm (UTC)!!!
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Date: 2025-03-04 06:16 pm (UTC)Isn't it a gorgeous town? So much history.
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Date: 2025-03-08 10:13 am (UTC)