ABC of Chippenham: Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Thanks to the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Chippenham is a railway town. He decided that his Great Western Railway line from London to Bristol - nicknamed 'Brunel's billiard table' at the time because the line is relatively flat compared to others in the UK - would be routed through the town and was also based here for a while whilst it was being built. When you visit many of our towns and cities, places of heritage are often marked with a blue plaque like the one above. The temporary presence of one of our greatest Britons ever was deemed to be of significance by the Civic Society.

The plaque is placed on a small building to the side of the railway station. This was Brunel's office which he used whilst supervising the works in Chippenham and the surrounding area. He left quite a mark on the town in 1841, but you'll have to wait until a later letter to see exactly what that was...

This is for ABC Wednesday and is the ninth in my themed round of posts about Chippenham.

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ABC Wednesday -- I

It can be really interesting to follow the names of quilt blocks. I post this one for the letter I because one of its names is Indian Meadow. It is listed with that name in two early historic quilt resources. But the same sources and another also call it Queen Charlotte's Crown. One other has it as Basket Design.

Meanwhile, both of these blocks are listed in some sources as Indian Meadow (along with other names.)

Basically, it means that a similar block may be developed in different times or regions and be given different names.

Why any of them would be called Indian Meadow is a good question.

 ABC Wednesday can be found here.

ABC of Chippenham: History Centre

It's been really hard choosing this week's H because there are quite a few good ones to choose from as far as Chippenham's concerned. In the end I plumped for the History Centre because I went there for the first time whilst researching D for Donkey Field.

As you can see the centre is for the whole of Wiltshire and is one of the latest (and largest) public buildings to be built in the town. It's built on part of the old cattle market (which closed in 2004) close to the railway station and opened to the public in October 2007. The move of the various records held at Trowbridge (our county town) and Salisbury to Chippenham was quite controversial at the time because whilst Chippenham has relatively good transport links, it's neither in the centre of Wiltshire, nor is it the largest (which is Swindon) or the county town.

The History Centre is the focal point for all heritage services relating to Wiltshire and Swindon which includes the collections of the county's local studies library, museums service, archaeology service, Wiltshire buildings record and the conservation service. It has purpose built archive storage and research facilities and covers an area of about 5 football pitches (4,000 square metres) in size. All kinds of items are stored there: documents, film, microfiche, newspapers, video, CDs etc. etc. Some of the more unusual items can be found on the Records Office blog.

About 10,000 people use the archives each year, many of whom are researching their family history and have found links to Wiltshire. My visit was slightly different as I was trying to find out some of the history of a local name and area of land.

Like all visitors I had to register on arrival (unless they've done so already) and store my coat and bag in one of the lockers provided. No food or drink is allowed inside the archive area in order to help preserve the materials and I was only allowed to carry a notebook and pencil. I then asked one of the staff on duty about my query who then scurried off to find the right set of indexes for us to look through.

As my query was about land belonging to the previous Chippenham Borough Council, I was told at the outset that it was highly likely that the information I wanted would be at the Town Hall in the middle of town as the town council have decided to store those records there instead of making them available at county level.

However, there was just one likely looking reference in the index which I then ordered up from the archive storage area. I was then shown into the 'inner sanctum', the silent study area where a few people were seated at tables making notes from various books. After about 10 minutes my document arrived tied up with white ribbon and I was able to find just what I needed for my letter D :)

I'm hoping they'll have behind the scene tours for the national Heritage Open Days in September as this is the most fascinating of places.

This is for ABC Wednesday and is the eighth in my themed round of posts about Chippenham.

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ABC Wednesday -- H

Eight Hands Around

Pattern originally published in 1929. Also known as Swing in the Center and Joy Bells.

ABC Wednesday is here.

ABC of Chippenham: Goldiggers

I have a confession to make: what you're looking at isn't Goldiggers at all. It's 'son of Goldiggers', the development which replaced it in 2005. When we moved to Chippenham in 1984, Goldiggers was the place to be at weekends. You might have 'been' there too as it was frequently where
Sight and Sound In Concert was recorded for BBC TV in the 1980s.

Goldiggers started life as the Gaumont cinema, an Art Deco building designed by the cinema architect W E Trent which opened in 1936. It was then was converted to a popular nightclub/concert venue in the 1970s and was owned by Sir Richard Branson in the 1980s.

It also housed The Bit on the Side, a bar which had a trompe l'oeile painting on the outside wall. Inside was a place which drew thousands of clubbers from around the country plus very well-known bands to perform there such as The Smiths, The Boomtown Rats and The Style Council (here's a longer list for your perusal). This video shows the late Gary Moore in action, so you get an idea of what it was like. There's also a video of it in nightclub mode, but the cameraman had a bit of a problem with the vertical hold ;)

NAH and I went there just once: in 1984 to see Howard Jones (don't ask) in concert. We'd never been to a gig at a nightclub before, so didn't realise there was about 3 hours of disco to endure before the main act came on at 11pm. It was a week night and we'd both just started new jobs, so were a bit concerned how our late night (well actually morning) was going to affect things the next day. As you can see, we survived to tell the tale.

At some point I believe it was sold by Richard Branson and the club started to go downhill and developed a reputation for drugs. Finally sometime in 1999/2000, the lease was forfeited for non-payment of rent, and the building repossessed. Most people in the town wanted the building to remain as a leisure/community facility, but it was finally demolished in 2005 to make way for shops on the ground floor with retirement flats above them - I always thought this decision was a bit daft.

The new building is roughly the same footprint as the old and looking at NAH's photo above (taken just before demolition) I'm wondering if the the windows/stone carvings on the new building are the ones taken from the old. Most of the shops are still empty (this isn't exactly the busy part of Chippenham), though one part was recently rented out to an insurance company. Some of the retirement flats have been the subject for my Unusual Front Gardens series and I used a more conventional angle for the photograph that time ;)

This is for ABC Wednesday and is the seventh in my themed round of posts about Chippenham.

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ABC Wednesday--G is for Goose

In quilt piecing terms, most of us consider this unit to be a flying goose.  In this sketch you can identify the goose and the sky by color--they are even referred to that way sometimes.

There are numerous quilt blocks with something about geese in their names, and nearly all of them contain this element of three triangles. Flying geese are also used in creating a number of stars and other blocks.

Or you can have a whole quilt of flying geese.

ABC Wednesday, Round 8

ABC Wednesday F

This blog has never been about politics.

 Long back in the days before suffrage, in the times when the United States was a young and growing nation--expanding into the frontier, women didn't necessarily have much say in politics. But they could express their opinion in other ways, and in quilting they often did. During the 1844 Presidential campaign, expansion and war were big issues. With dispute over the border in the Southwest continuing, could the nation afford to add possible war with Britain over northern boundaries with Canada to the ongoing unrest with Mexico. Oregon fever swept the nation in the 1840s, and an 1818 treaty allowed for joint occupation of the Oregon territory for Britain and America. At a time whe it was realized that that was no longer going to work, candidate James Polk campaigned on a slogan of 54-40 or Fight. Polk, a relative unknown, insisted that the border would be set at the latitude lines of 54-40. Public sentiment on the issue won him a landslide victory over Henry Clay.

When reality set in after the election, Polk fairly readily agreed to the British suggestion that the border be set at the 49th parallel.

The quilt block known as 54-40 or Fight was a popular statement in support of James Polk and still a great graphic image. I made this one for a project a friend is doing as a fundraiser and memorial quilt for a regional Kiwanis project. What I love about the 54-40 or Fight block is the illusion of curves that you get from the elongated triangles combined with other elements of the block. Do you see the almost circles in the sketch below?

You will find
ABC Wednesday
participants gathered
at the dedicated site.

ABC of Chippenham: Foghamshire

My walk into town takes me past the quaintly named Foghamshire which always makes me smile because I feel a bit Bilbo Bagginsish whenever I see it. It's just off the High Street and apparently used to form part of the main Bristol to London road in days of old when people wished to avoid the (then) unsafe Town Bridge*. Wikipedia also says it formed part of a medieval cloth route, which together with the making of woollen cloth itself was the source of the town's riches at the time.

It's a bit hard to imagine all the hustle and bustle of those times today as it's now a relatively quiet side street, quite narrow in places with some of the quainter buildings of central Chippenham. Sadly it was even quainter still until a number of the 17th and 18th century houses were demolished last century.

I'm getting to know this street a little more after two decades of largely ignoring it. Last December I started a pilates class in the studio housed upstairs in the street's old Temperance Hall. This also ironically hosts the local amusement arcade downstairs.

The naming of Foghamshire is uncertain: 13th century maps show today's Hardenhuish Brook as 'Fokena' running along the back of the street. Old English 'facn'ea' means 'treacherous stream' which may have described the brook's habit of flooding unpredictably. In 1289, there is a reference to 'Fokena' in Chippenham, then 'Fokenstret' in 1370. In the 16th century a more familiar 'Foggamshyre' appears on the map. Another suggestion is the name is derived from Yorkshire Fog, a rough meadow grass which grew in the area and indicates poor drainage.

Today the Hardenhuish Brook which flows past my house has disappeared underground by the time it reaches the centre of Chippenham, only to reappear briefly at its confluence with the River Avon by the town weir. In breaking news it seems there's a proposal to turn the weir into a hydroelectric scheme **.

There are a couple of other F's to share with you today from the archives. Chippenham's main annual event is the Folk Festival held at the end of May and in a previous ABC Wednesday I also talked about the Food Miles at our local Farm shop.

* = My copy of the 1899 Ordanance Survey map for Chippenham (reproduction) shows there was a ford across the Hardenhuish Brook at the end of Foghamshire.

** = the BBC news clip in the link lets you have a good nose around the River Avon and the centre of town

This is for ABC Wednesday and is the sixth in my themed round of posts about Chippenham.

If you're not reading this on vegplotting.blogspot.com, Blotanical or your own web reader such as Bloglines or Google Reader, then the website you're using is a blogpost feed scraper. Why not go straight to the source instead? That's vegplotting.blogspot.com