Trowbridge

Trowbridge, population 37,000, is the county town of Wiltshire, although it is now the unitary authority of Wiltshire rather than the county council. So it makes sense to start our visit at County Hall in Bythesea Road (which incidentally is nowhere near being “by the sea”).

 

County Hall was designed by the architect Philip Hepworth and was completed in 1940. The clock is housed on a wooden lantern.

                                     

                                        

 

Time to go down in scale from County Hall to Town Hall, the latter sitting in the town centre on Market Street.

 

Not knowing anything about Trowbridge before my visit, I was surprised that it was once a major mill town making cloth, known as the Manchester of the West. It therefore makes sense that the Town Hall was funded by a local cloth merchant by the name of Sir William Roger Brown, who offered to pay for the building as a celebration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (an event which led to many new clocks appearing across the country, either on buildings such as Trowbridge’s Town hall or on stand-alone clock towers).

                                     

The building was opened on 14 June 1889. The clock is on what is described as an Italianate style tower.

 

The clock was provided by J.W.Benson Ltd. This company seems to have been a watch rather than a clock maker, so it is not clear whether they manufactured or merely supplied it.

 

The building is now run by the Trowbridge Town Hall Trust and has a variety of community functions.

 

 From a pair of municipal buildings we now move to a brace of ecclesiastical ones.

 Holy Trinity is known locally as the Church on the Roundabout as it was encircled by a road “improvement” scheme in the 1970s.

 

The building is Grade II* listed and was consecrated in 1838.

 

Our second church is St James in the heart of the town.

 

The original church was built in about 1200, but the current building dates from the 14^th century onwards, with major restoration in 1848.

 

The Grade I listed building has a spire reaching 49 metres, second only in Wiltshire to Salisbury Cathedral.

 

The local museum has a nice model of the church, including of course the clock.

 

Two municipal buildings, two churches and finally two retail buildings. First is the Tesco superstore.

 

Not an exciting building, but the clock face looks good in blue and gold.

And finally we have this clock on Silver Street,