Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire

The gift of water

As the rain drizzles down in the Cotswolds, we’re apt to take for granted the regular clean water supply that we expect, in most of Europe, to be just there, at the turn of a tap. We grumble, of course, when they dig up the road to lay new water pipes, as they’re doing in my town at the moment. But our pipes have been there a while: in this town ‘the water’ was laid on in the Victorian period when the local bigwig and benefactress decided that installing piped water would be a good way to celebrate Queen Victoria’s jubilee in 1887. Many villages, such as the one where I was born in Lincolnshire, had to wait until the 1960s.

Some places were more fortunate. The mysterious structure in my photograph is on the hill outside the Cotswold town of Chipping Campden. It looks rather like a village lock-up, but it’s actually a conduit house, built as part of a system of pipes that brought spring water to the town. It has, apparently, a water trough inside it – such structures marked the point where one or more pipes from springs converged and exit pipes carried the supply on to the users. There might also be a holding tank.

Campden’s conduit house is built, like most of the rest of the town, of Cotswold stone. The virtually windowless construction, with stone flags attached firmly to make a vaulted roof, is indeed as secure as a lock-up, and not without reason. The people who built this did not want vandals getting in, or slates blowing off so that the supply could be contaminated. So it’s built to last, and its builders of c 1612 seem to have known what they were doing. It certainly proved durable, staying in use until the early-20th century. The water supply it served was the gift of another benefactor, Campden’s generous and aqueously named Sir Baptist Hicks, to whom the town is variously and continuously thankful.

Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire

Uncommon markets (3)

In contrast to the grand town hall of the previous post, here is a market hall, plain and simple, in the middle of the beautiful Cotswold town of Chipping Campden. The market hall was put up in 1627 by Sir Baptist Hicks, a London mercer who built a mansion for himself at one end of Camden and made various gifts to his adopted town. The building was intended for use for the sale of poultry, butter, and cheese. It consists of little more than three rows of arches, a stone floor, and a roof, but they are done with such simplicity in golden Cotswold stone, that the building provides the perfect centrepiece to the main street.

Chipping Campden, which came to prominence as a centre of the wool trade in the late Middle Ages, is one of the most perfect of all the Cotswold towns. That it is still so perfect is due in part to the numerous craftsmen and artists who lived there in the early-20th century, many of whom came to Gloucestershire under the auspices of C R Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft. It was Ashbee who repaired the market hall in 1903 and the artist F L Griggs, another Campden resident, who designed the war memorial, partly visible to the right of the picture. This is a place that has inspired artists and artisans, and they have repaid it with the work of hand, heart, and head.