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…