Market Hall, Chipping Campden

The Market Hall stands in the middle of the High Street in Chipping Campden, an open stone arcade that Sir Baptist Hicks built in 1627 to shelter the sellers of butter, cheese and poultry. In the 1940s the Campden Trust bought it to stop a sale to America and passed it to the National Trust. It is listed Grade I, and the Cotswold Way starts beside it.

History

The Market Hall was a produce market, not a wool market, as is sometimes said. The Chipping Campden History Society describes it as a butter market where women sold eggs, butter, cheese and bread under cover, and it may stand where an earlier market cross once stood.

Sir Baptist Hicks

Its builder made his fortune in London. Hicks was a wealthy silk mercer who supplied the Court, and Eton College's archive records him in 1585 as the mercer paying rent on the White Bear in Cheapside. He bought the manor of Campden in the first decade of the seventeenth century. In Campden he built a new manor house beside the church in 1612, gave the church its pulpit and lectern, had legal documents drawn up to protect the money John Fereby had left to found the grammar school, and built the almshouses on Church Street. The Market Hall, dated 1627, came two years before his death in London in 1629, and it carries his arms in a panel between the two gables at its east end, the same arms that are carved in the middle of the almshouses.

Carts, a sale and a rescue

By the 1850s the hall had become a store for carts: the history society has records of townspeople paying to keep the postman's mail cart there in 1857 and 1858, and early twentieth-century photographs show carts inside. Stone balustrades were added between the roadside arches in a renovation early in the twentieth century.

In the 1940s the owner offered it for sale, and a buyer planned to take it down stone by stone and ship it to America. The Campden Trust, the conservation society founded by the etcher F L Griggs, bought it first; a reader's note on the history society's page, citing Whitfield's history of the town, gives the year of the offer as 1942 and says it passed to the National Trust in 1944. The Trust owns it today. In December 2017, after the town's Christmas tree had gone up, the arm of a JCB struck it; the repair, in limestone from Oathill Quarry near Temple Guiting, was finished in December 2018.

What to look for

The hall is a double arcade of ashlar, five arches by two, under a stone slate roof with three gables on each long side. Pyramid finials stand on the gables and the corners. Look for:

• Hicks's coat of arms in an ogee-headed panel between the two east gables
• The inner row of chamfered stone piers on tall plinths, which carry the valley of the roof
• The cobbled floor, pitched paving in the listing, which the history society says is original and undisturbed since it was laid
• The roof, where the history society notes that each stone slate is pegged to a wooden strut; the waggon ceiling has lost its plaster

Stand at the east end and look down the High Street to see how the hall sits in the widening of the street where the market was held, with Grevel's House and Woolstaplers' Hall a short way along.

Visiting

The Market Hall is open in the street at all hours and free to walk through. The floor is uneven pitched stone. Public toilets with an accessible cubicle on the RADAR scheme are on Sheep Street, a few minutes away.

Getting there

By car, park in Back Ends, a lane behind the High Street, where the Cotswolds National Landscape asks walkers to park, or in the Market Square car park (GL55 6AW) beside the hall, which is free for the first 20 minutes, then charges from 7am to 7pm every day, takes cards or phone payment only and charges Blue Badge holders too. Stagecoach buses 1, 1A, 2 and 2A stop in the town on the way between Stratford-upon-Avon and Moreton-in-Marsh station, about every one to two hours from Monday to Saturday and less often on Sundays.

Several of our walks start or pass here:

• The Cotswold Way, 102 miles (164km) to Bath, starts beside the hall at a limestone marker stone carrying the National Trail acorn
• Chipping Campden and Dover's Hill, a 4.5-mile (7.2km) loop, starts at the hall
• Chipping Campden from Broad Campden comes along the High Street past it
• Chipping Campden to Blockley starts outside the Noel Arms, a few steps away

Nearby

The hall is the centre of the High Street. St James's Church, the gateway of Old Campden House and the almshouses, all Hicks's work or his gifts, are a few minutes away along Church Street, and Dover's Hill is the first climb on the Cotswold Way. For tea, the Bantam Tea Rooms are a few steps away, and so are the Noel Arms and Cotswold House. Court Barn, on Church Street, is the museum of the Arts and Crafts makers who came to Campden in 1902. Our guide to Chipping Campden covers the rest of the town.