Chippenham Town Hall

After significant population growth, largely associated with the cloth trade, Chippenham became a municipal borough in 1835. In this context, civic leaders decided to accept the offer of the local member of parliament, Joseph Neeld, who had recently bought the nearby Grittleton House estate, to pay for a new town hall to replace the ageing Yelde Hall in the Market Place. The site they selected had been occupied by a public house, The Cannon Inn. The new building was designed by James Thomson in the neoclassical style, built in ashlar stone at a cost of £12,000 and completed in 1834. The design involved an asymmetrical main frontage with four bays facing onto the High Street with the right…