The jewel of the Cotswolds

Chipping Campden takes its name from the Saxon campa denu: a valley with cultivated fields, ringed by unfenced hill pastures. The Chipping, meaning market, came later, once the town had one. Eight centuries on, the description still fits.

Experience the Cotswolds

There is evidence of a Stone Age village in Weston Wood, a Roman grave at Kingcombe and a vineyard on the slopes of Dover’s Hill. The Kiftsgate Stone stands on the moot site where local tribes met to settle their affairs. Little more is known of Campden before the Norman Conquest, when the Domesday Book recorded a population of about 300.

In 1185 the Lord of the Manor, Hugh de Gondeville, was granted a market charter by Henry II and set out the plan of the town: a main street following the level ground beside the River Cam, with a gentle curve that still makes the High Street what it is, and regular plots of land called burgages, let for a fee to craftsmen and traders.

The wool trade and its wealthy merchants brought prosperity, and with it St James’ Church, the Almshouses, Old Campden House, Grevel’s House, Woolstaplers Hall and the Market Hall. All of them can still be seen today.

For several hundred years, until the railway arrived, Campden was a vital junction and resting stop between Warwick and Gloucester, Worcester and Oxford. Today’s roads have taken that role away, which is why the town is now so often called the hidden gem of the Cotswolds, on the road from nowhere to everywhere. Named one of the best places to visit in Europe by National Geographic and ranked fifth among the nation’s best high streets, it is no stranger to acclaim.

Why Chipping Campden

Campden has just about everything a visitor could ask of a destination:

• 01A beauty of its own. The historian G. M. Trevelyan called it the most beautiful village street now left in the island.
• 02Five hundred years of buildings, many still in use today as shops and eateries.
• 03Cotswold countryside, villages and attractions in every direction.
• 04A central base for Banbury, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Hereford, Warwick and Worcester.
• 05Good places to stay and eat, from tearooms to fine dining.
• 06Walks in every direction, and the northern end of the Cotswold Way.
• 07Gentle lanes and proper climbs for the cyclist.
• 08Easy to reach, via the M5, M6, M42 and M40, and the Cotswold Line from Paddington and Birmingham.

Early days

Evidence of early life around Campden is limited to the remains of a Stone Age village in Weston Wood and a bronze axe, now in Cheltenham Museum. Walk the Cotswold Way from here and you pass three forts: Shenberrow Hill above Stanton, Beckbury near Hailes Abbey, and Belas Knap, a Neolithic burial chamber from around 3000 BC. The region is thought to have been settled by long-headed farming people in the late Stone Age.

There was a hill fort on Meon Hill near Mickleton, close enough that the Dobunni, the British tribe the Romans found here, certainly knew this valley. Who placed the Kiftsgate Stone, and why, remains unanswered. It stands on the old path from Brailes Clump to Bredon Hill, and some believe it prehistoric.

Notable people

Lords of the Manor, 1053 to 1273

• 1053King Harold became Lord of the Manor of Campden and Charingworth on the death of Edward the Confessor, and died at Hastings in 1066.
• 1066Hugh d’Avranches, Earl of Chester, nicknamed the Wolf, was given the manor by his uncle William I and spent his life pacifying the north and pressing into Wales.
• 1120Richard, Earl of Chester, drowned in the wreck of the White Ship alongside Prince William, heir to the throne.
• 1174Hugh de Gondeville held the manor for the king and developed the town, laying out a market street on a new open site.
• 1199Ranulph de Blundeville went on the Fifth Crusade in 1218. On his death in 1232 his lands were divided between four sisters.
• 1273Roger de Somery, Baron Dudley, left Campden to the husbands of his four daughters. From 1273 to 1544 the estate stayed divided.

The wool merchants

Robert Calf and his family were prominent wool merchants of the later Middle Ages. He built Woolstaplers Hall, opposite Grevel’s House, in 1340. For hundreds of years it served as a wool exchange, drawing merchants from London and as far afield as Florence to buy Cotswold fleeces for shipment around the world.

William Grevel was perhaps the richest and most powerful wool merchant of his day, remembered in the church brasses as a citizen of London and the flower of the wool merchants of all England. Of Norman or Flemish origin, his family settled in Campden around 1276. He built what is now Grevel’s House, lent money to the King, and on his death in October 1401 left a hundred marks for new work at the church and a chapel with four priests to sing mass for his soul.

Sir Baptist Hicks (1557 to 1626), one-time Mayor of London and friend of Charles I, made a vast fortune lending to James I and spent much of it on Campden. He sat in the Commons, was knighted in 1603 and made a baronet in 1620. The Almshouses, the Market Hall, the Jacobean pulpit and Flemish lectern in the church, and the great Campden House were all his. His tomb is in the Gainsborough Chapel.

The wool trade

The hills around Campden proved perfect for grazing, and the local abbeys and monasteries raised huge flocks. Between the 13th and 15th centuries, the peak of Britain’s wool boom, Cotswold fleeces became famous across Europe for their quality, and traders travelled to the market at Chipping Campden to buy them.

Grevel’s House, dating from around 1380, is now the oldest continuously occupied house in the country, and would have been among the first to have chimneys rather than holes in the roof. Many of the town’s finest buildings date from this prosperous period.

St James’ Church

Perhaps the finest wool church in the Cotswolds. A Norman church stood here before 1180; from around 1260 it began a slow transformation lasting nearly 250 years. The nave was rebuilt around 1490 on the old Norman foundations, with a rare great window over the chancel arch, and the 120 foot west tower was added around 1500, making the church a landmark from every approach.

Preserved behind glass are a unique pair of altar frontals from around 1500 and a cope from around 1400, copied by command of Queen Mary for the coronation at Westminster Abbey in 1912. The canopied tomb of Sir Thomas Smythe, Lord of the Manor until 1593 and first Governor of the East India Company, is the most remarkable in the church.

Sir Baptist Hicks’ town

Having bought the land in 1608, Hicks built Campden House and its mannerist gardens at a cost of more than £40,000. Royalists destroyed it in 1645 to keep it from Parliamentarian hands. Two gatehouses and two Jacobean banqueting houses are all that remain. His daughter Lady Juliana Noel lived on at the converted stables in Calf Lane, now the Court House.

He built the Almshouses in 1612 for £1,000, in the form of a capital I. They still house twelve pensioners, each front door shared by two homes. The Eight Bells was built to feed and shelter the men who built them. In 1627 he financed the Market Hall, for those who made their living selling cheese, poultry and butter.

The Old Grammar School was founded around 1440 by John Fereby, who had worked for Henry VI at the time Eton was being founded. By 1547 it had sixty to eighty scholars, and in the 1620s a new school was built on the High Street.

A profile of the town

Chipping Campden sits at the north-eastern end of the Cotswolds, within the Cotswolds National Landscape. The limestone belt runs some seventy miles from Bath to Campden. The parish is really two settlements: the town itself, lying in a bowl with the ground rising steeply to north and south, and the village of Broad Campden to the south-east, its houses strung singly along the lanes.

The High Street shows five centuries of building: the Almshouses of the early 1600s, Grevel’s House from around 1380, Woolstaplers Hall from the 14th century, and frontages from the Middle Ages through to Victorian Palladian. Westington, to the south, keeps its thatched and stone-roofed cottages. Look closely and you will see red brick on the sides and rear of buildings whose faces are all Cotswold stone.

Campden remained an agricultural town until the early 1900s, when the Arts and Crafts movement decamped here from London, bringing at least a hundred workers. The experiment was short-lived but many descendants remain, and the craft tradition with them. In 1919 an old mill by the station became an out-station of Bristol University; in the 1920s it produced the Campden tablet, still used by home brewers today. The site is now Campden BRI, serving the food industry worldwide.

The town also boasts one of the oldest grammar schools in the country, thought to predate Eton, alongside two junior schools and a low crime rate that has changed little in living memory.

Walking through Campden

A circuit of the town on foot, starting and finishing at Grevel House. Allow a leisurely hour, longer if you stop at the church. Look out for the sundials: there are eight to spot, and the Information Centre has a trail.

1. 01Grevel House. The oldest building in Campden, built about 1380 for William Grevel. Note the sundial.
2. 02The Market Hall. Built by Sir Baptist Hicks in 1627 for local traders; his arms and the date are on the gable. The stone pitching of the floor and the roof timbers are original.
3. 03The Town Hall and the Cotswold Way stone. A 14th-century building once used as a gaol and wool exchange, restored for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Beside it, the stone marking the start of the Cotswold Way.
4. 04Lower High Street. Darby’s House, home of the maltster credited with inventing the slide rule; Island House, a 16th-century timber frame never refaced; Elm Tree House, where C. R. Ashbee kept his architectural practice; and St Catharine’s, with stained glass made in Campden by Paul Woodroffe.
5. 05The Old Silk Mill, Sheep Street. Base of Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft from 1902. Working studios remain, including Harts Silversmiths on the first floor, run by descendants of the original craftsmen.
6. 06The Noel Arms and the Old Police Station. The town’s posting house, with an archway onto the old packhorse track to Bristol and Southampton. The 1872 police station now holds the Information Centre.
7. 07The Old Grammar School and Woolstaplers Hall. Founded about 1440, the school bears the arms of John Fereby and Baptist Hicks. Woolstaplers Hall dates from the 14th century, at the height of the wool trade.
8. 08Church Street. The Eight Bells, probably the oldest inn in town; the Almshouses of 1612, twelve houses sharing six front doors; the old cart dip opposite; and Court Barn, now a museum of the Arts and Crafts movement.
9. 09Campden House. Behind the wall, the remains of Hicks’ great house, burnt in 1645. Limestone turns pink when burnt, and you can still find pink stone reused around the town. The gatehouse and the twin banqueting houses with their spiral chimneys survive, restored by the Landmark Trust.
10. 10St James’ Church. Approached along a line of 17th-century limes representing the Apostles. Inside: the great brass to William Grevel and Mariana, the tombs of Sir Baptist Hicks and the Noels, the Flemish lectern of 1618 and the 500-year-old altar hangings.
11. 11Leysbourne and the Ernest Wilson Memorial Garden. Opened in 1984 for the Campden-born botanist who introduced more trees, shrubs and flowers to British gardens than any other collector. Opposite, the Regency facade of Old Maid’s Row hides earlier timber frames. Continue back to Grevel House.