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Yelde Hall
Municipal building in Chippenham, Wiltshire, England From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Yelde Hall is a public facility in the Market Place, in Chippenham, Wiltshire, England. The building, which was the meeting place of Chippenham Borough Council, is a Grade I listed building.[1]
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The hall was built in around 1450.[2] The design involved an asymmetrical main frontage facing onto the Market Place with the right hand section projected forward; the right hand section, which consisted of two bays, featured a short flight of steps leading up to a doorway in the left bay with a horizontal window above the doorway and two small gables above that.[1] The left hand gable contained a carving of the town arms with the inscription "JS 1776": the initials refer to John Scott who was the bailiff at that time.[2] The right hand gable at one time contained a clock which was taken down in 1851.[2]
The building was originally used as a jail (in the cellar),[3] as a courtroom (on the ground floor) and as a council chamber (upstairs).[1] The Chippenham Savings Bank operated an office in the building on Saturday mornings from 1822.[2]
Following the relocation of the town council and burgess to Chippenham Town Hall in 1834,[4][5] the building became the drill hall for the Chippenham Volunteer Rifle Corps in 1846.[2] The unit evolved to become B Company, 2nd Volunteer Battalion, The Wiltshire Regiment in 1881 and B Company, 4th Battalion, the Duke of Edinburgh's Wiltshire Regiment in 1908.[6][7] The regiment vacated the building when it relocated to the Little Ivy in 1911.[2] However, the building was also used as the headquarters of the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry at this time,[6][8] and continued to be a yeomanry drill hall until the yeomanry moved its headquarters to Trowbridge in 1920.[8]
The Fire Brigade used the east end of the building from 1870 and then almost the whole building from 1911 to 1945.[2] After some restoration work in the 1950s, the building served as the Chippenham Museum from October 1963 until it relocated to the Market Place in 1999.[2]
Following a refurbishment, the building then became the North Wiltshire Tourist Information Centre in March 2003[9] although that concern relocated to a unit adjacent to the town hall in February 2012.[10] It underwent a further refurbishment in March 2012 and then re-opened to the public as an extension of the Chippenham Museum and Heritage Centre in April 2012.[11]
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