The England Archive · Reference Hub
The complete record of an English wool town - nine hundred years of stone, wool, and the craft that still works here.
AR-0014 Begin the storyA beta site · In partnership with
Chipping Campden is the archive’s first deep-partnership town - the beta for how The England Archive documents a place in full and then replicates it across the country. We are building this record together with the Chipping Campden History Society, whose decades of local research stand behind it.
Visit the History Society →Chipping Campden is one of the most complete medieval wool towns in England, a single curving High Street of honey-coloured oolitic limestone that has been added to but never broken since the fourteenth century. Its wealth came from the Cotswold wool trade, and the names of the merchants who made that wealth - chief among them William Greville - are written into its great Perpendicular church and its terraced frontages.
It is also, and this is the rarer thing, the place where the Arts and Crafts movement put down its deepest roots. In 1902 C. R. Ashbee moved his Guild of Handicraft out of the East End of London and into the Old Silk Mill on Sheep Street - some hundred and fifty men, women and children, a whole social experiment, transplanted to a quiet Cotswold town. The Guild itself did not last the decade. But its last working workshop never closed: Hart Gold & Silversmiths is still on the first floor of the Silk Mill, still raising silver by hand, four generations on.
This is the archive's first full town hub - the record of a place where the buildings, the trade that built them, and the living craft that still works inside them can all be documented at once. It is the template for the town hubs that will follow.
Editor's picks
Photograph archive
42 of 42 photographs in the archive. Click any image to open.
From a camp in the valley to a living craft town. Scroll the story, or open any chapter in full. Built with the Chipping Campden History Society.
How a settlement in a fold of the Cotswold escarpment got its name, and how it enters the written record at Domesday.
A market charter, a wide street laid out for trade, and the wool that made Campden one of the richest small towns in medieval England.
A London mercer pours a fortune into the town, builds the hall that became its emblem, and sees his great house burned in the Civil War.
The wool wealth gone, Campden spent two centuries adapting to whatever the wider world sent it - silk, enclosure, a branch line - while the shape of the medieval town held. Not quiet so much as never rebuilt.
An idealist brings a hundred and fifty craftspeople out of the East End of London to make beautiful things in a Cotswold valley - and the workshop never quite stops.
An etcher who loved the place leads its rescue; a museum, a revived games and a working silver bench keep it alive. This archive is the next chapter.
Chipping Campden is one long curving street of honey-coloured stone. Choose a place to read its story - the Market Hall, the wool church, the Silk Mill where the Guild still works, and the hill above the town.
Natural amphitheatre; the Cotswold Olimpick Games
On the escarpment above the town, Dover’s Hill has hosted Robert Dover’s Cotswold Olimpick Games since 1612 - shin-kicking, wrestling, tug of war and the Championship of the Hill, held on the Friday after Spring Bank Holiday and among the longest-running sporting events in England. The etcher F. L. Griggs bought the hill in 1926 to save it from development and later passed it to the National Trust.
Home of the Guild of Handicraft since 1902
The long stone mill on Sheep Street to which C. R. Ashbee brought the Guild of Handicraft from London in 1902 - a fact recorded on a round plaque by the door. The Guild dissolved in 1908, but the building has been a craft workshop ever since. On its first floor, Hart Gold & Silversmiths still raises silver by hand, the last continuously working workshop of the Guild; the ground and upper floors hold a coffee house, a gallery, and other makers.
Hart Gold & Silversmiths →Court Barn - the Guild of Handicraft →
Medieval market cross
The stepped market cross stands in the middle of the High Street, the old centre of the market town and a fixed point in every long view down the street.
Jacobean market house, 1627
Sir Baptist Hicks built the open-arched Market Hall in 1627 for the sellers of butter, cheese, poultry and the like, its twin gabled bays standing in the middle of the High Street on a worn cobble-and-flagstone floor under a fine timber roof. It is Grade I listed and cared for by the National Trust, and is the single most photographed building in the town.
First World War memorial cross
The tall memorial cross stands on the green beside the Market Hall, its octagonal base carved with heraldic shields above panels of the names of the Campden men who did not return from the First World War. Remembrance crosses and poppy wreaths are laid at its foot each November.
Almshouses, 1612
Sir Baptist Hicks built the row of almshouses on Church Street in 1612, an I-shaped terrace of Cotswold stone on a raised pavement leading up to St James’ Church, still in use as homes four centuries later.
Perpendicular wool church, 15th century
Campden’s great Perpendicular “wool church”, largely rebuilt in the fifteenth century on the profits of the wool trade. It holds the memorial brass of William Greville, called “the flower of the wool merchants of all England”, and the monuments of Sir Baptist Hicks and his family. It is the tallest thing in the town and the clearest measure of how much money wool once made here.
The people
✦ Silversmith, third generation, Hart Gold & Silversmiths
✦ Silversmith, fourth generation, Hart Gold & Silversmiths
1882 - 1973
Silversmith, founder of the Hart workshop
1863 - 1942
Architect, designer, founder of the Guild of Handicraft
died 1629
Mercer and benefactor; built the Market Hall
1876 - 1938
Etcher; founder of the Campden Trust
Local institutions
Museum of craft and design
Tells the story of Campden’s craft and design heritage, from Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft to the makers working in the town today.
Charity preserving the Guild’s legacy
Holds the archive of Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft and works to keep its history and its craft tradition alive in Campden.
Preservation charity, founded 1929est. 1929
Founded by F. L. Griggs and others to protect the character and historic fabric of the town; the reason Campden survives so intact.
Charity securing the workshop’s future
Works to secure the future of Hart’s and its building as a piece of living national craft history.
Local businesses
The archive is not a commercial directory. These are the businesses that make up the working town - listed so visitors can find them, and so the record is complete.
Coffee house on the ground floor of the Old Silk Mill.
The studio shop of the designer Robert Welch, who worked in the Silk Mill from the 1950s; cutlery, homeware and design still run from Campden by his family.
The working silver and goldsmith’s workshop on the first floor of the Old Silk Mill - the last working remnant of the Guild of Handicraft. Visitors welcome.
Gallery in the Old Silk Mill showing the work of contemporary makers.
Visit
High Street, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, GL55 6AT
OS grid reference SP 151 391
Public car parks off the High Street and on Back Ends; on-street parking is limited.
Weekday mornings are quietest. The Cotswold Olimpicks and Scuttlebrook Wake fall on the Friday and Saturday after the Spring Bank Holiday.
Map
Open full map on OpenStreetMap
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence.
Further reading
The books and sources the archive's record of the town leans on, and where to find them.
Yale University Press
The standard biography of Ashbee and the fullest account of the Guild of Handicraft.
Lund Humphries
On the Guild’s move to Campden and the experiment in the simple life.
The museum of the town’s craft and design heritage.
Find itDetailed local history of the town, its people and its buildings.
Find itCite this page
AR-0014 · https://englandarchive.org/regions/the-cotswolds/chipping-campden
Suggested citation:
The England Archive. (July 2026). Chipping Campden [AR-0014]. https://englandarchive.org/id/AR-0014
The archive ID above is a permanent handle. /id/AR-0014 resolves to this page and will continue to do so if the URL ever changes. If you are citing one of the photographs on this page, each carries its own IM-NNNN - hover any thumbnail in the gallery above to see it.
Makers Third-generation silversmith at Hart Gold & Silversmiths in the Old Silk Mill, Chipping Campden - the last working workshop of Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft. Grandson of George Hart, who came to Campden with the Guild in 1902; brought into the workshop by his father Henry in 1956. Eighty-seven at the time of the visit, and seventy years at the bench this July, still raising silver by hand.
Makers Fourth-generation silversmith at Hart Gold & Silversmiths in the Old Silk Mill, Chipping Campden. Son of David Hart, great-grandson of George Hart of the Guild of Handicraft. Came to the bench from computer science, joining the workshop in 1990, the year his grandfather Henry died, and now carries the workshop forward.
Makers Silversmith at Hart Gold & Silversmiths in the Old Silk Mill, Chipping Campden - the only one of the workshop's silversmiths not a Hart by blood. Recruited from Chipping Campden School in 1982 while sitting his A-levels, aged eighteen, and apprenticed to David Hart, taught by David and his father Henry. Forty-four years at the bench.
Makers Silversmith at Hart Gold & Silversmiths in the Old Silk Mill, Chipping Campden. David Hart's nephew and William's cousin, son of David's brother Basil. He joined the workshop in 1994, aged eighteen, after two years of motor-vehicle engineering at college - asked in to help with a busy order book while he looked for a job, and at the bench ever since.
The Cotswold Olimpick Games have been held above Chipping Campden since 1612. Shin-kicking, tug-of-war, championship of the hill. One person keeps it going.
A Morning at Hart Silversmiths · 21 May 2026
A working morning in the Old Silk Mill with David Hart, eighty-seven and seventy years at the bench, and his son William, fourth generation - the last working workshop of Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft. JN-0017