Saving the Town, and the Living Record

The town that came through those centuries whole could easily have been lost in the twentieth. That it was not is largely down to F. L. Griggs, the etcher, who came to Campden in 1903, fell in love with its buildings, and spent the rest of his life defending them. With other artists and craftspeople he formed the Campden Society in 1924; in 1926 he bought Dover's Hill outright to save it from development and gave it to the National Trust; and in 1929 he helped found the Campden Trust to buy and repair threatened buildings. It was conservation before the word was common, and the reason the High Street still looks as it does.

The craft story is told now at Court Barn, the museum of craft and design that opened in 2007 and gathers the makers who have worked in and around Campden since Ashbee - the Guild, the Harts, Robert Welch and many more. And Robert Dover's games came back too. They had ended in 1852, when the hill was enclosed; they were revived for the Festival of Britain in 1951, and have run every year since 1966, organised by the Robert Dover's Games Society founded the year before. The Cotswold Olimpick Games - shin-kicking, tug of war, a torchlit procession - are held again each spring on Dover's Hill, on the Friday after the Spring Bank Holiday.

So the town today is not a museum of itself. It is a working place with a very long memory: silver still made by hand in Ashbee's Mill, a market hall still standing where the cheese was sold, a games still run on the hill, and a History Society that has kept the record for decades. This hub is built with that Society, and with people like Carol Jackson, who carry the town's story. The aim is simple and large: to make the fullest, truest record of Chipping Campden that exists anywhere - and then to do the same, town by town, across England.