Westbury, Wiltshire
Westbury is a market town and civil parish in west Wiltshire, England. The town lies below the northwestern edge of Salisbury Plain, about south of Trowbridge and a similar distance north of Warminster.
Westbury was known for the annual Hill Fair where many sheep were sold in the 18th and 19th centuries; later growth came from the town's position at the intersection of two railway lines. The busy A350, which connects the M4 motorway with the south coast, passes through the town. The urban area has expanded to include the village of Westbury Leigh and the hamlets of Chalford and Frogmore.
Toponymy
The most likely origin of the West- in Westbury is simply that the town is near the western edge of the county of Wiltshire, the bounds of which have been much the same since the Anglo-Saxon period.The -bury part of the name is a form of borough, which has cognates in many languages, such as the German -burg and the Greek -pyrgos. It carries the idea of a hill or fortified town. In Wiltshire, -bury often indicates an Iron Age or Bronze Age fortified hill fort, and such a site is to be found immediately above the Westbury White Horse.
History
A Romano-British settlement was found at The Ham, in the north of the parish, in the 1870s.The manor of Westbury, and the hundred with the same boundaries, was held by the king at the time of the Domesday survey in 1086. The Wiltshire Victoria County History recounts the fragmentation into manors, and traces their ownership. The ancient parish included Bratton, Dilton, Dilton Marsh, Heywood and part of Chapmanslade. Churches at Bratton and Dilton were dependent chapels of Westbury church.
Westbury centres on its historic marketplace – although markets ceased to be held in the middle of the 19th century – and the All Saints' Church. This was built between c. 1340 and 1380 in a transitional style between the Decorated and Perpendicular Gothic and parts survive, but the church was rebuilt in the 1430s, when a clerestory, three chapels, and most of the central tower were added; the north chapel was given by William de Westbury and his father. The west window was donated in the 19th century by Abraham Laverton.
Westbury was incorporated as a borough by royal charter in 1448.
The charter is lost, although there was a tradition that it had been burned. The borough had a corporation consisting of a mayor, recorder, and thirteen capital burgesses, appointed for life by the corporation, and the duties of the mayor were to act as returning officer for the parliamentary elections and to preside in the borough court. The borough was not reformed by the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, remaining an unreformed borough until 1886, when its corporation was abolished.
The Wilts, Somerset and Weymouth Railway was completed from near Chippenham, via Melksham and Trowbridge, as far as Westbury in 1848. That company was bought by the Great Western Railway in 1850, who over the next few years built lines onwards to Frome, then south to Yeovil and Weymouth, as well as southeast from Westbury to Warminster and then Salisbury. Westbury station was rebuilt in 1899 since it would become more important as a junction the next year, on the opening of the Stert and Westbury line. This was a faster route from London to Weymouth, which at Westbury crossed the route between the south coast and Bristol or South Wales. From 1906 the route from London was also used by trains to Taunton and Exeter.
In 1894, Westbury parish was reduced in size when a new civil parish of Dilton Marsh was created from its western part, and likewise Bratton parish from its eastern part. A further reduction in the north created Heywood parish in 1896. Westbury Urban District was formed in 1899, with the same boundaries as the parish. It was abolished in 1974 as a result of the Local Government Act 1972, its area becoming part of West Wiltshire district. The district was in turn abolished in 2009 on the establishment of Wiltshire Council as a unitary authority.
Leighton House in the south of the town has been home to the Army Officer Selection Board and the Cadet Force Commissioning Board since 1949. Its planned disposal was announced in March 2016, and later that year the MoD estimated that the Selection Board would move to Sandhurst by 2024.
Jurassic fossils
A band of Late Jurassic Kimmeridge Clay runs under England from an outcrop on the Dorset coast and comes close to the surface around Westbury. Many marine fossils have been found in the pits dug for the cement works north-east of the town, notably the almost complete skull and lower jaw of a new species which was named Pliosaurus carpenteri after its 1994 discoverer, Simon Carpenter. This evidence of a large reptile-like ocean predator has been conserved by Bristol Museum. A smaller fossil found in 1980 was named Pliosaurus westburyensis in 1993.Industries
In common with nearby towns in the Avon valley, Westbury was a centre of the cloth industry from the later 15th century. By the start of the 19th century, Dilton Marsh was a centre of hand-loom weaving. The Phipps family were prominent among the clothiers, becoming the largest landowners by the end of the 19th century and occupying Leighton House and Chalcot House. During that century the industry declined, until only the Angel and Bitham mills continued to make fine woollen cloth, having been acquired in the 1850s by Abraham Laverton; both mills closed in 1969. There were also tanning and glove-making businesses, some of them taking over the disused cloth mills for a time in the 20th century.Malting was another important industry from at least the 17th century. In the 1830s there were six firms active in Westbury and Westbury Leigh, but by 1960 only one remained. Iron ore was discovered just north of the town in the 1840s during construction of the railway; opencast mines were developed and furnaces built. Production declined toward the end of the century and had ceased by 1925. A chain of lakes and ponds near The Ham is evidence of the abandoned workings.
Governance
The majority of local government functions are carried out by Wiltshire Council, a unitary authority. The area of Westbury parish is divided into three electoral divisions, each electing one member of Wiltshire Council.Westbury is a civil parish with an elected town council of fifteen members: five for each of three wards with the same boundaries as the electoral divisions. The council has significant consultative roles, in addition to responsibility for certain local services. The chairman has the title of Mayor of Westbury which is a wholly ceremonial role. Around 2020, the council took over the running of the town's play areas, toilets and flower planting from Wiltshire Council, and supplemented reduced services from Wiltshire Council with its own staff. The council also runs the Grade II listed Laverton Institute which serves as the town hall and as a venue for events and meetings.
The parliamentary constituency of Westbury dated back to the 15th century but the name was abandoned in 2010, when the town and most of the former constituency became part of the new South West Wiltshire constituency. The seat has been held by Andrew Murrison for the Conservatives since 2001.
Before the parliamentary reforms of the mid-19th century, Westbury was considered a pocket borough, at one point having as few as twenty-four electors. This status led to gifts to the town from the owners of the parliamentary borough, including the Old Town Hall in the Market Place, donated by Sir Manasseh Masseh Lopes.
Geography
Westbury is in the far west of Wiltshire, close to the border with Somerset. It lies under the northwestern edge of Salisbury Plain; in the past, the name Westbury-under-the-Plain was sometimes used to distinguish it from other towns of the same name. The town is southeast of the city of Bath, approximately south of the county town of Trowbridge and the same distance north of the garrison town of Warminster. Nearby villages are Bratton, Chapmanslade, Dilton Marsh, Edington, Heywood and Hawkeridge, Coulston, and Upton Scudamore; and in Somerset, Rudge and Standerwick.The Biss Brook, which becomes the River Biss as it flows north towards Trowbridge, forms most of the western boundary of the parish.
Suburbs of Westbury include Frogmore, Bitham Park, and The Ham, Chalford, Leigh Park, and Westbury Leigh. Westbury Leigh is sometimes considered a separate village, with its own church and chapel, although it is now a contiguous part of the town. Leigh Park is a large housing estate developed from the late 1990s immediately to the north of Westbury Leigh, with a large medical centre, a community hall, and a district centre with a Tesco Express.
Economy
Until the 1940s, the Westbury Hill Fair was an important annual event, mostly for the sale of sheep.The company which became known as Blue Circle built in 1962 a rail-served cement production plant a short distance north-east of the town, partly in Heywood parish; its two rotary kilns were for a short time the largest in the country. Chalk came from a quarry around 2 km away, and clay was dug from pits near the plant. From 1977 to 1992 part of the plant's fuel came from domestic refuse, and from 2000 tyres were burned. French company Lafarge took over Blue Circle in 2001, and cement production ended in 2009. Most of the site was demolished in 2016 but the cement silos remain in use as a distribution centre, owned since 2013 by Tarmac. From 1961 until its demolition in 2016, the plant's chimney was the tallest unsupported structure in southwestern England.
Businesses at the Brook Lane industrial area, north-west of the railway station, include an Arla creamery which makes Anchor butter. The West Wilts trading estate, in Heywood parish just north-west of Westbury, has Welton Bibby & Baron who claim to be the UK's largest manufacturer of paper bags and similar goods.