As the New Year is now upon us, I thought to take a look at how some of our previous Wiltshire inhabitants spent their New Years’ Day by taking a look at their diary entries. The authors’ backgrounds range from lords to schoolboys, schoolmasters to reverends, and how different their experiences of New Year were…

Advert from the Wiltshire Times, 1st January, 1910, p.7

It was the plague that was the main concern at the beginning of January in 1666 when Sir Edward Bayntun of Bromham noted in his Commonplace Book on January 6^th  :

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Just lately the Wiltshire Buildings Record seems to have got involved in some big projects. Our latest commission in Salisbury is just such a one. Salisbury city centre is laid out in a grid pattern, all in one go, known as the Chequers. This ancient layout dates from around 1220, when work on St Mary’s Cathedral began. Each chequer has its own colourfully quaint name. Three Swans chequer and Three cups chequer stand side by side above Antelope chequer. Our present project is in Blue Boar Chequer, to the north of the market place.

One of the buildings in the Blue Boar Chequer

Imagine how excited we got, being given the chance to penetrate the interior of one of these historic chequers! As we amble along the myriad streets of Salisbury all we normally get to see are the shop fronts lining the edges, or modern interior shop fittings, and sometimes the historic fabric of the buildings, warts and all, where this has been kept and subsequently exposed in the current trend for nostalgia.

Lloyd’s Chemist is next to Debenham’s, and is sited on the south side of the Chequer, facing the Market Place. This tall, smart building was constructed in about 1740, no doubt replacing an older, timber-framed one, and contains a grand staircase, panelled walls and old fireplaces, none of which you can see from the shop. The front of the building was modernised in the later 19^th century, and the ground floor shop front in the middle of the 20^th century. To find out about the fascinating documents discovered within the buildings, please 'read more'...

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