Bradford-upon-Avon
From World travel guide
Bradford-upon-Avon is a small country town in the county of Somerset, England, in the United Kingdom.
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Built in the same fine oolite limestone as Bath, the town was already a settlement in the Iron Age, and people have been living there ever since. The foundations of a large Roman villa - the centre of an estate many miles across - were recently found in the grounds of the town's secondary school, and it has one of England's few surviving Saxon churches and a magnificent medieval Tithe Barn, crowned with one of the largest stone roofs in the country. But the handsome buildings which climb up the hills from the 'broad ford' (and, since Norman times, the bridge) across the river are mostly Georgian, the legacy of a few hundred years of prosperity as a centre of a textile industry making fine woollen cloth from Cotswold sheep. Towards the end of the Georgian period the industry and its money moved north to Yorkshire and Lancashire, and building largely stopped for around 100 years. The old textile mills were taken over in the 20th century by the rubber industry, making goods like tyres (and the small-wheeled Moulton bicycles, briefly famous in the 1960s and 70s as town runabouts), but that too eventually moved away. Today Bradford is largely a residential town.
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