Let us deal with the confusion first, because it is everywhere and it is worth clearing up. The building on Load Street with the wrought iron gates is the Guildhall. It is not the Town Hall. Bewdley’s Town Hall was up on Wyre Hill, and there is still a pub nearly opposite where it stood.
Why the mistake is so easy to make
Because the Guildhall did the job people associate with a town hall. For centuries the town’s most important business was conducted here, and the borough’s civic life ran through the building. Bewdley’s coat of arms is worked into the wrought iron of the gates, and the town’s ancient charters, the oldest granted by Edward IV in 1472, were kept here.
But tradition places the original town not down by the river at all but up on Wyre Hill, at a distance from the Severn, and an ancient inn up there, formerly the Shoulder of Mutton, was still being called the Old Town Hall in the nineteenth century. It had a projecting upper storey carried on pillars with a covered market underneath, which is exactly what a small medieval town hall looked like. Edward I granted a market every Wednesday and a fair on St Margaret’s day, and that may well be where they were held. The main road ran past it until 1753.
The confusion is old and it is still repeated in print, so if you correct somebody on it you are on firm ground.
The building
The Guildhall you see is not medieval. The present sandstone building was put up by Lord Ward in 1908, replacing what stood there before. What it now houses, along with the Tourist Information Centre, is part of Bewdley Museum.
The Shambles
Behind the Guildhall runs the Shambles, an eighteenth century range that is now the heart of the museum’s craft workshops. Shambles is the old word for a row of butchers’ stalls, and that is precisely what this was.
It is worth understanding where the butchers used to be, because it changes how you picture Load Street. The middle of that wide street was not empty. A long range of timber buildings ran down the centre of it, containing the barley market, the shambles and the butter cross. Load Street was not a broad Georgian boulevard with room to breathe; it was two carriageways with a market block down the middle. The whole range was taken down in 1783.
The scale of the butchery trade at its height is startling. There were once thirty-two butchers holding stalls in the shambles. By the 1880s the market that remained had two.
The black hole
At the far end of the Shambles were the borough’s prison cells, known locally as the black hole. They appear in a newspaper report of 1854, when three drunken carpet weavers were arrested after a night of throwing stones at doors in Welch Gate, and one of them was so far gone that a trolley had to be fetched to convey him there. Georgian jail cells survive on the museum site and are part of what visitors see.
Brass, and everything else
The museum complex around the Guildhall holds one of the oldest brass foundries in the country, alongside the jail cells, the Shambles, the gardens and, in the garden, a Second World War air raid shelter built in 1940 for the staff of the Post Office next door.
That is a fair summary of the place, in fact. One site holding the civic building, the butchers’ row, the cells, a brass foundry and an air raid shelter, which between them cover about five hundred years of how this town actually worked.