Paul Stamper

Shrewsbury Market Place and Hall

Shrewsburys late sixteenth-century Old Market Hall—recently restored and returned to public use—is among the most prominent buildings in the town centre and, or so it would seem, a reminder of the towns pre-eminence as a marketing centre in the central Marches in the early modern period. Combining documentary evidence, archaeology, and the evidence of the building itself, this inter-disciplinary study sets out to examine the real reasons for the Halls construction, how it was built, and the way in which it functioned. The paper also looks backwards to the growth of marketing in this part of Shrewsbury in the thirteenth century, and its promotion by considerable civic investment in the 1260s when a new market square was created from what was previously a wet wasteland. Looking forward, it tells the story of the Halls use in the post- medieval period, and of past attempts to deal with inherent structural defects in the original design.

Observations on Modern Gardening by Thomas Whately: An Eighteenth-Century Study of the English Landscape Garden

races, ramps, banks and an amphitheatre. Many aspects of the story are object lessons in the potential dynamism of designed landscapes, not least the coming and going of garden buildings and statues, their renaming and moving, in the 1740s perhaps to introduce an overall iconographic scheme akin to Stowe’s. Studley was a work constantly evolving, and more by trial and error than by grand design. A salutary lesson for all students of designed landscapes.