Calne, United Kingdom

In the Middle Ages the king's successor as the lord of Calne manor and, as owner of the church's revenues, the treasurer of Salisbury Cathedral, each had the right to hold a market and a fair in the town, with two triangular market places or fair grounds. A modest hospital was provided on a modest endowment from 1248 until it provided no accommodation in 1546 and was sold two years later by the Crown.

Reflecting the large area of the king's estate, until the late 19th century Calne had tithings at Eastmead Street, Quemerford, Whetham, Whitley, and part of Beversbrook, all now within Calne parish; and furthermore Blackland, Calstone, Stock, Stockley and Studley, all now in the surrounding parishes.

Calne suffered an epidemic between 1880 and 1890 and Chaverywell (now in Castle Park) was the only clean water source available to residents.

Calne had a significant woollen broadcloth industry in the 18th century, and evidence of this can be seen set around the triangular green by the parish church, where 24 listed buildings remain, five at Grade II* including the Tounson almshouses for the neediest poor and Georgian era clothiers' houses. Nearby are some of the 14 original mills along the Marden. St Mary's church was extended by the generous donations of rich clothiers and wool merchants in the 15th century.

Houses of the 17th and 18th centuries have external walls of stone and timber-framed walls inside. Most of the stone is limestone rubble, laid with ashlar dressings in houses of higher quality; the walls of many houses were rendered smooth. Until the 19th century, quarries beside the London road northwest and southeast of the town were sources of stone for building.

A relic of 19th century lime extraction, a kiln, exists in the grounds of St Mary's School. This solid marine deposition is chiefly one chemical, calcium carbonate, and is dug in nearby pits for its main use in cement and as fertiliser on acid ground.

The Wilts & Berks Canal linked the Kennet and Avon Canal at Semington, near Melksham, to the River Thames at Abingdon. Much of the traffic on the canal was coal from the Somerset Coalfield. As the canal passed through open country near Stanley, east of Chippenham, a short branch led through three locks to a wharf in Calne. The canal was completed in 1810 and abandoned in 1914.

Calne railway station opened in 1863, the terminus of its own branch line of the Great Western Railway running east from Chippenham, with one intermediate stop: Stanley Bridge Halt. The opening of Black Dog Halt in the early 20th century provided insufficient demand to slow a progressive decline. The branch closed as a result of the Beeching Axe in September 1965, having made the biggest loss per mile of any line in the country.

Subsequently, Calne's main industry other than being a small market town was the imposing C&T Harris pork processing factory. It is said that the pork-curing industry developed because pigs reared in Ireland were landed at Bristol and then herded across England on drovers' roads to Smithfield, London. One resting place for the pigs was at Black Dog Hill, just west of the town, and the Harris family of butchers took the pigs that were not expected to survive the onward journey.

The Harris business began in the second half of the 18th century, when widow Sarah Harris and her son John relocated from Devizes and began trading as pork butchers in Church Street (Butchers Row). Brothers John and Henry Harris, sons of John Harris, continued separately in business, at High Street and the original Church Street shop respectively. Their products included bacon and hams preserved using the Wiltshire cure method, which the family had developed.

John Harris and his wife Mary Perkins had eleven children, and three of them, Thomas, George, and Charles, expanded the family business. The businesses of Charles and Thomas merged in 1888 as C. & T. Harris & Co. C&T Harris documented their work in a company magazine between 1927 and 1939, each issue containing an article by their managing director, Sir John Bodinnar.

C&T Harris built a five-storey factory in the centre of the town in the 1930s, which at its height employed 2,000 people to process 5,000 pigs each week into bacon, pies, sausages and cooked meats. The business declined in the 1970s, due in part to competition from Danish bacon. The company (by now Farmers Meat Company Ltd) closed in 1982, and the factory was demolished over the next two years. Its site was later redeveloped as housing and the town's public library. The departed industry is celebrated by a bronze sculpture of two pigs, installed in 1979 by Calne Civic Society on Phelps Parade in the town centre.