The Corn Exchange is a commercial building in Gloucester Street in

Faringdon Faringdon is a historic market town in the Vale of White Horse, Oxfordshire, England, south-west of Oxford, north-west of Wantage and east-north-east of Swindon. Its views extend to the River Thames in the north and the highest ground visib ...

Oxfordshire Oxfordshire ( ; abbreviated ''Oxon'') is a ceremonial county in South East England. The county is bordered by Northamptonshire and Warwickshire to the north, Buckinghamshire to the east, Berkshire to the south, and Wiltshire and Glouceste ...

, England. The structure, which is currently used as a community events venue, is a Grade II

listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building is a structure of particular architectural or historic interest deserving of special protection. Such buildings are placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Hi ...

History

In 1862, a group of local businessmen decided to form a private company, to be known as the "Faringdon Corn Exchange Company Limited", to finance and commission a

corn exchange A corn exchange is a building where merchants trade grains. The word "corn" in British English denotes all cereal grains, such as wheat and barley; in the United States these buildings were called grain exchanges. Such trade was common in towns ...

for the town. The site they selected in Gloucester Street was occupied by the Green Dragon public house. The new building was designed by John Luker of

West Dulwich West Dulwich ( ) is a neighbourhood in South London on the southern boundary of Brockwell Park, which straddles the London Borough of Lambeth and the London Borough of Southwark. Croxted Road and South Croxted Road mark the boundary between Sou ...

in the

Gothic Revival style Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic or neo-Gothic) is an architectural movement that after a gradual build-up beginning in the second half of the 17th century became a widespread movement in the first half of the 19th century ...

, built by local contractors, Isaac and James Wheeler, in

rubble masonry Rubble masonry or rubble stone is rough, uneven building stone not laid in regular courses. It may fill the core of a wall which is faced with unit masonry such as brick or ashlar. Some medieval cathedral walls have outer shells of ashlar wi ...

at a cost of £1,400 and was officially opened by the Member of Parliament, John Walter, on 29 December 1863. The design of the corn exchange involved an asymmetrical main frontage of two bays on the corner of Gloucester Street and Marlborough Street. The left hand bay featured an arched doorway, with a

quatrefoil A quatrefoil (anciently caterfoil) is a decorative element consisting of a symmetrical shape which forms the overall outline of four partially overlapping circles of the same diameter. It is found in art, architecture, heraldry and traditional ...

in the tympanum and a moulded surround, flanked by statues on

pedestal A pedestal or plinth is a support at the bottom of a statue, vase, column, or certain altars. Smaller pedestals, especially if round in shape, may be called socles. In civil engineering, it is also called ''basement''. The minimum height o ...

s. There was an

oriel window An oriel window is a form of bay window which protrudes from the main wall of a building but does not reach to the ground. Supported by corbels, bracket (architecture), brackets, or similar cantilevers, an oriel window generally projects from an ...

with cusped heads on the first floor and an arched window in the

stepped gable A stepped gable, crow-stepped gable, or corbie step is a stairstep type of design at the top of the triangular gable-end of a building. The top of the parapet wall projects above the roofline and the top of the brick or stone wall is stacked in ...

above. The right-hand bay, the canted bay to the right of that and the first bay in Gloucester Street were all fenestrated with bi-partite windows with

ogee An ogee ( ) is an object, element, or curve—often seen in architecture and building trades—that has a serpentine- or extended S-shape (Sigmoid curve, sigmoid). Ogees consist of a "double curve", the combination of two semicircle, semicircula ...

-shaped heads on the ground floor and by bi-partite windows with dividing shafts, cusped heads and quatrefoils on the first floor. The Gloucester Road frontage extended along the street with a further five bays all containing tri-partite segmentally-shaped windows with dividing shafts and ornate bosses. Internally, the principal room was the main hall which featured a

vaulted In architecture, a vault (French ''voûte'', from Italian ''volta'') is a self-supporting arched form, usually of stone or brick, serving to cover a space with a ceiling or roof. As in building an arch, a temporary support is needed while ring ...

ceiling. The building was also used for public events: speakers included the former

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States between the East Coast of the United States ...

slave and anti-slavery campaigner,

Henry Box Brown Henry Box Brown ( – June 15, 1897) was an enslaved man from Virginia who escaped to freedom at the age of 33 by arranging to have himself mailed in a wooden crate in 1849 to abolitionists in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For a short time, Bro ...

, who visited the building in September 1867. A single storey building behind the corn exchange, which had been commissioned the Faringdon Trustee Savings Bank, was acquired by the Faringdon Corn Exchange Company in 1889, and subsequently leased to the local

freemasons Freemasonry (sometimes spelled Free-Masonry) consists of fraternal groups that trace their origins to the medieval guilds of stonemasons. Freemasonry is the oldest secular fraternity in the world and among the oldest still-existing organizati ...

as a meeting place for the Vale of White Horse Lodge. The use of the main building as a corn exchange declined significantly in the wake of the Great Depression of British Agriculture in the late 19th century. Instead, from 1913, it was let out as a cinema showing

silent film A silent film is a film without synchronized recorded sound (or more generally, no audible dialogue). Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, various plot elements (such as a setting or era) or key lines of dialogue may, w ...

s. After the building had been sold to Faringdon Parish Council, the Faringdon Corn Exchange Company was wound up in late 1936. The building was subsequently used as a community events venue for dances, dinners and similar events.

References

{{reflist Commercial buildings completed in 1863 Faringdon Grade II listed buildings in Oxfordshire

History

See also

References