Town in Somerset, England
Frome
A Somerset market town where independents took control of the council, a stream runs down the middle of the street and a Brunel train shed still stands.
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Key information
- County
- Somerset
- Nation
- England
- Population
- about 28,000 (2021 Census)
- Known for
- Independent shops, the Frome Independent market, Cheap Street's central stream, wool-trade heritage, Brunel's timber station shed
- Famous people
- St Aldhelm (founder), Rev. William Bennett (Victorian vicar)
- Football clubs
- Frome Town
About Frome
The town that ditched party politics
In 2011, Frome made national headlines when Independents for Frome won 10 of the town council's 17 seats and took control, while party councillors kept seven. They had no manifesto handed down from a party HQ and no whips telling them how to vote. In 2015 the group went further and won all 17 seats. The movement became a case study in how a small town can run itself differently. It even inspired a book, Flatpack Democracy, a do-it-yourself guide for other towns that fancied trying the same. Frome has since become a place people visit to ask how it was done. The name, by the way, is pronounced "Froom", and visitors who say it to rhyme with "home" are gently corrected.
From Aldhelm's church to a cloth boomtown
Frome's story starts around 685, when St Aldhelm, later Bishop of Sherborne, founded a church here. The town was long known as Frome Selwood, after the great forest that once covered this part of Somerset. The real money came from wool. Frome's clothiers wove broadcloth in huge quantities, and by the 1600s and 1700s the town was a serious industrial centre. The evidence is still on the hillside at Trinity, a tight grid of weavers' and clothiers' houses put up in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and now one of the best-preserved examples of its kind in the country. The town's confidence shows in other buildings too. Rook Lane Chapel dates from 1707, and the Blue House, an early eighteenth-century almshouse with a little cupola, still looks like a toy-box version of a grand mansion. When the Duke of Monmouth's rebel army marched through in June 1685, Frome was a town of weavers with plenty of Nonconformist sympathies.
The street with a stream down the middle
Cheap Street is the town's showpiece, a narrow, crooked lane of old shopfronts with a water channel running right down the middle. It has done so for centuries, and it makes the street feel more like a village in the Cotswolds than a market town high street. The name has nothing to do with bargains. "Cheap" comes from an old word for market, as in Cheapside in London. Catherine Hill, the steep, cobbled street leading up from the town centre, is the other great postcard view. It is lined with independent shops, cafés and galleries, and it is one of the reasons Frome gets called one of the best places in Britain for a wander.
Brunel's shed and the foundry that cast Boadicea
Frome railway station is a rarity. Its timber train shed dates from 1850, built for Brunel's broad-gauge railway, and it is one of the last of its kind still standing. The town had heavy industry too. Singer's foundry in Frome was a famous name in art metalwork, and cast the bronze statue of Boadicea and her daughters that stands beside Westminster Bridge in London. The sculpture is by Thomas Thornycroft, but it was Frome's workers who poured the metal. So the next time you see Big Ben in a photograph, remember that a Somerset foundry made one of the monuments in the corner of the shot.
Stations of the Cross up a Somerset hillside
St John the Baptist's church has one of the town's strangest sights. Leading up to the church is the Via Crucis, a set of outdoor stone Stations of the Cross. It was the work of the Victorian vicar William Bennett, a High Church reformer who wanted to bring Catholic-style devotion into the Church of England. It is an unusual thing to find climbing a hill in an English market town, and it is still there. St John's itself is largely medieval, dating from the late twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, and it had an extensive Victorian restoration. Its tower dominates the skyline.
Markets, music and a Badgers Hill kick-about
On the first Sunday of most months, the Frome Independent fills the town centre with stalls selling street food, vintage finds and handmade goods. It started in 2014 and has become one of the best-known markets in the south-west. The Cheese & Grain, a music venue in a former market hall built in 1874 for trading cheese and grain, brings in touring bands, and the ten-day Frome Festival in July fills the town with gigs, talks and exhibitions. For football, Frome Town play at Badgers Hill, while the Frome Agricultural and Cheese Show keeps the town's farming links alive each autumn.
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Isambard Kingdom Brunel
He once swallowed a coin during a magic trick and had to be hung upside down to cough it up. Then he went on to redraw the map of Britain.
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