Town in Gloucestershire, England
Stroud
A town of five steep valleys that dressed the British Army in scarlet, then reinvented itself as one of Britain's most alternative market towns.
Key information
- County
- Gloucestershire
- Nation
- England
- Known for
- Scarlet cloth, Cider with Rosie, its Saturday farmers' market and a famously independent-minded streak
- Famous people
- Laurie Lee, Dale Vince
- Football clubs
- Forest Green Rovers (nearby Nailsworth)
About Stroud
The valleys that dressed the redcoats
Stroud's great trick was water. Five valleys cut into the Cotswold edge here, and the fast streams running through them turned mill wheels and washed and dyed cloth by the mile. By the 1700s the area was one of the great wool-working centres of England. Its speciality was Stroudwater Scarlet, the vivid red broadcloth that went into British Army uniforms. Those redcoats you see in paintings of Waterloo and the American wars may well have been wearing Stroud. The cloth also travelled across the Atlantic. Heavy woollen blanket cloth known simply as "strouds" became a staple of the North American fur trade, so the town's name ended up in the vocabulary of traders thousands of miles away.
A canal through the hill
Moving heavy cloth and coal needed better roads, so Stroud got waterways. The Stroudwater Navigation, linking the town to the Severn, opened in 1779. A decade later the Thames and Severn Canal began carrying boats up and over the Cotswolds towards London. The showpiece was the Sapperton Tunnel, about two miles long and dug in the 1780s with picks and gunpowder. It was among the longest canal tunnels in the country when it opened. Railways eventually killed the canal trade, and parts of it fell into ruin. Volunteers have spent decades bringing the Cotswold Canals back to life, and walking the towpath is one of the best ways to see how the valleys were once worked.
Why Laurie Lee never really left Slad
Laurie Lee was born in Stroud in 1914 and moved with his family to the nearby village of Slad in 1917. His memoir Cider with Rosie, published in 1959, turned a steep Cotswold valley into one of the best-loved settings in English writing. The book recalls a childhood of scything meadows, village carol singers and haymaking, in a world that was already vanishing. It sold in huge numbers and became a school staple. Lee left, wandered Spain and London, then came home. He is buried in Slad churchyard, and the Woolpack Inn, his local, still looks out over the valley he made famous.
Green before green was fashionable
Stroud has long had a reputation for doing things differently. Artists, potters, musicians and back-to-the-landers settled in its cheap mill buildings and hillside cottages, and the town developed an independent streak that shows in its shops, politics and festivals. The Saturday farmers' market, which began in 1999 and fills the streets around the Shambles, became a model for others. It helped make local, organic food a Stroud habit well before it became a trend. The town even ran its own local currency, the Stroud Pound, from 2009. In 2021 the Sunday Times named Stroud the best place to live in Britain, a title that locals greeted with a mixture of pride and a quiet wish that nobody had said it too loudly.
The world's greenest football club, a few hills away
Stroud's football story belongs to nearby Nailsworth. Forest Green Rovers, owned by green-energy entrepreneur Dale Vince, became famous for serving only vegan food and for powering the ground with renewable energy. The pitch was mowed by a solar-powered robot, and in 2017 FIFA called the club the greenest in the world. For a small-town side from the Cotswolds, it was an unlikely bit of global attention. The area's love of sport is rather more traditional on the commons, where walkers, cyclists and dog owners share the high ground with grazing cattle.
Common land, a Roman floor and an unfinished mansion
Rodborough Common, a short climb above the town, is protected grassland where cattle still graze among wildflowers, and where the views over the valleys explain why people stayed. Rodborough Fort, a folly built in the 1760s, gives the hill a touch of theatre. In the Woodchester valley lies a Roman villa with a huge mosaic of Orpheus, one of the largest of its kind in Britain. It is covered over to protect it and uncovered only on rare occasions, which makes seeing it a proper event. Nearby stands Woodchester Mansion, a Gothic Victorian house begun in 1857 and never finished. Its unfinished stonework, with scaffolding marks and half-built rooms, makes it one of the most unusual stately homes in the country.