There is a Jacobean house on the Holt Road in Bradford on Avon that a great many people in the town have never been inside.
The Hall was built in 1610 for John Hall, a clothier who had made a great deal of money out of Wiltshire wool, on the site of an earlier manor house. It is Grade I listed. The architect is unknown. The Moulton trust that looks after it now says the evidence points to William Arnold, who built Montacute, rather than Robert Smythson, who was once credited with the work.
Writing around 1670, John Aubrey called it “the best built house for the quality of a gentleman in Wiltshire”. Country Life later described the grounds, seven acres of them, as “amongst the most interesting of their kind in England.”
The duchess who was tried for bigamy
The house passed in time to the Pierrepont family, and to Evelyn Pierrepont, 2nd Duke of Kingston, who in 1770 married Elizabeth Chudleigh. She was already married to someone else, and had been since a secret ceremony in 1744.
The Duke died in 1773, his family contested the will, and in April 1776 Elizabeth was tried for bigamy in front of the House of Lords at Westminster Hall, with 117 peers sitting as her jury and around 400 people who had bought tickets to watch. They found her guilty to a man. The law said she should be branded on the hand; she escaped it on the grounds that she was still, technically, a Countess, and left the country within days.
That is a story in its own right and deserves more room than this page can give it. If you can’t wait, why not visit the Hall Estate to find out more.
Stephen Moulton and rubber
In 1848 the house was bought by Stephen Moulton, and the second half of its life began.
Moulton had been Charles Goodyear’s agent in America and brought the first samples of vulcanised rubber into Britain, along with the process behind them: sulphur and heat used to stabilise raw rubber. A friend, Septimus Palairet of Woolley, talked him into setting up in Bradford on Avon: the wool trade had collapsed, which meant empty water- and steam-powered mills going cheap and a workforce already used to factory conditions. He opened the rubber works in the redundant Kingston woollen mills in October 1848 and started the British rubber industry from this town.
Within a few years he was supplying buffers, springs and hose to Brunel’s Great Western Railway, then other railway companies, then rubber-proofed capes for the army once the Crimean War broke out in 1853. In 1891 the firm merged with the London company of George Spencer to become George Spencer Moulton. Avon Rubber, a separate company that began at Limpley Stoke and moved to Melksham, took it over in 1956. Rubber making in Bradford on Avon finished in 1995.
His family kept the house for the next 164 years.
Alex Moulton, the Mini and the bicycle
Dr Alexander Eric Moulton CBE was an engineer, and the two things he is remembered for are both about suspension.
The first is the Mini. Working with Alec Issigonis, Moulton designed the rubber cone suspension used on the 1959 car, which is a large part of why something that small rode as well as it did and why so much of the floor space was left for people. He went on to develop Hydrolastic, which BMC used across its range.
The second is the bicycle that carries his name. The Moulton Bicycle launched in 1962: small wheels, full suspension at both ends, a separable frame on later models. It was a genuine rethinking of what a bicycle frame was for at a point when nobody was asking the question, and it is still in production.
Alex Moulton died at The Hall on 9 December 2012, aged 92. His will passed the house to the charitable trust he had set up, who manage the estate to this day.
The stables
Alex Moulton kept his Bentleys in the old stable block.
Hand made Moulton bicycles are built in it now.
The house today
Nobody lives at The Hall. The trust looks after it, some of the rooms are roped off, and it is opened to visitors on a limited number of days through the year.
What makes it worth an hour of your time is that the house is still furnished as it was when Alex Moulton died.
Some of the rooms are dressed like a period recreation – a time capsule of what the house would have looked like at times during its history. Whereas others are a mid-century engineer’s house, left as he had it, inside a building from 1610. This makes them an interesting mix of styles and furnishings.
Alex Moulton was not one for being confined by convention – he built a tunnel from the outer wall into the kitchens, so his cat Eric could get in and keep warm.
There is a mural inside showing Bradford on Avon, with magpies in the foreground and Concorde in the sky.
Out in the grounds there is a stone portico, classical, entirely at odds with the house behind it, standing on its own in the garden.
Visiting The Hall
Guided tours run for about an hour and take in a selection of rooms plus the grounds, with the history from the Hall family in the 1600s through the rubber years to the trust’s work now. Tours are limited across the year and advance booking is essential, so this is not somewhere to turn up on spec. There are Christmas tours in December and private tours for groups.
Grounds admission is sold separately if you want the seven acres without the house.
The trust also runs guided walking tours of Bradford on Avon itself, one on Georgian life in the town and one on the Avon Rubber factory and local industry, which is the better of the two if the Moulton story is what brought you.
Current dates, availability and prices are all on the trust’s own site: https://moultontrust.org/book-a-tour
Staying at The Hall
Since 2024 the trust has let three self-contained en-suite bedrooms, one on each of three floors, each named after somebody who lived in the house. You get a breakfast hamper and a fridge rather than a dining room, and the money goes back into keeping the place standing.
Worth knowing: the guest rooms are their own part of the house and are not the rooms you walk through on the tour.
The house can also be hired out for weddings and events.
Getting here
The Hall Estate, Holt Road, Bradford on Avon, BA15 1AJ.
Bradford on Avon has a station on the line out of Bath, and the house is a walk from the town centre. See the full guide to Bradford on Avon for the rest of the town, and the Cotswolds without a car if you are travelling by train.
The Hall FAQ
Can you visit The Hall at Bradford on Avon?
Yes, on guided tours run a limited number of times through the year, and you need to book in advance. You can also buy grounds-only admission, or stay overnight in one of three guest rooms.
Who owns The Hall?
The Alex Moulton Charitable Trust, which Alex Moulton set up and left the house to when he died in 2012.
Are Moulton bicycles still made there?
Yes, in the old stable block on the estate and at the factory on the edge of the estate.
Is The Hall the same as Moulton Hall?
It is the same house. It is properly The Hall, and it is often called the Moulton estate locally because the Moulton family held it from 1848.
Is The Hall in the Cotswolds?
Bradford on Avon is treated by the Cotswolds National Landscape as the southern end of the Wiltshire Cotswolds, so almost. There is more on that argument in the Bradford on Avon guide.