Frieze for a fine family

3:17pm Thursday 5th June 2008

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PIECES of public art in Devizes do not come along very often and this year will be ten years since a modest example was unveiled.

Above the doors of Long's Buildings in New Park Street there is a sculpted frieze by local artist Eric Stanford commemorating the entrepreneur John Anstie (1743-1830), whose textile factory was the first of its kind in the West Country.

Mr Anstie's family had been in snuff manufacture but John Anstie saw the future in textiles and opened his factory in 1785.

Local historian Lorna Haycock has written a book about John Anstie and says that, at the height of his fame, his factory was making fabrics for members of the royal family, including Queen Charlotte, George III's wife.

Sadly, John Anstie's brilliant career ended in bankruptcy and his factory returned to making snuff and other tobacco products.

The Anstie family had tenanted land on both sides of Snuff Street from 1731 and the factory was mechanised in 1830 and completely rebuilt in 1831.

The building was known as Long's Stores after it was briefly leased to William and John Long in the 1870s.

The New Park Street frontage was redesigned by J A Rendell in 1894.

Anstie's took over the tobacco company I Rutter & Co of Mitcham, Surrey, in 1925 but then, in 1944, the building was sold to the Bristol-based Imperial Tobacco Company, thus severing the six-generation link with the Ansties. Snuff production ceased in 1957 and tobacco products in 1961, when the building was sold to printing firm C H Woodward Ltd.

After Woodward left in the 1970s the building deteriorated so badly that in 1990 one wall had to be propped up to prevent it collapsing into Snuff Street. Then, in 1993, it was converted to flats by the Focus Housing Association in partnership with Kennet District Council.

It became known as Long's Buildings and the new homes built in the courtyard at the back of the New Park Street frontage were called Snuff Court.

To celebrate saving the listed building from dereliction, Mr Stanford was commissioned by the Trust for Devizes to create the semi-circular frieze about the entrance, incorporating icons from the history of the Anstie family and Devizes' connections with the wool industry.

There are depictions of sheep, shears, a loom, a spinning jenny, teasels, burling irons and woven cloth around a portrait of John Anstie.

The unveiling was performed by John Anstie's great-great-great grandson, Denis Anstie from Derry Hill, near Chippenham, in October 1998.

It was not the last piece of public art Mr Stanford completed for Devizes.

The town council commissioned him to create a Millennium Cross, which now has pride of place in St John's Churchyard.