All Cannings

Village Map

This map only show the main part of the village - the Parish of All Cannings is much larger and includes Allington, South Farm and Cannings Cross.

But it can be compared to this 1841 map:
(click for larger view)

Eartliest concrete houses?

Reading the local Parish magazine there is an excellent article by the local historian Rick Ozzard about houses made of concrete.

There doesn't sound much to interest one in the subject until one starts to consider where are the earliest ones. The little village of All Cannings in Wiltshire is in a very rural farming community with Black and White thatched cottages etc. It is probably the last place you would expect to have been the site of an amazing Victorian experiment in the use of Concrete.

In 1868 the Lord Ashburton and his tenant farmer Simon Hiscock decided to each build a pair of semidetached workers cottages. They had two plots adjacent of the same size. The tenant built his pair of brick, his Lordship of concrete - the only major difference is that in the absence of internal shuttering the concrete chimneys are straight rather than bent to combine into a single chimney stack. Both pairs of cottages still stand largely unaltered.

We can only surmise this was a trial into the efficacy of using shuttered reinforced concrete as a building method. It obviously was successful as two more pairs were then built, followed by a more elaborate villa style pair of cottages and finally a large Farmhouse.

This amazing experiment is unknown and unacknowledged outside the area. While these houses may not be the very first concrete houses built, they were built within a couple of years of the first one - the time-line is not clear and are certainly the biggest example of a group of dwellings built then. They are worthy of note!

History

The following is the text from the Church information bulletin.

"All Cannings is one of the ancient villages of the Pewsey Vale. It is thought to originate from a Saxon settlement, and is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as 'Caninge'. From at least until the Reformation, the manor of All Cannings was held by the Abbey of St. Mary, at Winchester.

At the Reformation, in 1536, Henry VIII presented 'the valuable manor of Allecanynges' to Edward Seymour, who later became the Duke of Somerset. His family retained the estate until the late 17th century.

The estate then passed through various hands, and remained intact until 1909, when, at a sale at the Bear Hotel in Devizes, the estate was broken up into smaller farms and properties.

All Saints or St. Annes? There has been uncertainty as to the dedication of the church. Today it is All Saints, but in the last century, and early this century, there are records indicating Saint Anne. There is a fifteenth century reference to 'Cannings All Saints.'

All Cannings or Old Cannings? The name 'All Cannings' is thought either to derive from 'Old Cannings' to differentiate the village from nearby Bishops Cannings, or else to be a shortened form of 'All Saints Cannings' referring to the dedication of the church. The name 'Cannings' is thought to derive from the name of the Saxon tribe which settled in the area."

1610 Map of All Cannings and surrounding area in Wiltshire
(click on map to view larger image.)

Thanks to My Hitchcock Heritage: pictures