Wycombe Museum plans new trail to show off town’s chairmaking history

Wycombe Museum has planned a new walking trail to show off the town’s chairmaking history.

‘Here, Chair and Everywhere’ is the charity’s new 1.7 mile-long circuit to help people understand the role that the furniture industry played in the area.

Funded through the Chiltern Conservation Board, the step-free trail starts and ends at the museum and takes in seven other locations around the town centre. These are the railway station, St Mary Street, High Street, Denmark Street, Frogmoor, Temple End and Benjamin Road.

Plans for the trail state: “It is not attempting to be a comprehensive trail of all furniture sites, or even the key ones – it is deliberately selecting sites around the town centre, to make the trail one that is easy for many people to follow.”

The trail has a leaflet and several A2 size interpretation boards to make the information more accessible for people, so that they do not need to have the leaflet to understand some of the chair history in that location.

The museum’s plans have now been submitted to Buckinghamshire Council so that planners can sign off four of the interpretation boards.

In St Mary Street the board will be on a timber stand next to an existing notice board fixed to the low boundary wall of the Riverside Club, which requires planning permission.

The three other boards at the railway station, Denmark Street and Benjamin Road are to be fixed to walls, with the permission of the landowner, although still require advertising consent.

For the locations where applications are not needed, information is set to be provided through QR codes on existing structures, such as BT cabinets.

From October, Wycombe Museum is also running a ‘Here, Chair and Everywhere’ event for children as part of its ‘explore’ series.

The description for the event reads: “Interactive learning workshops aimed at home educators, targeted at different age groups. Sessions will be run on a different theme, with role play, museum object handling, crafts and activities.

“In October’s session, we’ll be taking a walking tour around High Wycombe’s furniture making historic sites! The tour will take around an hour, with a short talk before and after. Please dress suitably for the weather.”

The museum previously organised a similar, self-guided walking trail looking at the town’s chairmaking history in July as part of the Chilterns Chairs Festival.

Although, High Wycombe has become renowned for chairmaking, chairs were not widely made in the town until the 1800s.

By 1877, around 4,700 chairs were estimated to be being made every day across 150 workshops and factories in the town and the wider area, meaning that Wycombe became the biggest producer of chairs in the country.