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Corsham is a small town in northwest Wiltshire in England, close to both Bath and Chippenham.
One of the towns that prospered greatly from Wilshire's wool trade in medieval times, it maintained its prosperity after the decline of that trade through the quarrying of Bath stone.
Corsham' small town centre includes the new Martingate Centre that has been redeveloped. The town has its own festival.
It also has a stately home, Corsham Court. Standing on a former Saxon royal manor, it is based on an Elizabethan manor home from 1582. Since 1745, it has been part of the Methuen estate. The house has an extensive collection of Old Masters, rooms furnished by Robert Adams and Thomas Chippendale, and parks landscaped by Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton.
The owner of Corsham Court in the mid-seventeenth century was the commander of the Parliamentarian New Model Army in Wiltshire. His wife built what came to be known as the Hungerford Almshouses in the centre o town. These famous almshouses were recently featured on the BBC's Restoration television series.
It is the site of the eastern portal of the well-known Box Tunnel and the disused entrance to Tunnel Quarry, which used to be visible off Pockeredge Drive. The largely disused emergency government wartime headquarters, known as Hawthorn or Turnstile, is located in the neighbourhood. The headquarters was offered for sale in 2005 *.
Camilla Parker Bowles (who later married Charles, Prince of Wales, and assumed the title Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall) is a noted former resident of Corsham; when she moved to the nearby village of Lacock in 1995, she sold her house to the Pink Floyd musician Nick Mason.
The town of Corsham was the inspiration for Charles Dickens's novel The Pickwick Papers. The name Pickwick is likely to have come from that of a nearby farm, Pickwick Lodge Farm. This area is the part of Corsham which is on the A4, once the main road from London to Bristol.
There was once a priory in Corsham, which was destroyed, then built on by a Georgian house (now Heywood School) located on Priory Street.
In 2005, it was officially revealed that there was a city-sized nuclear bunker beneath the town, codenamed BURLINGTON. The bunker was to have housed 4000 key people in the event of a nuclear attack.
Corsham derives its name from 'Cosa' village', where hām is the Old English for homestead, or village. The town is referred in the Domesday book as Cosseham, the letter 'R' appears to have entered the name later under Norman influence.
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