New Blue Plaque unveiled in Salisbury to honour female builder
It's located on New Street, outside the Cosy Club
A new blue plaque has been unveiled in on New Street in Salisbury to celebrate Frances Hale, a businesswoman from the 19th century.
Her company, Hale & Sons, built several iconic buildings in the city, including what is currently Barclays Bank on the corner of the High Street and the Cosy Club on New Street, which is where the plaque has been erected.
The plaque was made possible courtesy of the research by Her Salisbury Story, which has sought to bring the city’s heritage to life by celebrating the lives of Salisbury’s women past and present.
Of the 28 plaques across the city, this is only the fifth for a woman.
Jenny Hare is the project manager for the Her Salisbury Story website, she said:
“We started looking around at the amount of information locally about inspirational women and found that there wasn’t that much information. Yet we knew that many women had done inspirational things in Salisbury.
Our aim is to inspire other women and girls to show how much you can do, but also to change the dialogue about the heritage of Salisbury and get people to understand that women have been doing inspirational things for many years – we just haven’t talked about it.”
Brian Evans conducted the research on Frances Hale for the project, he said she was an “astute” businesswoman.
“One of the key sources was the Salisbury Journal archive because a lot of the work she did on major buildings would have opening ceremonies and celebrations which were all reported.
“She made sure that the firm was prominently featured in the newspapers, the annual dinner with lots of speeches saying how wonderful the firm was, got reported at length.”
Salisbury Civic Society commission and erect the Blue Plaques, their chair Stephanie Siddons Deighton said it was “extremely important” to have more plaques celebrating women in the city.
She added that the work of the Her Salisbury Story project had been “essential”.
“They’ve uncovered the history and done a huge amount of research on significant women in Salisbury, which has been useful for us because we can then work with them in terms of identifying places and building to put the plaques.