The Village of Slad - Gloucestershire

The village of Slad originated at Steanbridge, an important crossing of the Slad brook, recorded in 1353 when it carried the Painswick-Cirencestcr road, near the site of a Roman Villa. In 1778 Painswick and Bisley parishes agreed to share the cost of rebuilding the bridge. The oldest part of Slad is situated on the slopes of the valley south of the bridge and east of the Stroud-Cheltenham road. The principal residence is Steanbridge House, the home for many years of the Townsend family which had a large estate mainly in the adjoining part of Miserden, in the 19th century. It is a 16th- or early-17th-century gabled clothier's house, refitted in the 18th century and enlarged in the early 19th by a classical south wing incorporating a staircase lighted by a glass dome. The house and Rosebank, an L-shaped rubble house formed out of three 17th century cottages with wooden- and stone- mullioned windows, are the oldest surviving buildings but other cottages, largely rebuilt as weavers' cottages in the 18th or 19th century, retain 17th-century features. Some cottages were built on the waste during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the building of the Stroud-Cheltenham road in 1800 encouraged development. By 1820 there were four or five cottages on the west side of the road and the church and school were built at the south end of the village on that side of the road in the 1830s. A public house, called the Woolpack, was built opposite at about that period. A Congregational chapel was built 500 yds. north of the church in 1867, and scattered houses have been built along the main road since the late 19th century, usually for people working in Stroud.
The village was the scene for Cider with Rosie, an autobiographical evocation of a rural childhood by Laurie Lee, who had a residence in the village in 1972.
About half a mile south of the village is the Star Inn recorded from l781. A number of houses are scattered along the road linking Slad with the suburbs of Stroud. They include a small 17th-century farm-house with later additions, but they were mostly built in the 19th century for professional people working in Stroud.
20/03/1851 Reuben and Mary NIBLETT resided with their children Reuben, John, Esther and William at SLAD. Glos. (info. 1851 Census) (Weaver's)
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