At two o’clock the drapers, with their clerks and shearmen, assembled under the Market-house, and proceeded up stairs (according to ancient usage) in seniority. The market being over, drays were seen in all directions conveying the cloths to the several warehouses, and more than six hundred pieces of web have been sold in a day. The whole was a ready money business; and as the Welshmen left much of their cash behind them in exchange for malt, groceries, and other shop goods, the loss of such a trade to the town may be easily conceived. This took place about the year 1795, and was occasioned by individuals (not members of the Shrewsbury fraternity of drapers) travelling into those parts where the goods were made, from which the manufacturers soon learnt that they might find a mart for their goods at home without the trouble and expence of a journey to the walls of Amwythig. In March, 1803, the company relinquished the great room over the market-hall, where they had for nearly two centuries transacted their business, and though much traffic in flannels was subsequently carried on in the town, the total extinction of this branch of our local commerce is fast approaching, from the market having diverged to Welshpool, Newtown, and Llanidloes, where the advantages of machinery are now substituted for manual labour in its manufacture. The cessation of the woollen market in this town has been ascribed to the improvement of the roads in Wales, which opened a more free communication to the interlopers of the Drapers’ company; and this again afforded some compensation to the town for the loss of this branch of its trade. For if Shrewsbury was no longer the emporium of North Wales, it was becoming the centre of communication between London and Dublin; and the agriculture of the neighbourhood and the trade of the town received a new impulse from the vast increase of posting and stage coaches, but far inadequate to the advantage which it derived from its trade in Welsh woollens and the weekly visits of the Cambrian farmers. That Shrewsbury, however, may reap the full benefit of its central situation as the great thoroughfare from whence all the roads into North Wales diverge, and being also the general market of the surrounding country, acknowledged to be one of the finest agricultural districts in the kingdom, it is highly expedient that our town should possess the advantage of a RAILWAY communicating with the great lines to Birmingham, London, Liverpool, &c.