Entries Tagged 'local history' ↓

The BBC have some pictures from Isaac Shephard, two of which are of Stoke Bridge – one of the two briges that start in the ward.  They offer views of the bridge from two angles, one from roughly where the R W Paul’s building is, where you can see the maltings and St Mary Stoke and an Inn which can’t be the Bell Inn (does anyone know which Inn this could be?).  The second one is to me far less recognisable, although you can make out the maltings.

My wife’s view on seeing the picture is that it was so much nicer than the current bridge – although probably not so practical for cars and lorries.

The oldest continuing Catholic church in Ipswich, St Pancras, is having its 150th anniversary celebrations.  For most of its existence it was also the Catholic parish church for much of Bridge, and indeed the Pentecostalist church on the corner of Rectory Road and Luther Road used to be the Catholic Stella Maris chapel of ease.

This is from the newsleter:

From this Thursday a 4 day celebration begins with an open church event and flower festival to run until Sunday.

There will be mass at 12.15am and 7.30pm on Thursday the Feast of St Pancras and a Youth Event in the evening. You are invited to join the over-night vigil of prayer and adoration in thanksgiving from 8pm Fri to 8am Sat. Please add your name to a vacant slot on the rota at the back of the church to ensure no one is left alone.

 Saturday morning will include a Children’s Activities Event. All children welcome time 9.15 to 10am.

 The celebrations main event is the 6pm Mass Saturday, with a cheese and wine reception afterwards in the hall. We hope you will all join us. Please take a copy of the Souvenir Program which is available now.

There is also a small but very interesting local history display in the parish hall, which I would urge anyone interested in the local history of the area to make a quick detour to see this.

I was alys vaguely aware that they found a mammoth on the Maidenhall Estate, but I did not realise that they were actually a rather important find when it came to the understanding of the evolution of large mammals and climate change during the ice age.

Ben Gummer forwarded to me a set of articles that Natural England sent to him about these excavations.  Part of the beauty of them is that many of them are from the 1920s and 1930s and so give a good flavour of what Belstead Avenue and Maidenhall Approach were like before the building..

One article by Nina Frances Layard in 1920 discusses Stoke like this:

The tunnel, which is 360 yards in length, was made by the then existing Eastern Union Railway Company.   The the North end is close to Ipswich Station the South can only be approached by a circuitous route, involving a journey “over Stoke,” as it is locally called.  A tortuous pathway threaded between allotments belonging to the Company’s men, led to the coveted spot, and arriving at length at the South end of the tunnel, I found the cutting beyond it thickly overrown, not only with grass, but with considerable briars, some of which had become trees of considerable size.  Here and there a foot or two of the earth was exposed, and five minutes’ search brought to light a stag’s horn as brittle as bread, the tip of which appeard protruding from the bank.

Some newer work makes clear that there is much more to be found as in 1975 they found that the bed extends about half a mile down (they say nearly a kilometer, but we don’t hold with Napoleonic measures on Bridge Ward News).

There was another excavation in 1948 by HEP Spencer (not a relation as far as I know) .

There are some more details in these links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Eastern_Main_Line#Stoke_tunnel

http://www.ipswich.gov.uk/site/scripts/documents_info.php?documentID=694&pageNumber=7

http://ipswich-lettering.org/EUR.html

I’m goi to put these documents into a better home, the Over Stoke History group.

Further to my interest in the Stoke Hall Vaults, I found this picture of an air raid poster among the Stoke Hall Vaults pictures.  There’s also some pictures of some of the wine bottles that were there when it was a cellar.

St Mary Stoke will be open again for the Heritage day this year, which is today and tomorrow. I don’t know whether the Over Stoke History group will be there.

I’m tired of the election coverage, here’s a BBC story about the Stoke Hall Vaults. There’ll be more about the election, but old cellars are more interesting.

My post on the Ipswich underground railway seems to be one of the biggest attractions for Google searchers.

In the hope that I can actually provide some genuine history to my readers, including those through Google, there were some rails through Bridge once, in the tram system, including Wherstead Road and Vernon Street.  (This is a Google cache, so please let me know if it stops being fresh).

St Mary Stoke was defined by the fact that until the Reformation it was owned by Ely Abbey, unlike the riff-raff over the river.  I’m rereading Robert Malster’s “A History of Ipswich” and it says on page 10 that it was likely that the whole of Ipswich was owned by Ely Abbey.  Then the Vikings came along and disrupted everything.

When the dust settled and the kings of East Anglia were finally persuaded to give the abbey its’ lands back, however he only gave the best bits back to the monks and the King kept the scraps on the other side of the river – which would later become the borough of Ipswich.

So rather than Stoke being a part of Ipswich, we should really say that the borough of Ipswich is an outgrowth of the more ancient and venerable parish of St Mary Stoke.

I’ve said before that the patron saint of Old Stoke should be Saint Ethelreda.  Well here’s something that was written about the St. Ethelreda’s church in Wherstead Road.

Right at the beginning of April 2007, intrepid local historian Simon Knott (of the Suffolk Churches website) decided to build a site devoted to the Ipswich Railway Station.

There are pictures of Halifax Quay, which is near the Bourne Bridge on Wherstead Road:

I do think Simon made one mistake, which was to ascribe the following to St Matthew’s underground station rather than the EUR public house in Croft Street, which closed a couple of years ago:

If you are wondering why it no longer exists, indeed why so few people talk about it the answer is in this link:

Simon Knott we salute you!