Needham Market, Suffolk

 

Embarrassment of riches?

This is the magnificent railway station building at Needham Market, an impressive Jacobean revival design by Frederick Barnes, who designed numerous stations on the Ipswich and Bury Railway. It’s one of the most outstanding stations on the line, a visual feast of towers, gables and mullioned windows – I think only Bury St Edmunds competes with it in this neck of the woods. The impressive, partly diapered brickwork is enhanced by dressings in Caen stone, a material sometimes found in medieval English cathedrals. Needham Market station closed in the great station cull of the 1960s, but by 1971 it had opened again, although this building had been let to tenants. It is, after all, on the large side for a small town.*

When the station was built – during the railway boom, in 1846–7 – it was still more magnificent than it is today. The square end towers had curvaceous ogee roofs and the three gables were in the Dutch style, also with multiple curves. At some point in the station’s history, these features were modified, giving the end towers crenellated parapets and the gables straight sloping edges. It’s not clear exactly when these alterations were made. Gordon Biddle, in his book Britain’s Historic Railway Buildings, cites a photograph of 1912, which shows the station in its original form. An Aerofilms image of 1928 shows it the way it looks today, so the changes were made long before the station’s short-lived closure.

Whatever the reason the building was altered, it’s still worth noticing. It speaks of a time when a station was not something that was thought best to hide away behind other buildings. Frederick Barnes and the Ipswich and Bury Railway did Needham Market proud.

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* The most recent census put the population at around 5,000.

Bramfield, Suffolk

Sinuous

One of the joys of my travels around England is going somewhere to visit one building and finding some other structure that gives me as much pleasure, or more, than what I was originally looking for. In Bramfield, south of Halesworth in Suffolk, I found something, if a bit less absorbing than the medieval church I was seeking, something still of interest, and right opposite the churchyard too. Even before I pulled up, I saw it, this long stretch of sinuous brick wall, a crinkle-crankle wall as it’s called, undulating its way into the distance.

I’ve noticed another such wall before on this blog, in Worcestershire, much nearer my home patch. But Suffolk is the true heartland of the crinkle-crankle wall (the very name is said to be Suffolk dialect for sinuous), so a ’native specimen’ was something to be noticed, especially one of such good length. For those who don’t know, the usual explanation for such a curvaceous wall is that it saves bricks. The wall gains its strength from the curves and so can be built with a single layer of brickwork, whereas a straight wall needs two layers (and sometimes buttresses) to stay up.*

Crinkle-crankle walls became popular in Suffolk in the 18th century and I’ve seen those that date from the 19th and even 20th centuries. This one is probably late-18th or early-19th century and marks the northern boundary of the grounds of Bramfield Hall. It’s impressive, and nicely begins with a gateway built in the contrasting materials of dark flint pebbles and pale white brickwork, also traditional Suffolk materials. Most people find these serpentine walls very attractive – curves have an appeal, especially in a context where we’d normally expect a straight line. Visual appeal is of course is another reason why you might build a wall in this unusual way, its repeated curves complementing the rounded arch of the gateway in the foreground.

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* Of course a curving wall is longer than a straight one, but the number of bricks required is apparently still smaller.

Framlingham, Suffolk

 

First post

I’d been to Framlingham before, but was not switched on enough to look properly at the post boxes. What a sadly missed opportunity! 

Now, I know that for many people even a slight preoccupation with post boxes is thought to be the preserve of the anorak.* And yet I’d argue (hoping not to get too dull about it) that these small items of street furniture both look good in our towns and villages and provide some insight into social history.

So, in Framlingham the other week, I paused to appreciate one of two such boxes in a very rare early design – octagonal boxes with vertical slits, probably dating to about 1856. This is really early in the history of the post box. When the standard penny post for letters was introduced in 1840, there were no post boxes at all. To post a letter you had to take it to a ‘Receiving Office’ or wait for a man ringing a bell to walk down your street and give your letter to him.

In 1852, the first free-standing post boxes were installed on Jersey; these proved successful and the following year the first of (eventually) thousands of boxes began to be seen on streets on the British mainland. They were all made of cast iron and took a column-like form,† with a vertical slit for the letters. There was no standard design,¶ but this example in Framlingham is one of the earliest still in use. It exhibits many of the features common to later boxes – the initials or cipher of the monarch, a display panel for collection times, a locking door, and so on. It was made by Andrew Handyside, ironfounder of Derby, and probably dates to 1856 or 1857 – Handyside began to produce boxes with horizonal slits in 1857. Horizontal letter slots became the norm, and by 1866 the first national standard box was introduced.

If all this is much too like anorak-speak for you, you’ve probably stopped reading by now. But if you’re still with me you’ll appreciate that such rare early boxes illuminate a bit of postal history and enhance the handful of streets and lanes where they still exist.

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* Informal British English. Anorak: person who has an obsessive interest in something generally thought to be ‘dull and unsociable’ (thanks to Chambers Dictionary for the last phrase).

† Some resembled columns very closely, like the fluted one in Malvern, subject of an earlier post.

¶ To begin with, there was no uniform colour either. Red became the standard hue in 1884.

Wickham Market, Suffolk

Light industry

By the River Deben and at the foot of Wickham Market’s High Street lies this cluster of buildings: ‘An attractive group,’ says Pevsner, laconically. Indeed it is, a throw-back to a time when industrial buildings could look both purposeful and pretty. The river, the ducks, and bright light under stormy clouds help the picture too.

What we’re looking at takes us back to the 18th and 19th centuries. The central building is an 18th-century corn mill, weatherboarded in the typical style of this part of East Anglia. The mill leet passes under the twin-arched brick-faced bridge (itself thought to be 19th-century) to the mill to provide its power. A lot of the original machinery remains inside. The mill’s lucam (the projecting structure that contained a hoist) still survives high on the right-hand end.

To the left of the central mill and adjoining it is a white-brick house, still with its windows with the small panes they would have had when the house was first built in the early-19th century. It would have been the miller’s house and the large central window with its semi-circular top suggests that behind is the main staircase, which must be well lit and probably spacious. One gets an impression of understated prosperity.

The brick-built structure on the right-hand side of the picture is another mill. This is again 19th-century and was purpose-built as a steam-powered mill with solid walls able to withstand the vibrations that a steam engine and its connected machinery would produce. The windows have cast-iron lintels now painted white and the lucam is still there, pointing towards the equivalent structure on the older mill. The small structure on the right with the round-headed window is said to be the original engine house – the chimney stack was taken down at some stage. The engine that ran there was made by local firm Whitmore and Binyon, the subject of my previous post, and is now at the Food Museum (formerly the Museum of East Anglian Life).

So milling no longer takes place here, but the buildings usefully survive – the mill parts house variously storage and a shop selling such things as logs for wood-burning stoves. While the buildings are in use, they are likely to be looked after, preserved, and shown off to their best by the light of the sun.

Wickham Market, Suffolk

Cast-iron evidence

The Resident Wise Woman reported that she’d noticed an intriguing pair of iron gateposts a few hundred yards away from where we were staying in the Suffolk town of Wickham Market. Before long I was out on their trail and quickly found the posts, with their fluted uprights and extraordinary spiky finials, which resemble some sort of close-combat weapon, such as a medieval mace. The posts are between some white brick buildings on the town’s main street. A little research revealed their story.*

The gateposts flank the former entrance to the works of Whitmore and Binyon, which in the 19th century was a major employer in the town. Nathaniel Whitmore was a millwright at the end of the 18th century; subsequent generations grew the business, producing not only equipment for milling, but also several kinds of metal goods, from bedsteads to steam engines. From their beginnings as a small local concern, the firm grew top employ some 200 people and by 1868, the Whitmores were joined by George Binyon, a successful engineer and entrepreneur, who brought expertise in agricultural engineering.

The white brick buildings on either side of the gate, which I’d taken to be houses and a shop, were in fact offices of Whitmore and Binyon, together with a shop where customers could call to discuss an order for a steam engine or a pair of gatepoists. From these premises and the factory at the rear, steam engines for mills were dispatched across Suffolk and beyond and diamond-washing equipment was made for the three main diamond mines in South Africa. The company exhibited at major milling exhibitions and had an office in Mark Street, in the City of London. The company seems to have done very well – but for a relatively short time. By 1902 it was in trouble and the works and contents were sold off. From the street, this striking pair of gateposts and modest range of buildings is a quiet testimony to what was once here. Surviving steam engines, including one in the Museum of East Anglian Life that once powered a mill down the road, provide further reminders of a once successful firm.†

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* See for example Wickham Market Movers and Shapers, here.

† I plan to do a further post about the mill for which this engine was built.