Needham Market, Suffolk

House move

As I approached Needham Market on my Suffolk trip late last year, this house caught my eye and once I’d got my bearings I went back to have a look at it. With its big thatched roof and squarish proportions it reminded me of certain toll houses, built to act as landmarks and to be easily spotted on the road. Except that this house was set back from the road, not at all a good position for a toll house. So I supposed it was probably simply a cottage orné, an example of that rustic and decorative kind of house that became popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

However, the history of what is now called the Mustard Pot is not quite as simple as that. It turns out that it was built as a toll house, and the gatekeeper must have sheltered under the generous eaves hundreds of times when it was pouring with rain. But when it fulfilled this function, it was not on its current site. It originally stood at Brockford, not far from Mendlesham, by the road that is now the A140. When the A140 was widened in 1972, the house was threatened with demolition, so a Mr Sniechowski of Ipswich, who thought it was worth preserving, had it taken down and moved to Needham Market.*

The roof was removed in one piece – thatch, timbers and all – put on a trailer and driven, very slowly, to the new site. Then the walls were dismantled – they are timber-framed structures beneath the external plaster – taken to the new site and reassembled. The original idea was for the building to be used by fishermen who were angling at the nearby Needham Lake, but Mr Sniechowski died soon after the house’s re-erection and apparently this idea was not taken up. The building served as a dwelling before being taken over by a veterinary practice, which is still its use today. Moving entire houses is a very unusual practice in the UK, most often undertaken by the various open-air museums whose mission it is to preserve unused historic buildings. It’s good that Mr Sniechowski had the vision to move this small house, ensuring the survival of a useful and picturesque building.

- - - - -

* My thanks to the Stowe Veterinary Centre’s website for information about this unusual house move.

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.

- - - - -

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