Everything about Bury St Edmunds totally explained
Bury St Edmunds is a town in the county of
Suffolk,
England, and was formerly the
county town of
West Suffolk. It is also the seat of the
East of England Regional Assembly. It is the main town in the borough of
St Edmundsbury and is probably most famous for the
ruined abbey that stands near the town centre. The town is closely associated with
Magna Carta, in 1214 the barons of England are believed to have met in the Abbey Church and swore that they'd force King John to accept the Charter of Liberties, the document which influenced the creation of the Magna Carta. It was also the setting for two
Witch trials, the first under the direction of the
Witchfinder General the second used as a reference in the
Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and 1693. During the
Second World War, the
USAAF operated an
airfield outside the town.
The Hereditary High Steward of the Liberty of St Edmund is
The Marquess of Bristol.
Town
Near to the gardens stands Britain's first internally illuminated street sign, the
pillar of salt. When built, it had to be granted special permission because it didn't conform to regulations. Bury St Edmunds is the terminus of the
A1101,
Great Britain's lowest road.
There is an extensive network of tunnels in the town which are evidence of chalk-workings, though there's no evidence of an extensive network of tunnels under the town centre. Some buildings have inter-communicating cellars. Due to their unsafe nature the chalk-workings are not open to the public, although special viewing has been granted to individuals in the past. Some have caused subsidence in living history.
Amongst the other noteworthy buildings is St Mary's Church. The
Tudor King Henry VIII's sister,
Mary Tudor, was re-buried in Bury's St Mary's Church, after being moved from the Abbey after her brother's dissolution of the Church six year after her death.
Queen Victoria had a stained glass window fitted into the church to commemorate Mary's interment.
On
3 March,
1974 a
Turkish Airlines DC10 jet
Flight 981 crashed near Paris killing all 346 people on board. Among the victims were 17 members of the Bury St Edmunds rugby club, returning from a trip to Paris.
The Town Council election on 3 May 2007 was won by the "Abolish Bury Town Council" party. The party lost its majority following a
by-election in June 2007 and, to date, the Town Council is still in existence.
Name
The name
borough is an
etymological derivative of
Bury, which has
cognates in other Germanic languages such as the
Old Norse "borg" meaning "wall, castle"; and
Gothic "baurgs" meaning "city". They all derive from
Proto-Germanic *burgs meaning "fortress". This in turn derives from the
Proto-Indo-European root
*bhrgh meaning "fortified elevation", with cognates including
Welsh "bera", "stack" and
Sanskrit bhrant- "high, elevated building".
Abbey
In the centre of Bury St Edmunds lies the remains of an
abbey, surrounded by the Abbey Gardens, a park. The abbey is a shrine to
Saint Edmund, the Saxon King of the East Angles, who was killed by the Danes in 869 AD. The town initially grew around
Bury St Edmunds Abbey, a site of pilgrimage, and developed into a flourishing cloth making town by the 14th century.
The abbey was largely destroyed during the 16th century with the
dissolution of the monasteries but Bury remained a prosperous town throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. As would be expected of a town in such a rural area, Bury fell into relative decline with the onset of the
industrial revolution and accordingly remains an attractive market town.
The Abbey Gardens which surround the ruins had an
Internet bench installed in the late 1990s, which allowed anyone to plug in a portable computing device and connect to the Internet. It was the first bench of its kind, though within the first week of it's being there, two teenagers discovered a flaw: that one could also make free telephone calls from the bench. They phoned the
Borough Council (owners of the bench) to notify them, then they attempted to contact
Bill Gates, founder of
Microsoft, in person to tell him about this problem.
Cathedral
Bury St Edmunds Cathedral was created when the
Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich was formed in 1914. The cathedral was extended with a new eastern end in the 1960s, commemorated by
Benjamin Britten's
Fanfare for St Edmundsbury, and a completely new
Gothic revival cathedral tower was built as part of a major millennium project running from 2000 to 2005. The opening celebration for the new tower took place in July 2005, and included a
brass band concert and fireworks display. Despite this there are still parts of the cathedral that remain uncompleted, including the
cloisters Many areas of the cathedral remain inaccessible to the general public due to ongoing building work. The tower makes St Edmundsbury the only recently completed Anglican cathedral in the UK, no other is being built or extended and, indeed, only a handful of Gothic revival cathedrals are currently being built worldwide. The tower was constructed using original fabrication techniques by six highly skilled masons placed the machine pre-cut stone individually, as they arrived on site.
Culture
The town has the small but enormously significant
Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds built by
National Gallery architect
William Wilkins in 1819. It is the sole surviving
Regency Theatre left in the country and even after nearly 200 years remains a vital part of the town's cultural identity. The theatre, which is owned by the
National Trust underwent a major restoration between 2005 and 2007. Appeal Patron Dame
Judi Dench: It presents a full programme of performances and is also open for public tours.
Moyse's Hall Museum is one of the oldest (c. 1180) domestic buildings in East Anglia open to the public. It has collections of fine art, for example
Mary Beale, costume, for example
Charles Frederick Worth,
horology, local and social history; including
Red Barn Murder and
Witchcraft.
The town holds an annual festival in May. This including concerts, plays, dance, and lecturers culminating in fireworks. Bury St Edmunds is home to Englands oldest Scout Group,
1st Bury St Edmunds (Mayors Own).
The town's
football club,
Bury Town, are recognised as the fourth oldest
non-league team in England. They are currently members of the
Isthmian League Division One North.
Local economy
Brewing
The
Greene King brewery is to be found in Bury.
The other brewery in Bury St Edmunds is
The Old Cannon Brewery and public house on Cannon Street near the
railway station. The brewing vessels, which were made for an exhibition in Japan in 1997, can be seen in the front room. Just outside the town is
Bartrums Brewery, which is situated on Rougham airfield but originally started in the village of Thurston.
Another famous beer-related landmark is Britain's smallest
public house,
The Nutshell, which is on The Traverse, just off the town's marketplace.
Sugar beet
Bury's largest landmark is the
British Sugar factory near the
A14, which processes
sugar beet into refined crystal sugar. It was built in 1925 and processes beet from around 1,300 growers. 660 lorry loads of beet can be accepted each day during a processing "campaign", when beet is being harvested. Not all the beet can be crystallised immediately, and some is kept in solution in holding tanks until late spring and early summer, when the plant has spare crystallising capacity. The sugar is sold under the Silver Spoon brand name (the other major British sugar brand,
Tate & Lyle, is made from imported
sugar cane). By-products include molassed sugar beet feed for cattle and LimeX70, a soil improver. When the wind is in a certain direction a smell of burnt starch from the plant is very noticeable. As of September 2007, persistent local rumours and a report on BBC Radio Suffolk suggest that the site is to be sold in 2012 to
Merlin Entertainments Group, the owners of the Staffordshire theme park
Alton Towers, with a view to rebuilding half the site as a similar attraction, whilst the rest of the land would be developed into housing and amenities.
Notable residents
Notable people from Bury St Edmunds include artist and printer
Sybil Andrews, actor
Bob Hoskins, theatre director
Sir Peter Hall, author Maria Lousie de la Ramé (
aka Ouida), World War II Canadian general
Guy Simonds and the Eighteenth Century English landscape architect
Humphry Repton, as well as
Thomas Clarkson main fact-finder behind the
abolition of the slave trade.
Notable bands from Bury St Edmunds include
Jacob's Mouse,
Miss Black America,
The Dawn Parade and
Kate Jackson (of
The Long Blondes)
Although not from Bury St Edmunds, the
BBC Radio 1 DJ
John Peel lived nearby in
Great Finborough and on
12 November 2004, his funeral took place at the Cathedral. It was attended by over a thousand people including many of the artists he'd championed throughout his career. During a peak of local musical activity in Bury St Edmunds in 2002, he referred (tongue-in-cheek) to the town as 'The New Seattle'.
Whilst not resident in the town, the actor
Ian McShane was given Freedom of the Borough in 1996 after he played the title role in the popular television series
Lovejoy, which was filmed in and around Bury, raising the profile of the town.
Twin towns
Further Information
Get more info on 'Bury St Edmunds'.
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