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Bury St Edmunds

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Template:Infobox England place with map Bury St Edmunds is a town in the county of Suffolk, England. 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 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 town is closely associated with Magna Carta, in 1214 the barons of England met in the Abbey Church and swore that they would force King John to accept the Charter of Liberties, later known as Magna Carta.

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 Cathedral

St Edmundsbury Cathedral from the east.

Next to the abbey is Bury St Edmunds Cathedral, 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, 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 all this work, there are still parts of the cathedral that need completing. The cloisters remain unfinished, and there are still many areas of the cathedral that are inaccessible to the general public due to ever ongoing building work. The tower makes St Edmundsbury the only recently completed cathedral in the UK; only a handful of Gothic revival cathedrals are still being built worldwide. The tower was constructed using original fabrication techniques. Six highly skilled masons cut and placed every stone individually.

For an important service at the new cathedral in the 1960s Benjamin Britten wrote his Fanfare for St Edmundsbury, a work for three trumpets which is now well-known.

The Theatre Royal

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 began a major restoration in late 2005 which is due for completion in early 2007. Appeal Patron Dame Judi Dench: "The Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds holds a unique place in the history of theatre in this country as well as a special place in my heart. The restoration of one of the last Georgian theatres in the country will ensure a vital part of our theatrical heritage will survive for future generations"

Brewing and beer

The Nutshell pub

The Greene King brewery is to be found in Bury. Greene King produce the award-winning IPA India pale ale. It is a light hoppy ale intended for expatriates in India, the large quantity of hops used being intended to keep the beer from spoiling on the long sea voyage. First brewed in the late 1800s, according to local legend a boat transporting it spilled its load on the Suffolk coast and the locals found it so delicious that they demanded it be made available at home. Greene King's advertising campaign shows Indian people complaining that the beer never reached them[1].

Another famous beer-related landmark is Britain's smallest public house, The Nutshell, which is on The Traverse, just off the town's marketplace.

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.

The Sugar Beet factory

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 local 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.

Miscellany

The Abbeygate, a local symbol of the town
  • The Abbey Gardens 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 being there, two teenagers discovered a flaw: that one could also make free telephone calls from the bench. They contacted Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, in person to tell him about this problem.
  • Every May, Bury St Edmunds holds its annual festival including concerts, plays, dance and culminating in fireworks.
  • Bury St Edmunds boasts Britain's first internally illuminated street sign, the pillar of salt. When built, it had to be granted special permission because it did not conform to regulations.
  • Notable bands from Bury St Edmunds include:
  • Notable people from Bury St Edmunds include:
    • Guy Simonds, World War II Canadian general, born in Bury and migrated to Canada
    • Actor Bob Hoskins.
    • Although not from Bury St Edmunds, the BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel lived nearby in Stowmarket 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 had championed throughout his career. During a peak of local musical activity in Bury St Edmunds in 2002, he referred to the town as 'The New Seattle'.
  • The name Bury is a form of borough, 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".
  • Bury St Edmunds is also the seat of the East of England Regional Assembly
  • On 3 March, 1974 a Turkish Airlines DC10 jet 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.
  • Tudor king Henry VIII's sister, Mary, was buried in Bury's St Mary's Church.
  • Moyse's Hall Museum has a vast collection of archaeological findings that were made in the region between Devil's Dyke and the line between Littleport and Shippea Hill (i.e. along the borderline of East Cambridgeshire and Suffolk) from the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.[1] Findings include a hoard of more than 6500 pieces of bronze, in particular swords, spear-heads, arrows, axes, knives, daggers,armour, decorative equipment (in particular for horses) and many fragments of sheet bronze, all dating from the late Bronze Age. The swords show holes where rivets or studs held the wooden hilt in place (studs were usually made of bronze except for commanders who had silver-studded swords or for a commander-in-chief who had a gold-studded sword).[2]
  • Bury St Edmunds is the terminus of the A1101, Great Britain's lowest road.
  • Bury St Edmunds has an extensive network of tunnels under the centre. These tunnels were used for many historical purposes, and it is unsure what they were originally intended for. Entrances to the tunnels are to be found in some of the older buildings, such as Moyses Hall and Cupola House as well as the ruins of the Abbey. Due to their unsafe nature the tunnels are not open to the public, although special viewing has been granted to individuals in the past.

Twin Towns

Possible twinnings

References

  1. ^ Hall, David. Fenland survey : an essay in landscape and persistence / David Hall and John Coles. London; English Heritage. ISBN 1-85074-477-7. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |origdate= ignored (|orig-date= suggested) (help), p. 81-88
  2. ^ Where Troy Once Stood, I. Wilkens, 2005, p. 90
Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "Bury St Edmunds".
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