Bury St Edmunds

Bury St Edmunds

Bury St Edmunds shown within the United Kingdom
Population	35,015 (2001 Census)
OS grid reference	TL855645
District	St Edmundsbury
Shire county	Suffolk
Region	East
Constituent country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	BURY ST EDMUNDS
Postcode district	IP28-IP33
Dialling code	01284
Police	Suffolk
Fire	Suffolk
Ambulance	East of England
UK Parliament	Bury St Edmunds
European Parliament	East of England
List of places: UK • England • Suffolk

Coordinates: 52°′″N 0°′″E / 52.2474, 0.7183

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 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

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 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 ^{[citation needed]}.

The 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 did not conform to regulations. Bury St Edmunds is the terminus of the A1101, Great Britain's lowest road.

There is an extensive network of tunnels which are evidence of chalk-workings, but there is no evidence of an extensive network of tunnels under the 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.

Moyse's Hall Museum is one of the oldest 1180 domestic building in East Anglia open to the public. It has collections of fine art, e.g. Mary Beale , costume, e.g. Charles Frederick Worth , horology, local and social history; including Red Barn Murder and Witchcraft. [1]. Amongst the other noteworth 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 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 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 Council election on 3 May 2007 was won by the "Abolish Bury Town Council" party.

The 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".

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, which is owned by the National Trust underwent a major restoration between 2005 and 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." It presents a full programme of performances and is also open for public tours.

Brewing and beer

The Nutshell pub

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.

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.

Notable residents

The Abbeygate, a local symbol of the town

Notable people from Bury St Edmunds include artist and printer Sybil Andrews, actor Bob Hoskins, Guy Simonds, World War II Canadian general, born in Bury and migrated to Canada and the Eighteenth Century English landscape architect Humphry Repton.

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 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'.