John Orbell
In Search of a Roof
Bury St Edmunds Buttermarket in the 1850s and the building of a covered market hall
The Buttermarket is at the heart of the town centre of Bury St Edmunds. Today it still bustles as it has done for centuries, and especially on market days.
Its heyday may have been in the mid-nineteenth century for then it was very crowded with stalls and pitches selling meat, fish, vegetables, eggs, dairy products and the like as well as ‘manufactured goods’. So crowded was it that Bury Council decided to introduce some order and in the process smarten up the town centre.
Their solution was to build a Provision Market. But opposition grew and grew and finally the ratepayers took matters into their own hands. So in an exercise in local democracy, Bury failed to get its provision market; congestion and noises and smells continued. So did the dreadful conditions under which the traders existed.
This is the tale of this ill-fated project, something completely lost in history. The writer – a ‘Bury boy’ – uses Council archives and especially the files of the Bury & Norwich Post to reconstruct the story. But some mystery remains – no drawing of the proposed building has survived; we have no knowledge of what it would have looked like!
- Format
- Booklet
- Pages
- 32
- Illustrations
- 11 colour and black & white
- Trim size
- 148 × 210 mm
- ISBN
- 978-0956611130
- Published
- 2021, Tailor’s End Press
Where to buy
Buy direct · £4.95 UK postage included. Overseas postage on application.
Look inside
Sample pages from In Search of a Roof. Select a page to enlarge it.
