see our Vestiges page);
- The Post Chaise: at the very tip of St Margaret's Street and Woodbridge Road with a loop lane behind it linking the two roads; standing opposite The Mulberry Tree, still standing today;
- The Admiral's Head: opposite the jaws of Carr Street, on Major's Corner);
- The Duke of Kent Tavern: 10 Upper Orwell Street on the opposite side to the St Michael Church, for many years the former public houses was the offices of the Co-op funeral service – see our Co-op page for a photograph; a Urinal is marked behind tenements on the opposite corner to the church.
7. Note that the prominently-marked 'The Old House' on the south side of Carr Street was the home of James Allen Ransome (1806-1875), director of Ransomes Sims and Jeffries. His extensive triangular garden is to the south of the house. Ironically, perhaps, what must have been a rather fine house fronting Carr Street is today a Poundland store (formerly Woolworth's in one of the ugliest buildings in Ipswich); the gardens are either built on or part of today's car park. Such is progress.

'Courts' and 'Yards' were small clusters of poor, overcrowded housing often grouped around a small yard and accessed from the street by a narrow passage. 'Upper Orwell Courts' still has its street sign, but is now just a narrow lane between Upper Orwell Street and Bond Street. Muriel Clegg (see Reading List) writes of houses (mainly one room up, one room down) with no gas, electricity or sanitation when an additional income could be had by storing human dung from the inhabitants in a tank in the yard which was collected and sold on to farmers to manure the fields. The stench and danger of disease can only be imagined. In the 1880s a network of sewers was dug in Ipswich (a notable feature of those dug down the centre of Westgate Street was the discovery of a series of medieval burials. This work may well have been in progress at the time of the above 1881 map. Through the 19th century private companies provided the water supply but in 1892 the council took them over. See the Ragged Schools page for other signs of extreme poverty in Ipswich when apparently its economy was booming...

Rags & bones
A key source of information on this subject is Frank Grace's excellent book Rags & bones (see Reading List) which meticulously documents the truly awful poverty of eight to nine thousand people living in St Clement's parish in the 19th century. One or two examples really bring the squalor to life. The area known for many decades as 'The Potteries' – roughly the site of Suffolk New College, with the 'cliff' (scarp) up to Alexandra Park probably caused by clay-digging was probably the source of raw material for the seventh and eighth century wheel-thrown pottery which was widely distributed in Britain and the Rhineland and which  is called by archaeologists 'Ipswich Ware' because of its characteristic composition and glaze. A stratum of white clay was estimated by historian John Glyde in 1850 to be thirty feet deep in this area and there was, of course, plentiful local, fresh spring water. The greatest number of kilns was found just inside the late Saxon rampart and ditch which ran down what is now Upper Orwell Street and 'St Helen's pottery ground' succeeded these kilns in later centuries.The decline of this ancient trade is the story told in Rags & bones. In addition to The Potteries, Rope Walk (literally a rope manufactory) and the area reaching round the bend in the dock from Neptune Quay and down the east bank to Myrtle Street experienced a massive change from the 1820s. The Rope Walk and Rope Lane were once cut off from the river by meadows until Long Lane was cut through. The remnant of this today is the southern stub of Long Street between the College and the University running from the bottom of Back Hamlet into car parks. This lane was eventually to form one of the worst slums in the town. The decline of pottery, tile and brick-making as well as rope-making seems to have triggered a burst of trading in plots of land, rapid building of 'cottages' with small pubs on the corners, grocery shops etc. (For a 1902 map of much of 'The Potteries' area, see our Potteries page; also the Holy Trinity Church page.)

All of this was driven by the profit-motive, not by philanthropy. Very little or no attention was paid to decent infrastructure: paving, drainage, access etc. Because it catered to the housing demands of the lower and lowest strata of Ipswich society, the result was the building of slums with appalling sanitation, overcrowding, disease and exploitation of the inhabitants. The distance between the frontages of the cottages varied from less than fifteen feet in David Street, even less in Baker Street and nine feet in Short Lane. The last of these was 200 feet long and in 1881 there were eighteen households with 102 people living there. It was similar in many ways to present-day shanty towns which grow up on the edges of conurbations. Many of the people making money from these ventures were supposedly upstanding members of Ipswich society. People with power, wealth and influence: politicians, mayors, businessmen resisted any social reforms for decades, despite overwhelming evidence collected by the Medical Officer of high mortality and degrading living conditions over a large area of the town where 'repectable' persons might fear to tread. The stench would certainly put them off. So much for the enlightenment of the Victorian industrial revolution and its resultant immense wealth and 'prosperity'.

'Cottage' is a word we like to associate with roses round the door and a pleasant garden, perhaps a thatched roof. In the Potteries it was more commonly a 'single house', no more than a two-roomed shed with a blind back, no doors or windows at the rear. In 1881, one such dwelling in Clark's Court housed thirty-three people. The toilet would have to be emptied by hand, through the house. Many cases of inadequate drains becoming blocked are reported with the surrounding ground, paths and buildings becoming contaminated with effluvia. Slums reported as being health hazards, damp, overcrowded, disease-ridden, were no more than twenty years old in some cases, so the landowners were not just building the slums of tomorrow, but virtually the slums of today. There are examples of builders being unable to finish their work because the inhabitants were so desperate for housing that they moved into unfinished premises. Needless to say, the builders gave up and left houses unfinished. Some jerry-built houses on the clay layer of the Potteries site, close to the scarp either fell down or had to be demolished only ten years after erection. In the 1880s a network of sewers was dug in Ipswich and eventually the major contamination and public health problems of 'The Rope Walk Insanitary Area', as it had come to be known, were ameliorated. (Between 1879 and 1881 the sewer outlet was built downriver from the dock.) In the 19th century private companies provided the water supply but in 1892 the council took them over. See our Street furniture page for a note about Ipswich Water Works. Drainage, sewers, water supply, paving, slum landlords: all unromantic subjects, but crucial to the chequered history of Ipswich and its people.

Another feature of the population of the Potteries area in the 19th century detailed in Rags & bones is its restless nature. People were coming into the area to seek for, usually, very low-paid work then moving around to different addresses, moving away and sometimes returning. Whatever societal structure developed happened despite this perpetual motion. For the powerful employers of the day, notably the dominant Ransome's, Sims and Jefferies engineering works, this would be called "a flexible workforce"...

An 1850 perspective
‘There are 106 courts in the town, containing 627 houses. The drainage from some of these is very defective. In some instances all the refuse water has to be carried to a dead well, situated either in the middle or at the end of the yard. In others, the water course is very badly paved, and stagnant water is the consequence. The demoralizing practice of providing but one convenience for several house is here seen in full force. No less than 67 courts, containing 358 houses, are in this position; giving an average of one to every five houses. The courts are also equally deficient in accommodation for the washing of clothes. Many of the inhabitants have to perform that operation in their dwellings, to the serious injury of their health and destruction of their comfort. The supply of water to the courts is also of a defective character. Ten of them are without any supply, to 4 the water they require is fetched from the wells, and to 21 from pumps. The difficulty and labour attending the procuration of this needful article, must have deteriorating influence on the character of the inhabitants, and prevent the formation of those habits of cleanliness so essential to the health, comfort and moral elevation of the poorer classes. The ventilation of the courts is bad, their situation often very confined, and the entrance in some instances narrow. Some of their houses are situated back to back. Above 500 of them have no back doors; and, in the major portion, the rooms are so small that, where they are occupied by families, they cannot fail of being crowded in the sleeping apartments.’
Contemporary description of insanitary courts, John Glyde: Moral, social and religious condition of Ipswich, 1850; quoted in Grace, F. The late Victorian town (see Reading list).
Frank Grace's

Certainly there is no name (not even Union Street) on the map of Ipswich by Edmund White, 1867. The two streets crossing at right-angles between Upper Orwell Street and Cox Lane are named Barclay St and Office St. However, an Ordnance Survey (scale 1/1250) map of 1883 given to us by Hilary Platts some years ago shows all the names in this rabbit-warren of the poorest Victorian housing in the centre of the town. This clearly shows, on the north side of Union Street, Well Court and directly opposite: Charles Court. Thanks to Dave Riseborough for bringing this hidden corner of historic lettering to our attention. Below: location photograph of the vestigial Charles Court lettering.
2014 image

See Upper Orwell Court and Dove Yard for this and other metal street name signs.

1778 map
Watts Court doesn't exist in 1778; the site is an orchard across Foundation Street from Shire Hall and beside 'The Master of the Grammar School's House'. By the 1867 map Watts Court runs off the street to the west between the 'D' and the 'A' of 'FOUNDATION' with a few dwellings. The map of 1881further down this page actually labels 'Watts Court' in this position (shown here in red), now fully built up with small cottages on both sides. The Shire Hall has disappeared by this date,
1867map

1881 map

Watts Court, Foundation Street
[UPDATE 21.8.2012: "I stumbled on this very interesting site.  I know there were several courts built for the poor in Ipswich, usually built behind houses on the main streets.  My mother was born in Craig Court off Upper Orwell St, she grew up in Watts Court off Foundation St.  In fact two of these very small houses off Foundation St. still survive, they are now used as some kind of storage facility.  It would be great if you could put a picture of the houses on your site before they disappear. Also is are there any photos in the archives of these two courts.  Thank you for your time, Kind regards, Carolyn Saxon." In response to Carolyn's email, we have added the maps of courts and yards on this page and here are her 2013 images of those houses. Thanks.]
  2011 photographs courtesy Carolyn Saxon
[UPDATE: By spring 2013, this humble building had been demolished (see below). "Unbelievable!  Doesn't anyone in Ipswich  who has any say-so have the foresight to save anything of historic value?    I'm so glad I took those pictures when I was home last (2011) & passed them on to you.  Just in the nick of time it seems. Thanks for letting me know, Carolyn" (13.7.2013)]
2013 image
Muriel Clegg:
‘Under the twin pressures of rapidly growing population and the demands of industry, Ipswich, in common with there towns early in the nineteenth century, embarked upon the dual policy of opening up the town by the creation of new streets and infilling with rows of little houses wherever space permitted. The departure of the better off to new developments on the outskirts of the town left vacant the gardens and orchards which for centuries had been a feature of the town. One has only to compare the maps of Pennington (1778) and White (1867)*** to see the results. There is endless fascination in looking through nineteenth and early twentieth century directories at the names of the little courts, rows squares and cottages, often bearing the names of those who built them. In the long history of the town it was a short-lived development. The name-plate Watt’s Court until recently hung as a solitary memento of that period, when the town was crammed with people who actually lived in it. Watt’s Court has been redeveloped but no-on lives there now. If nostalgia threatens, a quick look at the 1874 report of the Medical Officer of Health for Ipswich is an instant corrective. No-one can regret the slum clearances begun ‘in earnest’ in the 1920s when many hurriedly built and deplorably insanitary little dwellings were gradually swept away. Yet during that phase of almost wholesale destruction when older buildings shared the fate of newer, much was lost which a later generation, bent on conservation, might have saved to grace an almost denuded town. But the streets designed to open up the town and to provide through ways are still with us.

'One of the earliest was Great Colman Street. The new road entailed the purchase of ‘Harebottle’ House with one-and-a half acres of land, offered for sale at the Great White Horse Hotel on 5th June, 1821. The last occupant of the house was Mrs Elizabeth Edge, widow of the Revd. John Edge, rector of Naughton and vicar of Rushmere. Unfortunately the particulars of sale show only the new lay-out and do not describe the house, which was to be demolished. Harbottle House (to give it its original name) was a Tudor house built by John Harbottle, a successful Ipswich cloth merchant who acquired property at the corner of Carr Street and Northgate Street in 1538. Gradually he extended his possessions in a north-easterly direction, building himself a house described as ’lately built’ in 1539. The house was sold by his great grandson, Sir Harbottle Grymston, in 1633. Little Colman Street was the back driveway from the stables to Carr Street. Here was a Tudor house which can be placed in context, but it is lost to us. A few years ensued before the proposed new road was constructed. On August 21st, 1823, the Suffolk Pitt Club held its anniversary meeting in a temporary building on the site. Clarke, whose History of Ipswich was published in 1830, wrote of it as only a proposed new road at the time. The new street took its name from the Colman family, shown by Pennington as having property there. Useful it may be, but the new street created a confusing little pattern by cutting across the double encircling lines of Old Foundry Road and St Margaret’s Street.’  Clegg, Muriel: Streets and street names in Ipswich (see Reading list).
[*** See the comparison of these two maps of the Foundation Street area shown above.]

"The usage of these street names is relatively modern. Muriel Clegg in her booklet Streets and Street Names in Ipswich [see Reading List] describes the history of each. Lower Orwell Street follows the course of a natural stream the ‘Cauldwell Brook’ that flows ‘from high ground to the east of the town gave its name and its course to Spring Road. Swelled by more water from Warwick Road (formerly Water Lane) the stream continued its course along St Helens Street (Cauldwell – 'Cold well' – Lane) to Majors Corner where there appears to have been another stream. There it turned down Upper and Lower Orwell Streets (the “Wash”) to reach the river’. In 1959 ‘excavations in Shire Hall Yard, behind Lower Orwell Street, revealed that the rampart [of the town’s walls] was constructed above a ditch (probably a boundary ditch of between AD900 and AD1100. The stream bed provided earth and gravel for the rampart, and itself, widened and deepened by these operations, provided an outer ditch probably 18 to 20 feet wide’. The street previously known as the ‘Wash’ or ‘Key Lane’ has never been a major thoroughfare. The ditch separated the area of this site from the medieval town and in medieval documents property in this area is described as in the suburbs of Ipswich. Fore Street ‘was originally St Clement’s Street’ or St Clement’s Fore Street’. By the early eighteenth century the name Fore Street had appeared, reflecting the approach to the ‘fore’ or foreshore, no longer apparent since the construction of the Wet Dock opened in 1839...

Wingfield Street (named after Wingfield's House)

A lane at its junction with Tacket Street; it elbows round to meet Foundation Street, but its much smaller today than in the above mid-1880s map (also shown on our Brook Street page relating to Rosemary Lane). See Street name derivations. Our page on Tooley's & Smart's Almshouses shows a 1902 map of the area with Wingfield Street and Little

See also our Christ Church URC/Baptist page for the Listing text relating to the still-standing rear wing of Sir Anthony Wingfield's 16th century mansion, next to the church, both of which stand back from today's Tacket Street north pavement.

Tankard Street: the theatre and Salvation Army Citadel
Photo courtesy Ipswich Society Image Archive
Above is a view of the north side of the narrow Tankard Street (now Tacket Street – see Street name derivations) looking east. The Tankard Inn had begun life as a private house bought by Sir Humphrey Wingfield* from a Mrs Falstof – probably after 1516 (the entrance to Wingfield Street is opposite) which he decorated in palatial manner. Henry Davy's engraving in Clarke's History and Description of the Town of Ipswich (1830) [see Reading list] shows that the magnificent panelled ground floor room with even more elaborate ceiling decoration survived as a public room in the Tankard Inn. It did so until Henry Ringham, woodcarver and church furnisher (whose Gothic House is in St Johns Road, shown on our California page), was in 1856 instructed to strip the room of its panelling, repair it and use most of it to line the walls of the study at John Cobbold's residence, Holy Wells. In 1929 the oak overmantel and wall panelling, some of it heraldic, was moved again to find a permanent home in the Wingfield Room at Christchurch Mansion.
[*Sir Humphrey Wingfield (c.1481-1545) was an English lawyer and Speaker of the House of Commons of England between 1533 and 1536. For more on his fascinating life and relationships to Charles Brandon (c.1484-1545), Duke of Suffolk who married Mary Tudor (1496-1533); also to Cardinal Wolsey and to Ipswich and its county – see The Wingfield Society website.]
See also our Withypolls memorials page for Sir Humphrey's role (along with his neighbour, Sir Thomas Rush) in the sale of the Holy Trinity Priory site and the early days of Christchurch Mansion.

Above: the illustration of the 'overmantel' from the Great Parlour in the Tankard Inn, from Blatchly, J.: Isaac Johnson, see Reading list.
From 1738 of the eastern part of the

for the Tankard Inn and the western part of the site for a Playhouse. The Salvation Army Citadel in the foreground of the above image began life on the site of the first permanent theatre in Ipswich; it was built by Henry Betts, a local brewer and owner of the Tankard Inn in 1736. In 1741 it is claimed that an unknown actor called Lyddal made his debut appearance as an African slave called Aboan in Thomas Southerne's play Oroonoko. This unknown actor was in fact the soon-to-be-famous Shakespearian, David Garrick. The original theatre was replaced by the Theatre Royal in 1803. It closed as a theatre in 1890 and became a Salvation Army barracks. All of the buildings in this view were demolished during the widening of Tacket Street (the Citadel relocated to Woodbridge Road in 1994). Today’s entrance to the NCP car park covering the site of the old Steam Brewery is at the immediate left of this picture. Even after conversion into a Salvation Army Citadel, it is said that parts of the 'auditorium' comprised some original theatrical fittings.
1778 map
Above: a detail from Pennington's map of Ipswich, 1778 showing the 'Playhouse' clearly labelled in 'Tackett Street'.
Tankard Innc.1830
Above: The Old Tankard in around 1830, converted from part of Sir Anthony Wingfield's house, the inn took the name from Tankard Street, formerly and now: Tacket(t) Street.

For much more on Wingfield's palatial house see A house fit for a Queen:Wingfield House in Tacket Street, Ipswich and its heraldic room by D. MacCulloch and J. Blatchly. Suffolk Institute, 1993.
The website Theatres and Halls in Ipswich, Suffolk

  
Above: photographs of the interior of the Tacket Street Salvation Army Citadel, courtesy Morvyn Finch, to whom our thanks. The galleried hall with its cast iron pillars bears striking resemblances to others in the town, e.g. the nearby Christ Church URC and Museum Street Methodist Church.