Hazells Histories – The Vinefields

There were indeed vinefields in Bury St Edmunds off the area now known as Eastgate, providing grapes for wine from 1211. Winemaking in monasteries was important for rituals, rites and services, conducted as they were in Bury by Benedictine monks. This site for growing grapes was on a definite incline from Eastgate Street, but this is northwest facing.

The grapes must have been blest as normally vines face south to take advantage of a sunny disposition. Maybe the climate was a lot warmer back in those times. Immediate access to these vinefields by the townspeople was by laying planks through the open buttresses of what we know today as the Abbots Bridge. With the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII in 1539, thousands of former ecclesiastical locations were sold off. By 1560, the abbey of St Edmundsbury and The Vinefields, along with a couple of other sites had been sold off to John Eyer, one of the towns Guildhall Feoffees.

In 1834, two brothers – Francis and Frederick Clark (both Bury St Edmunds publicans of the Globe and Coach and Horses respectively) went into the property market and built a row of six cottages on the Vinefields. Unfortunately, speculation was the downfall of Francis; he died bankrupt in 1853 aged fifty-six, Frederick died in 1870 aged seventy-one. The cottages are still there today unaltered, something so unusual in the town; a plaque at their southern end confirms the Clark connection. In 1883 the Bury St Edmunds Grammar School re-located from St Michaels Close in Northgate Street to purpose built buildings on The Vinefields; with the ending of the Grammar Schools in 1972 these became St James Middle School. Two rows of terrace houses known as Vinefields Terrace and Pelican Court off Eastgate Street were demolished to make way for a new estate, the entrance to which was by the ancient Vinefields Lane.

On the site of Vinefields Farm, twenty-three houses were built by the Direct Labour Organisation of the council using standard building methods and sixty-six by George Wimpey & Co Ltd. These were anything but that. Their construction was by a very unconventional method, ‘No Fines’ (without sand), a 1:10 mix of cement and 20mm aggregate was mixed mechanically on site then pumped into formwork (shuttering) on traditional foundations, the formwork being removed after the concrete had hardened. The external walls were rendered to increase weather protection and internally were either plastered or dry lined in some cases. These walls were up to 13 inches thick without cavities. Other houses of this type were built in and around Beeton’s Way on The Howard Estate. This sort of prefabricated housing was countrywide and developed under the Ministry of works 1947-1977.

Hazells Histories are kindly provided by renowned local historian, Martyn Taylor.