Gipeswic Waterfront

In the rain…

Well I might not get many plaudits from the Ipswich tourist board but I promise to snap it in the sunshine some time. This is a sky though all too familiar. The view is looking towards the brand new university building. It’s an impressive bit of kit. After all there was nothing there before except dirt and broken glass.

Not many people even in England seem to know much about Ipswich. It gets a bit of a bad press. Some people seem to think of it as some sort of ‘new town’ when in fact it is England’s oldest Anglo Saxon town. It is also a port which still has a bit of shipping but post containerisation this is all at Felixstowe by the mouth of the Orwell.

The waterfront has shifted considerably since Raedwald’s time. This shot would have entailed a serious risk of drowning. Upstream the river is still called ‘The Gipping’ and it is here you will find some of the main characters of the Rune of Ing.

Gipeswic is not far pronunication-wise from Ipswich. The ‘G’ was probably sounded as a ‘Y’ which over time has been lost or conflated with ‘I’ and the ‘wic’ part was pronounced ‘wich’ which in Old English simply means a port.

The fledgling port probably dates from the time of Raedwald or a little earlier but only began to really flourish in the 8th rather than the 7th century. It was obviously an important locus of exchange. In Ipswich it is possible to see where the English people came from, what they have been through, and where they are now, for good and for ill.

There are several wonderful medieval churches in the town, as many as four only a stone’s throw from the waterfront and two of these used to be on the dockside. They are now separated from the river by a choked up one way system.

In the town centre around a couple of the churches there are stone tombs where if you are lucky you might spot an enthusiastic contributor to the nation’s obesity problem tucking into a Macdonalds and using the tomb as a convenient table.