Historian Martyn Taylor looks into The Vinefields in Bury St Edmunds and its links with grapes, grammar schools and housing

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 north-west 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 over the River Lark by laying planks through the open buttresses of what we know today as the Abbots Bridge, which dates from around 1210.

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 to John Eyer, one of the town’s Guildhall Feoffees.

In 1834 two brothers, Francis and Frederick Clark, both Bury 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 56, Frederick died in 1870 aged 71.

The cottages, now Grade II listed, are still there today unaltered, something so unusual in the town; a plaque at their southern end confirms the Clark connection.

In 1883, Bury St Edmunds Grammar School re-located from St Michaels Close, in Northgate Street, to purpose-built buildings in The Vinefields. With the ending of 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, 23 houses were built by the Direct Labour Organisation of the council, using standard building methods, and 66 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. These walls were up to 13 inches thick without cavities.

Other houses of this type were built in and around Beetons Way. This sort of prefabricated housing was countrywide and developed under the Ministry of Works 1947-1977.

The future of the former St James Middle School site has yet to be resolved as the planning application for it has to take into consideration its view over the Abbey Gardens.

— Martyn Taylor is a local historian, author and Bury Tour Guide. His latest book, Bury St Edmunds Through Time Revisited, is widely available.