Historian Martyn Taylor explores how the Westfield estate was developed on the west side of Bury St Edmunds
In 1855, the borough council purchased from the executors of the 1838 will of George Brown, of Tostock, more than 11 acres of land at the end of Field Lane, in Bury St Edmunds, for £2,276.
This was to become the new cemetery, because the Great Churchyard had been closed then – as were many others – by an act of Parliament that prohibited graveyards in urban areas.
The thinking behind this was that miasmas and diseases were being created by water permeating the graves and being carried into the water table.
Field Lane, that ran from St Andrew’s Street South, was then re-named Cemetery Road. Subsequently the Westfield estate, a term loosely applied to the residential housing development from today’s King’s Road down to Risbygate Street westwards, came into being with the purchase by the borough council of the West Farm in that area.
A building plan was implemented, with location names known as Victoria Street, Albert Street, Albert Crescent, West Road, Upper Brown Road and Lower Brown Road – the latter names in deference to the former owner George Brown.
Bury Borough Council met on May 3, 1887, and agreed to re-name the existing Upper and Lower Brown Roads to Queens Road, in honour of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee on June 20. So on the next day Queen’s Road came into existence and Lower Brown Road became York Road.
Another celebration, that of the coronation of George V in 1911, saw Cemetery Road change to King’s Road. The estate was sold off in large individual plots with small front gardens but with lengthy rear gardens, especially in Queen’s and York roads.
The earliest house built throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras can most probably be attributed to a Walter Neetham at 50-51 Victoria Street, from 1860, however most building starting in the 1880s.
Active builders were F Tooke, Henry Frost, Alfred Andrews and the Barbrooke family. Some tradesmen lived in the houses they constructed, for instance carpenter George Barbrooke built numbers 8 and 9 Upper Brown Road, but left a gap between them (now filled in) so he could store his ladders. He was also responsible for number 10, in 1886. Here, in 1907, clerk Henry Hinnels lived. He had obtained a mortgage of £425 from the trustees of the Royal Oddfellows Pride Lodge, quite a sum of money then, though nothing like the value nowadays. It passed into the ownership of Godfrey and Mable Hinnels in 1955 and when she died in 1975 the house was put on the market.
Adjacent to this property, with its 130-foot-long garden, is a small track with an old brick and flint barn that was thought to be a dairy at one time. It has now been successfully converted into dwellings.
The Westfield estate became homes for ‘white collar workers’ as we would know them today, their income far greater than the labouring classes, ideally suited for the numerous bay-windowed villas, semi-detached houses and small terraces.
The Victorian fashion for naming their houses after famous events was followed throughout the area: Albert Crescent – Glencoe and Camperdown, West Road –Minden, Mafeking and Ladysmith.
Royalty was memorialised in Victoria Street with Victoria’s fourth child Prince Alfred and his daughter Marie, Villas named after them.
Perhaps the most intriguing of all of the homes is that of an unaltered little pair of semi-detached houses in Victoria Street called Notice to Quit Cottages. Why their original owner Charles Nunn decided on this name in 1874 – your guess is as good as mine.
Now a very desirable part of the town to live, many of the Westfield estate properties have been extended over the years but the streets suffer from that modern street scourge – parking. The Victorians and Edwardians did not need off road parking, cars being a rarity.
The only vestige left relating to George Brown is that of Lower Brown Terrace, now York Terrace, a row of four houses between York Road and Risbygate Street.
