Bury St Edmunds buildings [249]

Image: © Michael Dibb Taken: 9 Sep 2020

Accessed off Westgate Street is the St Edmund Hospital. Built as a house, later used as a hotel and now a private hospital and nursing home. Constructed in the early/mid 18th century, altered and extended in the 19th century. There are a mixture of 18th and early 19th centuries internal features and evidence of changes of layout. Listed, grade II, with details at: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1135174 Westgate Street is the southernmost street of the medieval grid and it is mainly about the Greene King Brewery with so many of the buildings constructed for its processes or for its employees. In addition to the brewery there is a rich mix of historic buildings in diverse materials, including white brick, red brick and stucco render. The street has the only surviving intact Regency theatre. Bury St Edmunds is a market town which is the cultural and retail centre for West Suffolk and is known for brewing (Greene King) and sugar (British Sugar). There is scattered evidence of earlier activity but essentially Bury St Edmunds began as one of the royal boroughs of the Saxons and a monastery was founded which became the burial place of King Edmund. A new Benedictine abbey was built in 1020 which became rich and powerful and the town was laid out on a grid pattern by Abbot Baldwin. After the dissolution the abbey became ruinous. A new church, later the cathedral, was begun in the early 16th century.

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