Exhibitions 2
A History of Maritime Ipswich (Isaac Lord Warehouse, Ipswich, till 27 September)
The bales of St Clement's
John Henshall
The parish of St Clement's, Ipswich, Suffolk, must be among the most historical- ly rich and diverse in any town of compara- ble prominence and antiquity in this country. It contains nearly all of Ipswich docks, five churches, including the now redundant St Clement's itself, numerous old pubs and memories of a pantheon of bygone worthies: Sir Thomas Slade, who designed the Victory, is buried here, Cardi- nal Wolsey was born here and Gainsbor- ough lived here for a while. Now almost exclusively commercial and industrial, it was until after the first world war one of Ipswich's most densely populated areas: local residents were packed like sardines into houses which were often of Tudor or Jacobean origin, and there was a huge `passing trade' through the port. Yet you will not find St Clement's, or Ipswich, on any national `heritage' trail: that is for the Canterburys, Yorks and Norwiches, the pretty places. However, this exhibition reminds us that workaday, wage-earning towns can give showpiece venues a run for their money.
Ipswich history is inextricably bound up with its maritime connections, which in turn are inseparable from its development, from Saxon times, as a trading centre. From mediaeval times on, Ipswich has con- centrated on wool, then malt, then ship- building. The last began in the Napoleonic Wars and even today there are ship and barge repair yards which use the ancient skills of the shipwright, shipsmith, sailmak- er, ropemaker and caulker. Since the 1850s these activities have been centred on the town's Wet Dock, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year. Ipswich was the biggest port between the Thames and the Humber, and when the 32-acre dock opened in 1842 it was the largest artificially enclosed trading water in England, hailed as a triumph of Victorian engineering in a town at the heart of the Industrial Revolu- tion. Overseer of the dock's construction was Henry Palmer, appointed by the Dock Commission in 1837. Three years after the dock opened, J.M. Clark's Old Custom House became its centrepiece; today it houses the Ipswich Port Authority. Two minutes' walk away on Wherry Quay is the Isaac Lord Warehouse, Ipswich's only sur- viving maltster's establishment dating from Tudor times; now it hosts what must be one of the largest, most original exhibitions in Britain this year.
The oldest part of the Lord complex is the old merchant's house at Nos 80 and 80A Fore Street. Almost all the rest of the premises is used to house this splendid show, which you enter from the docks end (the buildings extend right back from Fore Street to the quay) and most of which is in the long, superbly atmospheric 18th- century maltings which are the largest indi- vidual part of the building. I have family connections with Ipswich which reach back generations and can claim to know it extremely well, but even I was surprised by this exquisite Grade II building and impressed by its potential as a gallery or general exhibition venue. I was there on a superb summer Saturday when the newly opened show was almost as busy as the packed Malt Kiln pub next door.
The exhibition contains an astonishing variety of material and, as a primary task, tells the story of the great days of wool, malt and ships — huge selections of the relevant tools and machinery are on dis- play. Dozens of illustrations — paintings, prints and photographs — tell the story of the docks as a whole. I was especially taken with the hand-coloured drawing-diagrams of old Ipswich water, and those made while the new Wet Dock was in the planning and construction stages. Photographs tell the dockside's and by extension Ipswich's story from the turn of the century, and a series of aerial shots documents the changing face of this chunk of industrial Ipswich, now as often given over to new-tech as to tradi- tional industrial use. We see details of both the visits and manufacture of the numerous types of vessel associated with Ipswich and the River Orwell down the years: men-o'- war, schooners, East Indiamen, cats, billy boys, ketches, barques, barquentines,
boomies and spritsail barges. There are numerous historic model ships, too, rang- ing from detailed, working shipwrights' models to the more fanciful creations of sailors; there is also an excellent selection of those timelessly fascinating 'ships in a bottle'. We see everything from prototype local divers' suits and other underwater equipment to the mocked-up interior of a Dickensian quayside ship owner's office, with dozens of unused quill pens. We are reminded that, shipping apart, there was considerable floating interest in the dock itself, from the paddle steamers which took the local trading gentry on weekend excur- sions to more bizarre phenomena: the St Helena, the floating church, and the Old Sunk Light, the floating pub, which bobbed up and down a few hundred yards apart from each other for decades; the pub's enterprising landlady used to row boat- loads of customers to the quay and back.
Perhaps the Isaac Lord building could help solve Ipswich's main current artistic problem — how to finance and then build the European Visual Arts Centre, a pro- posed three-story modern art gallery which the town would dearly love to compete with the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The EVAC cen- tre was mooted several years ago, since when the economy has gone down and its expected cost up — from about £5 million to £12 million today. There is a plan to organise a pan-European architectural competition to design the building, and EVAC has run a series of exhibitions at other people's galleries. Ironically, the pro- posed site is the currently derelict 'island' dock straight in front of the Lord building. However, the building's owners have made known their interest in using the maltings as a permanent exhibition centre, so per- haps they should get together with EVAC and the town fathers: Ipswich might just get its major new gallery gratis.
The Common Quay, Ipswich', engraving by J. Greig from a drawing by George Frost
Previous page
