Today it's a small Suffolk village well off the beaten track - roughly west of Ipswich and south of Bury St Edmunds. But 500 years ago Lavenham was one of the wealthiest towns in the country thanks to all the money to be made from sheep, specifically the dyeing, spinning and weaving of woollen fleeces. Merchants grew rich by selling fine cloth created by outsourced labour, exporting it across Europe and beyond, and by the 15th century Lavenham had become a watchword for quality. But over the 16th century the business model started to fail, with Suffolk's wool towns undercut first by Dutch refugees in Colchester and then by cheaper imports from the continent.
Lavenham's swift fall from grace meant that residents no longer had the money to replace their homes and so an incredible cluster of late medieval/early Tudor timber houses has survived to the present day. Dozens of the most central houses are oak-framed, infilled with wattle and daub and perhaps limewashed in endearing pastel shades. Tourists flock to admire the uberphotogenic higgledy architecture, and rightly so, but also to wreck all the best views by parking their vehicles in front. I see why the old Market Place makes a very good and very necessary car park but Lavenham would be even prettier if public transport were king.
Let's pop inside the biggest building.
NATIONAL TRUST:Lavenham Guildhall Location: Lavenham, Suffolk CO10 9QZ [map] Open: 10am-4pm (closed Mon, Tue) Admission: £8.50 Website:nationaltrust.org.uk/suffolk/lavenham-guildhall Three word summary: prestigious Tudor timbers Time to allow: about half an hour
At the heart of the village is the former meeting hall of the Corpus Christi Guild, Lavenham's most exclusive band of clothiers. They met downstairs in a fairly small room, since enlarged, because you don't need a big space when riff-raff aren't allowed as members. But they didn't own all of what you now see because the National Trust have run three buildings together, with the cash desk in a former merchant's house and the tearoom in a late medieval shop. The guild part is impressive though, with its leaded lights and beamed ceiling, and can still be hired out by local community groups for a very reasonable fee. Alas the cellar has been closed for a while due to flooding, and without a significant injection of cash will be staying that way.
The guildhall has also been used as a workhouse and a 'bridewell', a kind of prison, and both these histories are explained upstairs along with further detail about the cloth trade. The last couple of rooms go big on WW2, an American air base having been opened to the north of the village in 1944, and whilst its impact was significant what I really wanted to see was more about the old stuff, not yet more wartime reflection. The garden includes herbs and plants which would have been used for dyeing, and also tables for overspill from the tearoom which, it has to be said, was busier than the house. But the Guildhall is truly an amazing survivor, and a salutary reminder that every economy collapses in the end.
The other visitable attraction in the market square is Little Hall, a bright orange house which dates back to the 1300s. In its time it's been owned by two art-obsessed twins so don't expect historical perfection, also it closes over the winter so come before the end of the month. Close by is the tiny Toll Cottage, the Angel hotel, a slightly bijou information centre and a warren of streets and alleyways leading off. Keep wandering and you'll find wonky cottages, crooked cottages, pastel cottages and, if you make it down to Water Street, a staggeringly half-timbered terrace without a straight line in sight. Yes of course they filmed some of Harry Potter here, think Godric's Hollow.
And of course what most tourists do when they get to Lavenham and have 'done' the middle is to browse the shops and graze the cafes down the High Street. You'll not be at a loss for a scone and a teapot, nor clothes and collectibles, nor perfumes and a pint, none of it overtly loathsome. If you want something cheaper don't worry, the village has two Co-Ops. I suspect a lot of people end up inside the Swan Inn, which is massive and juts out in multiple chunks alongside the chief T-junction. And those who manage to make their way out to St Peter and St Paul's will find it has the highest tower of any village church in England, having been massively overengineered for the current population, such is the scale of the wool town's economic descent.
» a dozen Flickr photos
The easiest way to get to Lavenham is to drive. I should have done this before I moved to London, back when I lived ten miles away and still owned a car, but somehow I never chose to do so. The car parks are free for heaven's sake. Instead I waited until I was middle-aged and tearoom-ready, caught the train to the end of the line and walked from there.
The end of the line is Sudbury, three stops up a rural spur from Marks Tey. An off-peak return from Stratford normally costs £32 (and from Liverpool Street £44, so never buy that), but Greater Anglia are currently offering a Hare Fares special offer (buy before 18th October, travel before 4th December) and this costs just £15. The journey takes just over an hour.
Sudbury's lovely, a proper East Anglian market town with all the shops that everyone for miles around needs, be that green wellies from Roy's or a plucked partridge from John Coleman in Old Market Square. Look out for the small Heritage Centre and Museum up Gaol Lane, and also the statue of artist Thomas Gainsborough in front of the parish church. His house is open to the public as a fine art gallery and exhibition space, though £17.50 seems a bit steep for entry when it was only a fiver a decade ago. I assume you're all familiar with my Sudbury blogpost from 2012 so I won't say more.
What you should do next is catch the bus, the hourly 753 to Bury St Edmunds via Lavenham, whose half-hour ride is currently subject to a bargain basement £2 fare. I did not do this, I assumed an 8 mile walk across the fields would be fun, plus the weather was unseasonably excellent for a proper hike.
I was helped by a closed railway line since repurposed as a walking route, the Valley Trail. This curves round from Sudbury to Long Melford for about three miles, dipping briefly into Essex along the way. I also cut off the corner by crossing the lush meadows beside the River Stour where I encountered thundering weirs and clustered cattle, unlike in 2012 when the whole place was flooded.
Long Melford is well named, being over two miles from top to bottom, so that kept me on pavements rather than footpaths for a while. The antique shop count has slumped somewhat since Lovejoy was filmed here but multiple tearoom opportunities abound. As a rambler I particularly appreciated the two red phoneboxes repurposed as Walkers' Hubs, each with a selection of free maps and guides inside. The top tourist attractions are Melford Hall and Kentwell Hall but I assume you're all familiar with my Long Melford blogpost from 2012 so I won't say more.
It was then time to bear off across the fields following another former branch line into the middle of arable nowhere. For an hour I met absolutely nobody as I tracked hedgerows, crossed streams, followed embankments, threaded through woods and passed acres of harvested stalks. It all seemed gloriously easy. But close to Lavenham the path dipped down into a cutting and became much narrower, then much muddier, then briefly waterlogged in an annoyingly unavoidable way and this led to me arriving in the wool town with splashed-brown jeans. Don't risk it in trainers. [map]
