Built on wool
Lavenham, Suffolk
Lavenham
is six miles north-east of Sudbury.
Wool was also the reason for the
wonderfully rich and colorful medieval half-timbered villages of East Anglia,
and Lavenham is probably the best-known and most complete. Medieval houses such
as the Guildhall and Wool Hall sag and creak crazily with age around the
cobbled market place with its cross, while the flint-knapped cathedral-like
parish church is perhaps the greatest of East Anglia’s wool churches.
Lavenham is six miles north-east of
Sudbury.
Plague village
Eyam, Derbyshire
Eyam,
Derbyshire
There’s a kind of macabre fascination in
walking around Derbyshire’s famed Plague Village of Eyam (pronounced ‘Eem’).
Many of the gritstone cottages carry plaques announcing which villagers died
there during the infamous Plague years of 1665-66. A visit to the Eyam Museum
in Hawkhill Road is recommended to get the full background on the 17th-century
‘visitation’. You should also take in the parish church of St Lawrence, with
its book of plague victims, the Rev William Mompesson’s chair, and the tomb of
his wife Catherine, who died of the disease, in the churchyard, watched over by
a venerable Saxon preaching cross.
Eyam is five north of Bakewell.
Ship-building village
Bucklers Hard, Hampshire
Bucklers
Hard on the Beaulieu River in Hampshire was the Tyneside of Hampshire
In its heyday, Bucklers Hard on the
Beaulieu River in Hampshire was the Tyneside of Hampshire, for many of Nelson’s
mighty “wooden walls of England” were built in this now quiet backwater on the
Beaulieu estate. Lines of neat, red-brick cottages march down towards the
river, where thousands of oaks from the New Forest were piled higher than the
rooftops, before being made into over 50 men-of-war, and then launched to take
on Napoleon’s fleet gather to witness the launches, as recorded in the museum
and refurbished cottages in the now peaceful, green-lined main street.
Buckers Hard is two miles south-east of
Beaulieu.
Transplanted village
Edensor, Derbyshire
The
whole is watched over by the graceful spire of the Parish Church of St Peter,
built in 1867 to the design of Sir George Gilbert Scott.
When in 1839 the sixth Duke of Devonshire
decided that the Domesday village of Edensor (pronounced “Ensor”) was spoiling
his view from nearby Chatsworth, he resolved to move it, lock, stock and barrel
to its present site. With the help of his brilliant gardener, Joseph Paxton,
and architect John Robertson of Derby, he built every house to a different
design – from Swiss chalet to Tudor cottage. The whole is watched over by the
graceful spire of the Parish Church of St Peter, built in 1867 to the design of
Sir George Gilbert Scott.
Edensor is two miles north-east of
Bakewell.
The model chocolate village
Bournville, Birmingham
a
chocolate-box village
We started this feature with the image of a
chocolate-box village, and we end it with a chocolate-based village. Officially
“one of the nicest places to live in Britain”, Bournville, south of
Birmingham’s city center, was created by Quaker brothers George and Richard
Cadbury for their workers when they relocated their chocolate-making factory in
1879. The Cadburys named the area Bournville after the Bourn Brook, not after
their famous chocolate (incidentally, now made in France). Bournville’s
spacious, mock-Tudoe, half-timbered cottages and houses, all grouped around a
triangular village green, became the blueprint for other model villages in
Britain. Other such villages exist at Port Sunlight, Merseyside; Saltaire, West
Yorkshire; New Larnark, South Larnarkshire and Silver End, Essex.
Bournville is four miles south of
Birmingham city center.
