Bury St Edmunds Guildhall is a municipal building in the Guildhall Street,

Bury St Edmunds Bury St Edmunds (), commonly referred to locally as Bury, is a historic market town, market, cathedral town and civil parish in Suffolk, England.OS Explorer map 211: Bury St.Edmunds and Stowmarket Scale: 1:25 000. Publisher:Ordnance Survey – ...

Suffolk Suffolk () is a ceremonial county of England in East Anglia. It borders Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south; the North Sea lies to the east. The county town is Ipswich; other important towns include Lowes ...

. It is a Grade I

listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...

History

The Guildhall is one of the largest and most impressive secular medieval buildings in the country, and a rare survival of a civic building from this period. The building, which was built with financial support from the wealthy

Bury St Edmunds Abbey The Abbey of Bury St Edmunds was once among the richest Benedictine monasteries in England, until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539. It is in the town that grew up around it, Bury St Edmunds in the county of Suffolk, England. It was ...

, dates back to 1220. The ''Bury Chronicle'' records that John of Cobham and Walter de Heliun visited the guildhall in 1279. The oldest part is the thirteenth-century stone entrance arch, within the highly decorative porch was added in the late 15th century. Its unique roof structure combines East Anglian

queen post A queen post is a tension member in a truss that can span longer openings than a king post truss. A king post uses one central supporting post, whereas the queen post truss uses two. Even though it is a tension member, rather than a compression me ...

s with

king post A king post (or king-post or kingpost) is a central vertical post used in architectural or bridge designs, working in tension to support a beam below from a truss apex above (whereas a crown post, though visually similar, supports items above fro ...

s and has been attributed to the fifteenth century, although some suggest it is midfourteenth century. Many timbers are covered in yellow ochre, usually a sixteenth-century feature. Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the late 1530s, the guildhall passed to the control of the town of Bury St Edmunds. During the nineteenth century the Guildhall housed the West Suffolk Library, in which room the first Quarterly General Meeting of the

Bury and West Suffolk Archaeological Institute The Bury and West Suffolk Archaeological Institute was a victorian organisation established in 1848 in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. It had a lively existence for five years until 1853, when the local activities concerning antiquaries and natural hi ...

was held in 1848. During the

Second world War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

the

Royal Observer Corps The Royal Observer Corps (ROC) was a civil defence organisation intended for the visual detection, identification, tracking and reporting of aircraft over Great Britain. It operated in the United Kingdom between 29 October 1925 and 31 December ...

established a control centre in the guildhall. After the war the condition of the building deteriorated and it was placed in the

Heritage At Risk register An annual ''Heritage at Risk Register'' is published by Historic England. The survey is used by national and local government, a wide range of individuals and heritage groups to establish the extent of risk and to help assess priorities for actio ...

in the 1980s. In July 2015 the Bury St Edmunds Heritage Trust launched a project to convert the guildhall into a heritage centre. The project was undertaken at a cost of £2 million, with support from the

Heritage Lottery Fund The National Lottery Heritage Fund, formerly the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), distributes a share of National Lottery funding, supporting a wide range of heritage projects across the United Kingdom. History The fund's predecessor bodies were ...

, and the works, which involved access improvements and a new lift as well as repairs to the roof, walls and ceilings, were completed in 2018. The project enabled visitors to see the newly-refurbished courtroom, the banqueting hall, the Royal Observer Corps operations room and the Tudor kitchen. In 2019, dating of the roof and entrance door was requested by

Historic England Historic England (officially the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England) is an executive non-departmental public body of the British Government sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. It is tasked wit ...

to inform on-going restoration work. Eighteen timbers were sampled from the roof, showing likely felling dates between AD 1263 and 1376. Two of the samples still had complete sapwood and were felled in the winter of AD 1376/77, implying that construction of the roof took place in AD 1377 or soon thereafter. The door boards were made from oak imported from the Baltic region, three samples indicating felling between AD 1253 and 1439, with the latest possible date of AD 1461.

References

{{reflist Grade I listed buildings in Suffolk Bury St Edmunds City and town halls in Suffolk Buildings and structures completed in 1220