Borin Van Loon: Ipswich Historic Lettering: St Helens Street

St Helens Street

Just accross the road from the H.W. Turner sign stands No. 129, a newsagents shop. Amongst the clutter of bracket, sign and lights it is easy to miss the name plaque for these properties: 'TRAMWAY PLACE, 1884' (close-up below)

The buildings were erected at a time of pride in the recent tramway which ran from the town centre, via Spring Road and St Johns Road and terminated at Derby Road railway station. A period map show tramlines running into a depot beside The Railway Hotel on the corner of Foxhall Road and Cauldwell Hall Road. Horse drawn trams were initially used and stabling was presumably provided at the Railway Hotel. These remnants of times past (used later as workshops) have only recently been demolished to make way for a new Krullind bookmakers building. Electrification of the tramway eventually led to the use of trolley buses and then the internal combustion engine omnibus. Some of the cast iron posts which used to carry overhead power cables for public transport still survive in Ipswich. They have since been used for BT phone lines. See below for a short history of tramways in Ipswich.

The decorative shop front of 198 St Helens Street was renovated by a tool hire business, then it was a Halal store. Its original use is proclaimed on the dated plaque above: 'GROVE BAKERY, 1904'. It predates the adjoining property by two years, as we see below.

The roundel, which matches the detailing of the windows of 200 St Helens Street, contains the large, ornate (presumaby terra cotta) numerals '1906'. The building on the corner of Grove Lane and St Helens Street was formerly The Singing Chef French Restaurant (now Masha Indian Restaurant). Quite why it was important enough to warrant this ornate and expensive dating is unknown. See here for a clutch of roundels on buildings.

More St Helens Street lettering can be found on the page for Hales Chemist, also the Regent Theatre on the Bethesda page.

IPSWICH CORPORATION TRAMWAYS

Horse trams running from Cornhill to the railway station started in 1880. 1881 brought the Ipswich Tramways Act to establish the Ipswich Tramway Company, a private enterprise. The tramway was extended from Princes Street, along Portman Road and the upper stretch (then called Mill Street, presumably because of the site of windmills at the top of the hill) to Barrack Corner on St Matthews Street. This stretch was abandoned after only a few years. There were also extensions from Cornhill along Westgate Street and from Cornhill to Major's Corner, St Helen's Street (the site of our 'Tramway Place 1884' plaque shown above), Spring Road, St John's Road, Cauldwell Hall Road to Derby Road railway station. The tracks were extended down into the station yard to serve special rail excursions to Felixstowe. As mentioned above, stabling for tram horses seems to ave been provided beside the Railway public house in Foxhall Road. Cross-town links meant a total route mileage of 4.4 miles. Interestingly, the initial stock, which consisted of three single-deck and six double deck cars, were believed to have been built by the Starbuck Car and Wagon Company of Birkenhead. Many of us might have imagined that this very American-sounding trade name was an invention of a certain modern coffee shop chain. Motive power was provided by a stud of 27 horses: one for a single-deck and two for a double-deck car.

In 1900 Ipswich Town Council took over the company for £17,552 with the aim of introducing electric trams and electric lighting to the borough. By 1902 work had started on the site of a tramway depot and power station at Seven Acre Field (now Alderman Road/Constantine Road). Due to very swampy conditions in this area of the borough close to the River Gipping, a bed of concrete 40 feet square and 40 feet deep was necessary to support the stack. This astonishing fact reminds us that, like the massive Wet Dock before it, the very large hole would have had to have been dug out by hand, using pick and shovel. When we look at today's Constantine House - the home of the original power station (later Eastern Electricity and now housing Customer Service Direct offices which provide Suffolk County Council and Mid-Suffolk District Council with I.T. and other services) and the next-door Ipswich bus depot, it's sobering to remember that they are built on an enormous sugar cube of concrete. The recent development of Endeavour House, the Ipswich Borough Council Offices in Russell Road and Constantine House has led to the erection of an unsightly car park block very visible from West End Road, thus wiping out what appeared to be a small, attractive tram shed which used to be seen from West End Road. What a shame that this significant building wasn't saved, perhaps the Museum of East Anglian Life could have resited it.

The attractive power station fascade (sadly lacking any lettering), now Constantine House, was designed by London architect C. Stanley Peach. The powered trams began work in 1903. £11,000 had been spent on tramways and £43,000 on street widening which changed the face of Ipswich in certain locations (presumably the area opposite the Great White Horse in Tavern Street and at the top of Upper Brook Street were opened up as part of this process. A narrow tramway guage (and, logically, narrow tram car fleet) was chosen because of difficulties in accomodating other traffic (pricipally horse-drawn carts and perhaps a very early motor vehicle) either side of the tracks on the narrow roads of old Ipswich.

The system consisted of about a mile of double track through the town centre (Barrack Corner to Major's Corner) and the remainder was single track with passing loops. It was extended as follows:-

- from Barrack Corner up Norwich Road, passing under the 'Ferodo bridge' (with its 'Keep your head down' sign) to Whitton. There was an extension from Major's Corner down Upper Orwell Street, Fore Street, Fore Hamlet and up the steepest gradient in the town, Bishop's Hill (where it is understood cars needed assistance to ascend - perhaps horse power?) to the Royal Oak public house on Felixstowe Road (this was only a few hundred yards away from the Derby Road station terminus, so that trams could have continued in a loop around the east of the town in the way of some modern bus routes; however, had it ever been suggested it was probably discounted because the trams and trackbed would have been too heavy to cross over the Derby Road bridge over the railway);
from the Princes Street/Queen Street junction down St Peter's Street, Bridge Street, crossing the Wet Dock tramway (still partially in existence), over Stoke Bridge (the steel structure, which replaced the old wooden bridge, must have been strong enough to carry it), Vernon Street, under the tramway bridge which crosses Wherstead Road close to Cowell Street - where the road had to be lowered by two feet for clearance of cars and power lines - you can still travel down the dip in the road today - and down to Bourne Bridge;
from Stoke Bridge round to Burrell Road and the railway station, with an additional short spur from Wherstead Road down Bath Street to Griffin Wharf on the west bank of the Orwell; apparently these two were intended to convey passengers between the railway station and the quay where Great Eastern Railway paddle steamers embarked for trips down the River Orwell to Felixstowe;
from the passing loop in Princes Street, just south of the junction with Portman Road - the section between the present fire station and the Royal Mail sorting office - a spur extended to the corner of Ceclia Street and Quadling Street, which doubled as it entered a car shed there; these rails were visible in the yard behind locked gates in Quadling Street long after all other traces of Ipswich tramway had disappeared and were eventually swept away during the rather dubious Cardinal Park development in the 1990s. The street was named after Quadling & Company, a coachbuilding business producing rolling stock for the Eastern Union Railway; incidentally, this business was linked to the dockside tramway by a curved siding, the trackbed of which survived as a footpath until about 1980,

Some of the cast iron poles which carried power lines for the trams are still in place in the town, a number being reused to carry street lighting and BT telephone cables. What happened to the tramway? The system was difficult to keep running during the shortages of the First and Second World Wars and some tramcars had the ignominy of being painted grey, as the traditional Ipswich Corporation Tramways livery couldn't be maintained. The track and trackbed suffered damage from iron cart wheels and other heavy vehicles and the whole system became uncomfortable (especially as the upper deck was open to the elements), unreliable and unpopular. All rails were lifted in the town except those outside the Police Station near Cornhill which were covered over and remain intact today. Later, power lines were largely kept in place to enable electric trolley buses to replace trams. Ipswich was probably the last municipal authority in the country to covert, in 1950, to the more popular motor buses. The last trolley bus entered the depot at Constantine Road in 1963.

[Much of the above information came from 'Tramways of East Anglia' by R.C. Anderson; see Reading List.]

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Copyright throughout this site belongs to Borin Van Loon, 2003.