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Modest house in original Sudbury costs a fortune

BY LIONEL RUDD  Many place names around our city all have a history of sorts. Early settlers identified their new home with some creativity or a reminder of where they hailed from.
Sudbury England
Sudbury, Suffolk, England, is a quiet, sleepy market town of 8,000 people situated in southern Suffolk just north of the Essex border.

BY LIONEL RUDD 

Many place names around our city all have a history of sorts. Early settlers identified their new home with some creativity or a reminder of where they hailed from.

Our First Nations already named several significant locations in their own language, and of course, some government official in antiquity named nearly all the six-mile townships across Ontario.

As the CPR railroad pushed west in the 1860s names were often given to the six-mile section houses or services points dotted along the line. 

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Often communities sprung up around these locations. Legend has it that the naming of some of these locations fell to the wife of Van Horne (one of CPR's senior executives). Her name was Clarabelle. Sound familiar?  Clarabelle hailed from East Anglia in England. Clarabelle selected names that no doubt had some sentimental meaning to her. Such names as Markstey (Marks Tay), Chelmsford, (capital of Essex). And of course Sudbury, Suffolk.

Sudbury, Suffolk, England, is a quiet, sleepy market town of 8,000 people situated in southern Suffolk just north of the Essex border. It is a community of Tudor and Georgian style buildings, narrow streets and a large central market square dominated by a large church.

In fact, Sudbury's roots date back to Saxon times.  Weaving and the silk industry created much of the local wealth.  Situated on the River Stour, which is navigable for small commercial type craft, coal was once shipped to Sudbury, and in turn bricks and agricultural products were shipped back for sea shipment down river. Brick making, silk weaving and agriculture are still viable industries to this day.

Presiding over the market square is the statue of one of Sudbury's famous sons, Thomas Gainsborough.Gainsborough, born in 1727, is a famous landscape and portrait artist. Anyone lucky enough to possess a "Gainsborough" will not only own an exquisite work of art, but could forget about having to buy any more lottery tickets.

The house where Gainsborough was born and brought up has been purchased by a local trust and turned into an art museum displaying some of his priceless masterpieces. The front of the house opens directly onto the sidewalk,and you guessed it, Gainsborough St. You enter through the rear of the house via a gift shop (visitor admission is free on Tuesday afternoons after 1 pm).

The backyard garden is very much as Gainsborough would remember.  In one corner exists a mulberry tree said to be around 400 years old. This tree is covered with ripening deliscous mulberries.  No doubt Gainsborough would have enjoyed the fruit from this very tree. A characteristic of this fruit is that it can cause a strong dye on clothing.

Around the town are numerous little shops, the inevitable pubs, centuries old trees and park and the river Stour, complete with ducks, swans and geese.

Sudbury, Suffolk will vaguely resemble the way that Calarabelle would have seen it except for the cars, traffic lights and TV antennas.

If you plan to move to Sudbury Suffolk be prepared for a tremendous shock. Real estate prices are truly galactic starting in at around £400,000 (or close to $1 million Canadian) for a very old but modest house. A saving grace is the fact that you can buy beer, wine and alcohol at the grocery stores, drug stores and even the gas station convenience shop.

Clarabelle's legacy is in some of our place names and, of course, her own name which lives on and identifies Inco's Calarabelle Mill and an adjacent railroad crossing.

Lionel Rudd is Northern Life's international correspondent


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