Bury St Edmunds is a town in the county of
Suffolk, England. It is the main town in the borough of St Edmundsbury
and is probably most famous for the ruined abbey that stands near the
town centre. The abbey is a shrine to Saint Edmund, the Saxon King of
the East Angles, who was killed by the Danes in 869 AD. The town
initially grew around Bury St Edmunds Abbey, a site of pilgrimage, and
developed into a flourishing cloth making town by the 14th century. The
town is closely associated with Magna Carta, in 1214 the barons of
England met in the Abbey Church and swore that they would force King
John to accept the Charter of Liberties, later known as Magna Carta.
The abbey was largely destroyed during the 16th century with the
dissolution of the monasteries but Bury remained a prosperous town
throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. As would be expected of a town
in such a rural area, Bury fell into relative decline with the onset of
the industrial revolution and accordingly remains an attractive market
town.
Next to the abbey is Bury St Edmunds
Cathedral, created when the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich was
formed in 1914. The cathedral was extended with a new eastern end in the
1960s, and a completely new Gothic revival cathedral tower was built as
part of a major millennium project running from 2000 to 2005. The
opening celebration for the new tower took place in July 2005, and
included a brass band concert and fireworks display. Despite all this
work, there are still parts of the cathedral that need completing. The
cloisters remain unfinished, and there are still many areas of the
cathedral that are inaccessible to the general public due to ever
ongoing building work. The tower makes St Edmundsbury the only recently
completed cathedral in the UK; only a handful of Gothic revival
cathedrals are still being built worldwide. The tower was constructed
using original fabrication techniques. Six highly skilled masons cut and
placed every stone individually.
Bury's largest landmark is the British
Sugar factory near the A14, which processes sugar beet into refined
crystal sugar. It was built in 1925 and processes beet from around 1,300
local growers. 660 lorry loads of beet can be accepted each day during a
processing "campaign", when beet is being harvested. Not all the beet
can be crystallised immediately, and some is kept in solution in holding
tanks until late spring and early summer, when the plant has spare
crystallising capacity. The sugar is sold under the Silver Spoon brand
name (the other major British sugar brand, Tate & Lyle, is made from
imported sugar cane). By-products include molassed sugar beet feed for
cattle and LimeX70, a soil improver. When the wind is in a certain
direction a smell of burnt starch from the plant is very noticeable.