Bury St Edmunds is a market town in the county of Suffolk, and formerly the county town of West Suffolk. It is the main town in the borough of St Edmundsbury and known for the ruined abbey near the town centre. Bury is the seat of the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich, with the episcopal see at St Edmundsbury Cathedral.
The town, originally called Beodericsworth, is known for brewing and malting (with the large Greene King brewery) and for a British Sugar processing factory, where Silver Spoon sugar, one of Britain’s biggest brands, is produced. Many large and small businesses are located in Bury, which traditionally has given Bury an affluent economy with low unemployment, with the town being the main cultural and retail centre for West Suffolk. Tourism is also a major part of the economy, plus local government.
Bury St Edmunds (Beodericsworth, Bedrichesworth, St Edmund’s Bury), supposed by some to have been the Villa Faustina of the Romans, was one of the royal towns of the Saxons. Sigebert, king of the East Angles, founded a monastery here about 633, which in 903 became the burial place of King Edmund, who was slain by the Danes in 869, and owed most of its early celebrity to the reputed miracles performed at the shrine of the martyr king. The town grew around Bury St Edmunds Abbey, a site of pilgrimage. By 925 the fame of St Edmund had spread far and wide, and the name of the town was changed to St Edmund’s Bury.
Near the Abbey Gardens stands Britain’s first internally illuminated street sign, the Pillar of Salt which was built in 1935. The Angel Hotel, a Georgian building on Angel Hill, was used by Charles Dickens while giving readings in the nearby Athenaeum and mentioned in The The Pickwick Papers. Angelina Jolie also used the hotel as a base during the filming of Tomb Raider. A coaching inn has stood on this spot since the 15th century. Bury is located in the middle of an undulating area of East Anglia known as the East Anglian Heights, with land to the East and West of the town rising to above 100 metres (328 feet), though parts of the town itself are as low as 30 metres (98 feet) above sea level where the Rivers Lark and Linnet pass through it.
[caption id="attachment_241787" align="aligncenter" width="455"] Caspar David Friedrich by Gerhard von Kügelgen[/caption][responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]Caspar David Friedrich was a German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most i...
