Handyman Debenham

Debenham takes its name from the River Deben, which rises just north of the village and flows south-east through Wickham Market and Woodbridge before reaching the sea at Bawdsey. The Deben actually runs along the High Street here in a covered channel, which is why the village floods occasionally and why the road sits unusually low between the buildings. Debenham was already important enough to have its own market in the Middle Ages, and the broad pattern of the High Street, with timber-framed houses leaning over it on both sides, is essentially unchanged since the fifteenth century.

The parish church of St Mary Magdalene has a Saxon west tower, one of only a handful in Suffolk, and inside there are good fragments of medieval stained glass and a fine hammerbeam roof. The village is also home to Carters Tea Pots, a working pottery that has produced collectible novelty teapots for decades. Mid-Suffolk's heavy clay land surrounds Debenham, with deep lanes, moated farmhouses and isolated churches dotting the fields. Modern life here revolves around the primary school, the village hall, a couple of pubs and a thriving village shop. Many of the houses in and around Debenham are timber-framed and listed, with all the gentle bowing and clay-lump quirks that suggests; I'm often called out here for sympathetic repairs that respect the building's age rather than fight it.