Handyman Sudbury

Sudbury sits on the river Stour where it loops broadly along the Suffolk–Essex border. The town has been continuously inhabited since at least Saxon times, and was important enough by 1086 to have its own mint. Three large medieval churches survive — St Peter's on the market hill, All Saints near the river and St Gregory's at the western end of town. Thomas Gainsborough, the great eighteenth-century portrait and landscape painter, was born in Sudbury in 1727; his childhood home on Gainsborough Street is now a fine museum and gallery devoted to his work.

Sudbury was famously the model for Eatanswill, the riotous parliamentary borough satirised by Dickens after he reported on a particularly chaotic Sudbury election. The town has had a less dramatic but more durable claim to fame in silk-weaving: from the eighteenth century, when the trade was driven out of London, Sudbury became the centre of English silk production and three working mills still operate here, supplying fabrics for high-end fashion and royal occasions. The railway arrived in 1849 and was famously painted by John Constable. Today Sudbury is a lively, slightly bohemian small town with a busy market, riverside meadows that flood picturesquely each winter, and a strong cultural life around the Quay Theatre. Its older houses include some of Suffolk's nicest pargeting and timber framing, and the work needed to look after them suits me very well.