Editorial: Our Anniversary

This little splash of colour in the Newsletter should help you to appreciate that this is our Golden Jubilee. There is much to celebrate as we recall some of the past - the various ways in which the Society has tried to make Ipswich a better place to live in and to look at. Sometimes we've been successful, sometimes not, but there's been no lack of commitment from a purely voluntary society. Dozens of committee members and others have freely given their time and made their efforts to improve our town.

In this issue of the Newsletter you will find a brief summary of some of the Society's aims and achievements in those fifty years. On a lighter note, you might like to consider how the very disparate hopes for Ipswich expressed by members ten years ago have worked out.

Today's problems are dominated by the Tesco issue, with important contributions by Mike Cook and John Norman. I hope members won't think this an over-reaction or an approach based on prejudice. It is our contribution to defending the town centre - surely one of the key aims of any civic society? Without a real centre a town becomes an American 'doughnut'!

In the foreseeable future the Society's work - often behind the scenes - will continue unabated. And for members there is a wonderful programme of special anniversary events to come, as outlined on the page opposite. But there are also ways in which you could actively help the community through the Society. You will find in this Newsletter Bob Kindred's invitation to photographers to assist the Borough Council in updating the Local List (the original version of which the Society compiled and published in 1984) and Geoff Knight's suggestion of how people could contribute to establishing Rights of Way in Ipswich.

I'd like to thank all contributors to the Newsletter, past and present, and in particular this time thank Brian Jepson for his cover design of buildings old and new. Finally, I remember with gratitude the late Bernard Reynolds who designed our logo - Keeping an Eye on the Borough which has served us so well for decades. It is fitting that I can feature in this Newsletter the new book about Bernard's work as a very distinguished sculptor.

NEIL SALMON