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Welcome to a valuable newcomer

The new UCS building should be not only complete but in use by the time you read this. It certainly is a striking sight on the NE corner of the Wet Dock with six floors overlooking the water and a gradual descent in height towards Fore Street. It's hard to believe it contains 325 rooms especially as two of them are large lecture theatres, but like the Willis building it occupies a surprisingly big space. At last the Ipswich area can be seen to have a university - nearly 50 years late! Incidentally, if you think there's a lot of new building or conversions for student accommodation, it is said that 2,750 will need to be housed by 2015.

And a welcome new use for Wherstead Park

The East of England Co-operative Society has announced its purchase of the former HQ of Eastern Electricity> TXU> E.ON electricity companies. E.ON's moving out was a blow to local employment and prestige. It is appropriate that the enlarged Co-op should locate its HQ in our area because it is central for their purpose following the merger of Ipswich and Norwich and then the addition of Colchester and E.Essex Societies. The Co-op's 400-500 employees won't occupy the whole site, part of which will be let to suitable other businesses.

St Peter's by the Waterfront

As mentioned before, our Society helped to fund the new booklet about the church. We also made a donation towards the restoration of the windows and are recognised for posterity in the book of sponsors kept in the church. Those of you who will come to our Awards Evening on 12 November will appreciate the work done on the windows. The east window especially is indeed a glorious sight - after all those years of being boarded up.

Generosity in Norwich

We often learn interesting things from newsletters sent by our neighbouring sister societies. The Norwich Society's Newsletter of July 2008 gratefully acknowledges a legacy of £40,000 from a certain individual's estate. He left no specific instructions for its use.

Band in the park

The Society was pleased to be able to sponsor a concert given in the Upper Arboretum of Christchurch Park by the Suffolk Phoenix Brass Consort on 27 July. The band played well, the weather behaved itself, lots of people came and we were also able to publicise ourselves.