The Ipswich to Stowmarket Navigation by Ian Petchey, The River Gipping Trust

I really enjoyed this well-illustrated 100+ page book written by Ian Petchey in conjunction with the River Gipping Trust. It tells the story of the River Gipping Navigation completed in 1793 from Stowmarket to the tideway in Ipswich using a mix of written records and landscape features, many illustrated with photographs. I love this ‘industrial archaeology’ approach and the book will inform my next and future outings north into the River Gipping valley. 

Subtitled ‘John Rennie’s First Canal Project’ it has interesting content on this early Scottish engineer at the start of his career in the 1790s. This was indeed his first project, and he announced (at the age of only 31) that ‘the ground for the foundation of the Locks should be bored which will enable me to point out the proper mode of laying down the foundation of each’. He also insisted that the bridges and locks should be built from brick rather than timber and earth. A progressive Georgian engineer indeed and no wonder we still have so many of his structures intact including the East and West India Docks, Waterloo Bridge, Southwark Bridge and London Bridge.  

The chapters are organised for the most part in a topical rather than geographical way, so you can dip into ‘Some original bridges along the canal’; ‘Water mills along the Gipping’; ‘Industry along the canal’; ‘The Gipping and the oldest photo in Suffolk’ (about our early Ipswich photographer John Wiggin) – and thus theme your trips into the Gipping valley.

The last fifteen pages, however, are about the geographical end of the Navigation, the River Gipping in Ipswich. The Alderman Canal/Little Gipping area of our town, so difficult to work out in the field, is explained for us and there is an interesting section on Wright’s Boatyard in Cullingham Road. Entry to the tideway was problematical. John Rennie was concerned about lack of water depth under Stoke Bridge (his notes from the National Library of Scotland are transcribed in an Appendix and this topic takes up a full page out of the four reproduced) and by the early 1880s the plans for the new Ipswich wet dock caused great consternation among the Trustees of the Navigation when they realised they would not have access to the new dock directly from the river, but would have to go downstream to the lock.

This book is a valuable addition to literature on the landscape and history of Suffolk and the Ipswich Society is pleased to have contributed towards its cost. 

The Ipswich and Stowmarket Navigation 2022 by The River Gipping Trust and Ian Petchey (ISBN 978-1-7396717-0-9) can be obtained from Dial Lane Bookshop, hello@diallanebooks.co.uk, 8 Dial Lane, Ipswich, IP1 1DL Price £10.

Caroline Markham

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