BRAMFORD is a large village situated about three
miles north west of Ipswich, the County town of Suffolk.
There is archaeological evidence to show that there
was a domestic settlement here in Roman times, but the first major
documentary record is in the Domesday Book of 1086. It shows a
fairly large community with three manors, two churches and two
mills. Before that in the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042 -
1066) land had been held in Bramford by Stigand as a manor. In 1596
the Acton family, who were clothiers from Ipswich, bought land in
the village. Over the next 200 years they added to their estate,
building Bramford Hall in the 17th century. The estate passed
through marriage into the Broke and Loraine families, who owned the
hall until it was demolished in 1956.
There have been many spellings of the village name,
including BRUNFORT, BROMFORD, BRAUMFFORDE and BRAUNFORD. Often a
place name was identified with visual items on the ground, so it is
possible that the name meant ‘the ford near the brambles’. Another
theory is that the name came from an early Dane called BRAUN who
settled here.
The oldest building in the village is the Church of
St. Mary the Virgin, which is probably built on an earlier pagan
site of worship. A second early church, dedicated to St. Albert,
stood near Boss Hall in what is now Ipswich at the junction of
Bramford and Sproughton Road.
Many of the outlying farmhouses, and some of the
houses in the Street date back four or five hundred years. The
oldest of these is at 6-10 The Street and was formerly the Bell
Inn. The largest expansion of the village took place in the 1960’s,
though smaller areas of housing are still being added to this
day.
The River Gipping passes through the village and was
once a navigable waterway carrying goods from Ipswich to
Stowmarket. It was opened to barges in 1793 having had locks built
and major bends straightened. With the coming of the railway in
1846, barges became less popular, and eventually ceased completely
around 1930.
Bramford has always been an agricultural community.
The only industrial area in the village was along Paper Mill Lane.
Rushbrooks Mill used to make paper, but before that was a fulling
mill, which is a process in making cloth. In the 19th century
chemical fertilisers were produced by 3 companies, Fisons, Packard
and Prentice, who eventually merged to become Fisons, and is now
Levington Horticulture. Also along Paper Mill Lane there used to be
a brick works and a tar mill.
The parish used to be much larger than it is today,
with the eastern boundary extending as far as Whitton, into what is
now Ipswich. In 1801 the population was 552. In 1841 it was
833. Today it is about
2500.