IPSWICH THINGS TO DO
AudaTours Ipswich Audio Tour: Hands That Built the Port
The Cornhill, Ipswich
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Information - AudaTours Ipswich Audio Tour: Hands That Built the Port
A self-guided audio tour of Ipswich, exploring the dockers, shipwrights, brewers and merchants of the port.
The tour begins at the Cornhill and takes in the Ancient House, Tooley’s and Smart’s Almshouses, Wolsey’s Gate, Stoke Bridge, the Old Custom House, Wet Dock Lock Gates, St Peter’s by the Waterfront, Isaacs on the Quay, the former Orwell Works site, St Margaret’s Church and the Corn Exchange. It runs for about 1 hour of audio and around 2 hours in total including walking.
What makes this Ipswich tour different is its focus on the working lives that kept the port moving: butchers in the market, woad-dyers, dockbuilders, ploughmakers, maltsters, mariners, merchants, coopers and ironworkers. You hear how trade, manufacture and waterfront labour shaped the town from Anglo-Saxon Gippeswic through to the age of the Wet Dock and the Ransomes works. Along the way, the route links named places with named workers — from initials carved into a church ceiling to the one ironworker Robert Ransome employed when he arrived in town — so the port’s history is told through the people who actually made it work.
Free every day, but why not make it part of your Heritage Open Days weekend?
