Ipswich Historic Lettering: Custom House

'IPSWICH PORT AUTHORITY IPSWICH BOROUGH COUNCIL
IPSWICH WET DOCK
150^TH ANNIVERSARY
CELEBRATIONS
1992
CAST BY CRANE LIMITED'

See our plaques page for the full set of ten Ipswich Society Maritime Ipswich 1982 plaques.

Rather confusingly the original Custom House was a wooden-framed structure which had stood for four or five hundred years: "a low, ill-shaped, isolated building, supported, on the south, next to the water by a numerous range of pillars, reaching the whole length of the front, which is about a hundred and twenty feet, forming a colonnade, under which the masters of vessels and other seafaring people delight to perambulate, excursion as being, we suppose, more similar to the agreeably-varied amusement of walking the deck" (G.R. Clarke with a plethora of commas!). Once this 'Old Custom House' was demolished it was follwed by the Custom House built in 1844, which stands today. In the way of these things, at some point in the 20th century this started to be called 'The Old Custom House'.

'MARITIME IPSWICH 1982
OLD CUSTOM HOUSE
ARCHITECT JM CLARK
1844
IPSWICH SOCIETY TRAIL CAST BY CRANE LTD'

(The final line attributing the casting of the plates is poignant in 2012 when the large engineering works of Crane Ltd which once stood opposite Ipswich Airport on Nacton Road have been demolished and John Lewis and Waitrose stores built on part of the site.)
“What was so novel … with the Custom House, was the marrying of the polychromy technique with an essentially Classical or Neo-Classical style. Hitherto, such buildings in East Anglia, as in London, had been built in 'white' brick, used, strictly speaking, as a substitute for the more expensive white stone. Red brick was considered unsuitable and even 'common' for such styles. But here we have, quite early in its conception, the technique of using red brick, executed in an extremely pleasing and decorative way. The first building in London (Christ Church, Streatham) to employ such polychromy was built only in 1841. In fact, Clark's plans for the Custom House really date from this same year, if not actually 1840, so that he seems to have been in the vanguard of the development and use of this particular technique. Although submitted in the competition in 1843, these plans had actually been prepared at the request of P.B. Long in his mayoral year, 1840-41; they had been accepted by the Estate Committee, inspected by the public, and universally approved. They had then 'lain on the table' of the Borough Council until March 1843, when the Estate Committee finally decided to go ahead with a new Hall of Commerce (the name officially given to the new Custom House). It was only because of the acrimony over the Wet Dock plans of 1837, which had been decided upon behind closed doors, that the Corporation decided, reluctantly, that they would have to declare a competition, though as Alderman Bullen forthrightly stated; 'he did not hold the slightest doubt that Mr Clark would be the successful competitor' (25 Mar. 1843). The following May the Suffolk Chronicle supported this view: 'the result of the competition ... displayed the superiority of Mr Clark's design which might not have been evident without the competition (27 May 1843).”
[Source: John Medland Clark 1813-1849 'Sometime Architect of Ipswich' by Ruth Serjeant, The Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History reserch paper. Volume XXXVII, part 3 (1991)]

See our Warwick Road page under the section headed 'The Casino' (once Rhynwick Lodge) for photographs of the house built for himself by architect John Medland Clark on the corner of Woodbridge Road and Palmerston Road.