Ipswich Maritime Trust’s latest window museum display, at the Waterfront, tells tales of explorers and maritime heroes, and international trade that goes back centuries.

The port of Ipswich has been the home of international trade for centuries.

It also the home of to famous seafarers, explorers and merchant adventurers such as Thomas Cavendish and Thomas Eldred.

Stories of the trading port are told in this latest window display.

Maritime trade made Ipswich. The town’s history and wealth has been sustained by merchants, adventurers, seafarers and traders from as far back as the 7th century.

Ipswich, or ‘Gipeswic’ as it was then called, was the first town to be established after the Romans left Britain, continuously occupying the same quays and original street pattern to this day. Its maritime and Anglo-Saxon history is therefore unique and of international importance.

Meanwhile the port continues to trade with many of the Hanseatic League continental cities that traded with the town in its wealthy medieval times. Although a considerable number of the town’s medieval buildings have survived, very few of the merchants’ houses and riverside warehouses remained after the building of the new Victorian Wet Dock (today’s Waterfront) in the early 1840s, and the large scale industrial growth and

redevelopment that it produced.

In 1982, the year when the Ipswich Maritime Trust was formed, a ‘Maritime Trail’ was created marking a route for visitors to view these medieval buildings. This latest window display includes some of the original wall plaques used for that trail and illustrates some of those buildings’ maritime histories.