‘A Neat and Beautiful Theatre’
No visitor to Bury St Edmunds market place can fail to notice a handsome neoclassical building of yellow limestone and white brick, standing on Cornhill opposite Moyse’s Hall Museum. This is the Grade I Listed Bury St Edmunds Market Cross.
The present building was designed as a theatre in 1774 by the celebrated Scottish architect Robert Adam. 2024 therefore marks the 250th anniversary of Bury Corporation commissioning Adam to design what has been described by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as “the finest post-medieval building in Bury”.
However, the Market Cross has a much longer and more surprising history.
It began life as a simple preaching cross, dominating the town’s medieval Great Market. In addition to preaching the gospel, it was used for making proclamations, serving penance and trading in corn and other goods, whilst symbolising the Christian principle of fair trade. It was later converted to a lead-roofed corn exchange, but this was burnt to the ground in the Great Fire of Bury in 1608.
Soon afterwards it was replaced by a new timber-framed, two-storeyed market hall. Its ground floor was an arcaded corn exchange and its upper floor a clothiers’ hall.
Over a century later, its upper floor was converted to an early Georgian playhouse, possibly the earliest municipal playhouse in England.
The playhouse became the Bury home of the celebrated Norwich Company of Comedians, who visited the town every autumn to perform during the Bury Fair. It was during this period that the building was redesigned by Robert Adam as the fine neoclassical building we see today. The company performed many of the most popular plays, and attracted some of the most famous actors, of the day. A small collection of the company’s original playbills are still preserved in the Suffolk Archives.
Following the opening of Bury’s new Theatre Royal in 1819, the Market Cross became a Victorian-style Concert Room. It hosted such events as Marie Tussaud’s travelling waxwork exhibition, and musical performances by Franz Liszt (at the height of ‘Lisztomania’), and the once hugely-popular Joseph Richardson & Sons, Rock, Bell and Steel Band!
It later served as Bury St Edmunds Town Hall and, more recently, its Art Gallery. Currently, its ground floor is occupied by a bookmaker, while its upper floor remains sadly unused, and in need of an imaginative and sympathetic occupier.
To find out more, see ‘A Neat and Beautiful Theatre: the Story of Bury St Edmunds Market Cross’.
Adrian Tindall, Bury St Edmunds Tour Guides
