Quick links

Hawstead on film:

To watch a short video made by Andy and Janet Taplin in support of our bid for Suffolk Village of the Year (2014), visit our Picture Gallery page. 

Village information:

Visit our Documents page where you'll also find previous copies of the Village Voice and its predecessor, The Hawstead Journal.

Upcoming parish council and community council meetings. For all other village events and updates, take a look at our Events page.

Parish council meetings: 

Parish Council meetings are held on the second Thursday of January, March, May, July, September and November in the village hall at 7.30pm. The agenda will be posted here a few days before each meeting   

Please note that archive material posted onto the website before 25 May 2018 may include limited personal data for which consent to publication has not been given.

This website is maintained by local volunteers, for which thanks.

Any enquiries regarding this website can be addressed to Hawstead Parish Council.

E-mail

clerk@hawstead-pc.gov.uk
 

Also on the Contacts page you'll find MAPS!

The GEOGRAPH website has lots of photos in and around Hawstead. The Geograph project aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre on the Ordnance Survey maps of Great Britain and Ireland. As of early 2014 there are over 3.8million photos on the site and that accounts for just over 80% of all the km. squares. The remaining unphotographed squares are mostly either in Ireland or remote parts of Scotland: the nearest ones to us are at RAF Lakenheath and the military training area in Thetford Forest. Some squares have been saturated, photographically and one in Hawstead, TL8559 has just under 100! This is largely due to dozens which have been taken in and around the Church.

Also, have a look at this collection of old photos which compises 45 black and white photos of Hawstead, part of the much larger "Spanton Jarman" collection of glass negatives which were deposited with the Records Office in 1997. (From the link, first select "Spanton Jarman Photographic Collection", then "Suffolk Towns and Villages", and lastly scroll down to find "Hawstead".) 1000 of the 4000 images were digitised with the help of Lottery funds and the project continues via sponsorship from both organisations and individuals. We are fortunate that the Hawstead photos have been sponsored by Rosemary Carr and James Carr.

The photos are all labelled 'nd' ie 'not dated' but the date range of the whole collection (covering Bury St Edmunds and many Suffolk villages) is between c.1860 and 1939. The Hawstead ones show the Church and Rectory, Hawstead Place, the Philip Metcalfe Almshouses and the old Hawstead House - including one of it as a ruin. This house was destroyed by fire in 1916, so the many other pictures of the interior are clearly prior to that date.

The Spanton Jarman collection takes its name from the two family names of the main photographers. The Bury Past and Present Society owns the copyright to the pictures and is the driving force behind the project. Interestingly there are dozens of pictures of Hardwick House, including lots of photos of paintings of members of the Cullum family.