Category: Places
-
Spalding sits on the River Welland in South Holland, Lincolnshire. It is a market town, and it behaves like one. It is practical. It is tidy in places. It is busy at the right times, and calm when it is allowed to be. The main town had a population of 30,556 at the 2021 census.…
-
The Spalding Gentlemen’s Society (often shortened to SGS) is one of those organisations that sounds like it should come with a hat, a hush, and a strict rule about not touching anything. It does come with a museum collection, a library, and a deep sense of place. It also comes with a much more modern…
-
The River Welland is a lowland river in the east of England. It runs for about 65 miles (105 km). It starts in the Hothorpe Hills near Sibbertoft in Northamptonshire. Then it heads east and north-east, passing places like Market Harborough, Stamford, Crowland, and Spalding, before reaching The Wash near Fosdyke. That route sounds simple.…
-
Ayscoughfee Hall Museum and Gardens sits right in the middle of Spalding, yet it feels like a small escape hatch from the modern world. One moment we are near shops and roads. The next, we are under old trees, beside clipped hedges, and facing a medieval hall that looks politely unimpressed by the last few…
-
Right in the middle of Spalding, tucked into Market Place, the South Holland Centre does a neat trick. It feels modern enough to host big touring acts, but local enough to feel like part of everyday town life. It is a theatre, a cinema, and a flexible events venue, all in one building. In a…
-
Some places celebrate spring with a polite nod and a cup of tea. Spalding, in South Holland, Lincolnshire, chose the louder option: a full parade of floats covered in flowers, rolling through town like a moving garden. The Spalding Flower Parade was held every year from 1959 to 2013, then returned in 2022 and has…
-
Boston in Lincolnshire is one of those English towns that looks modest on a map and then turns out to have fingerprints all over world history. It’s a flat-land market town with a big church, a busy river and fields of vegetables stretching out to the horizon – and it also lent its name to…
-
A quiet corner where names change but the water keeps moving South of Lincoln, the River Witham slides through flat Lincolnshire fields, past drains, sluices and quiet villages. It keeps going, as rivers tend to do, until it reaches Boston. At that point something subtle but important happens. The river stops behaving like an inland…
-
St Botolph’s Church sits on the river in Boston, Lincolnshire, and does not really bother with modesty. The tower climbs to about 266 feet, one of the tallest medieval parish church towers in England, and it rises from flat fenland so that it looks even taller again. Locals call it the Boston Stump. The nickname…
-
Boston in Lincolnshire looks, at first, like a typical fenland town. You see the big church, the flat fields, the muddy river, and you expect a modest local story. Then the names start to surface. Pilgrim Fathers. John Cotton. Boston, Massachusetts. Suddenly the quiet town on the Witham has a much longer shadow. You and…
