Bury St Edmunds

The abbey held the shrine of Edmund, an East Anglian king killed by a Viking army in 869 and venerated as a martyr, and it grew into one of the richest houses in England before its dissolution in 1539. The town around it was laid out on a grid in the late eleventh century by Abbot Baldwin, one of the earliest planned town layouts in the country and still legible in the street pattern. The ruins now stand in public gardens, with the odd sight of Georgian houses built directly into the west front of the abbey church, using the medieval masonry as their back wall. St Edmundsbury Cathedral gained a Gothic-style lantern tower completed in 2005. The Theatre Royal of 1819 is the only surviving Regency playhouse in Britain, and Greene King has brewed in the town since 1799.

What you actually see

• The abbey ruins - flint cores of one of England's richest medieval houses.
• The houses in the west front - Georgian homes built into the abbey masonry.
• The Theatre Royal - Britain's only working Regency playhouse, from 1819.
• The Norman grid - a late eleventh-century planned street layout still in use.

When to go

April to October for the abbey gardens at their best; the Christmas fayre in late November fills the town. Theatre Royal tours run on non-performance days and the cathedral tower opens seasonally.

Honest expectations

The abbey survives as flint rubble cores rather than standing architecture, since the facing stone was carried off, and it takes some imagination. The cathedral is largely a Victorian and twenty-first-century building. Parking in the centre is limited.

Nearby

Lavenham and the wool villages lie south; Cambridge is west and Ipswich east.