Many of you will remember reading, perhaps in “The Last Days of Richard III”, how John Speed went to Leicester looking for the site of the Greyfriars but confused it with the Blackfriars which was in a far worse state of repair thus no royal body could possibly have survived.
Yesterday, I lunched at the “Robert Ransome” in Ipswich – table 22 in case you ask. On the wall were several interesting photos, including Speed’s 1610 Ipswich map. Apart from his unaccountable failure to include the railway station, it compares well with the town four centuries later.

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