Shipbuilding
Building Commercial Vessels
By 1730 the shipyard at the Lord’s Quay was ‘cut from the river by a mud wall and almost filled’ but the shipyard on Lime-Kiln quay continued to flourish. It covered the strip of ground running from the Deben right up to the Thoroughfare.
There are only a few records of the ships built there in the 1700s but at least one of them was for the Jamaica trade.
From 1796 the brigs and schooners built at the shipyard were mainly for the coastal trade. The last brig was constructed in 1816 and thereafter only schooners were built.
Painting of the schooner Bernard Barton
which was built in Woodbridge.
When the shipyard was advertised to let in 1829 it was described thus. The premises comprise a commodious dock, enclosed building yard, ship warehouse and draft room, wharf, timber-yard, steam plank workshops and counting house’ everything that was needed for a ship-building business.
In November 1830 William Taylor took over the shipyard and eight years later it is clearly shown in on a 1838 map. An annotated extract from this map is shown here. The area outlined in red was being used as the shipyard and the area outlined in yellow, which was at one time part of the shipyard, was being used by a timber importer. The red dotted line marks an indent, shown on an earlier map, which was probably a slipway.
Map of the Lime Kiln Quay shipyard in 1838.
In 1850 the shipyard was advertised to let but there were no takers. When the East Suffolk Railway started to plan their service to Woodbridge in 1853 the shipyard was still vacant. They bought it in 1856 and four years later they had laid the main up and down lines and a goods line through the old shipyard. The impact of the railway is clearly shown here by overlaying the railway lines on an extract from the 1838 tithe map.
The railway lines superimposed on
a 1838 map of Lime Kiln Quay.
Shipbuilding at Woodbridge could not, however, be killed off. This extract from the 1881 Ordnance Survey map shows that a new shipyard had been constructed on the water front just below the old shipyard. The new shipyard yard was probably the inspiration of the boat builder William Garrard in about 1860. It was taken over by Ebenezer Robinson in 1884. The main activity of the yard was building boats for the increasing number of people who were sailing for pleasure.
Extract from the 1881 Ordnance Survey map
showing the new ship yard on the water front.
