Dear Ed,
I heard that you live in Ipswich, so you have my sympathy.
I can understand why you spend time away from home. I used to live in Ipswich, too, but saw the light and came to Dunedin, where I have lived most of the time since I left. I reckon you should move here, too. You would like the place.
I noted that you are reported (ODT March 26) to have said you came from a ''same-sized town in England and no-one ever tours there''.
But that didn't use to be true. In the late 1950s, Bill Haley and His Comets played at the Gaumont and excited fans tried to wreck the place. The Beatles also played at that venue, but I didn't go because someone warned me it would be impossible to hear anything above the screaming - and I later learned that was correct.
The Rolling Stones passed through at least once. Jimi Hendrix played at the St Matthews Baths, as did a rather sad solo Sandy Denny, but the acoustics were awful.
The management used to install a temporary floor over the swimming pool. John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, that nursery for subsequent supergroups, played at another venue. Ewan McColl also visited.
Ipswich had a folk music club, frequented in the 1960s by Bob Davenport, who was renowned for his unaccompanied singing. Like you, he lived near Ipswich. A friend of mine used to babysit for him and his wife, Tarby.
I remember being invited to select music from a cupboard full of Library of Congress recordings of vocal legends, such as Leadbelly. When Bob Dylan visited the UK on his 1965 acoustic tour, he visited Bob Davenport - they had both performed at the Newport Folk Festival.
So, looking back, Ed, although Ipswich may now be a musical cultural desert, it didn't used to be.
A key difference between Ipswich and Dunedin is that the latter is a long-established university city. Both may have lost much of their past industrial base, but Dunedin has kept alive because it is a renowned educational centre.
As you will know, Ed, Ipswich just missed out on that historical role. In Shakespeare's Henry VIII the Cardinal's College of Ipswich is described as one of ''Those twins of learning, Ipswich and Oxford''. It was designed to surpass King's College of Eton. Sadly for Ipswich, Cardinal Wolsey (a butcher's son born in the town) was deposed and only a minor brick gateway to the proposed grand college remains.
With my memories and historical curiosity revived, Ed, I searched through my 1973 Kelly's Directory of Ipswich & Neighbourhood (the most recent edition I have) and found only a single Sheeran listed (there was another with two r's), so it seems the Sheerans must have been relative newcomers to the area at that time.
The directory didn't include the ancient Suffolk village of Framlingham, so I was unable to check for Sheerans there.
Perhaps Framlingham is fine, but the last time that I visited Ipswich, it was depressing to see almost the whole street where I opened my bookshop in 1967 was now either partially demolished or boarded up and covered in graffiti.
St Matthew's church was a ruin which someone had tried to burn down. Upper Orwell St had once been a lively area for small businesses - just about everything you could think of from a pet shop to greengrocer, including the Bamboo coffee bar, a cafe, baker, pubs, a shop that sold model aircraft and fishing gear (important for boys growing up), a cobbler, an electrician etc.
The fire station was nearby. A good subject for a Penny Lane-type song at that time, Ed.
Unless things have improved a lot recently in Ipswich, I reckon you would be better off settling in Otago. There is a strong creative community here - artists, musicians and poets - among which you would feel at home.
Welcome to Dunedin, for a longer return stay, Ed!
-Tony Reeder is an amateur historian and Dunedin School of Medicine associate professor.
