Qualla: St Ives, Cambridgeshire

St Ives, Cambridgeshire: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives - the most famous English nursery rhyme riddle, and a perpetual source of argument about which St Ives the man was going to. The cathedral town in Cornwall claims it; locals here in Cambridgeshire insist it was their St Ives, the great medieval cattle market on the road from northern England down to London, where drovers brought sheep and oxen and the inns ran thick with maltsters and merchants. The truth is uncertain. What is not uncertain is that the Cambridgeshire town has been called many things over the years - Slepe, the muddy place; St Ivo, after a saint who may not have existed; and finally just St Ives, an Anglo-Saxon settlement that conjured itself a holy patron and then grew rich on his bones.

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

St Ives, Cambridgeshire: How a Town Acquired a Saint

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Sutton, CC BY-SA 2.0. The settlement began on the north bank of the wide River Great Ouse, perhaps in the fifth or sixth century, at a place where the river could be forded. The Anglo-Saxons called it Slepe - meaning a muddy place, which the riverside marshes amply justified. In 986 the manor of Slepe...

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Image: John Sutton | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Ives, Cambridgeshire: Drovers, Bridges, and a Great Fire

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philip Pankhurst, CC BY-SA 2.0. By the time Henry I granted a royal charter for an annual fair in 1110, St Ives had become a major staging point on a drove road that brought cattle and sheep from Scotland and the north of England down to the Smithfield markets in London. The wooden bridge of 1107 was replaced i...

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Image: Philip Pankhurst | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Ives, Cambridgeshire: Oliver Cromwell's Quiet Decade

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Between 1631 and 1636 a struggling minor gentleman called Oliver Cromwell lived at Old Slepe Hall in St Ives. He was in his early thirties, recently moved from Huntingdon where he had fallen out with the town's patrons, and farming land he had inherited from an uncle. By all acco...

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Image: Public domain

St Ives, Cambridgeshire: The Pocket Calculator and the Modern Town

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sunil060902, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Cambridge and St Ives railway line opened in 1847 and slowly killed the river trade. The town shrank for a while - 3,572 people in 1851, 2,664 by 1931. Then came the post-war expansion. The population reached 7,148 in 1971, 12,331 in 1981, and over 16,000 today. In 1971 a sma...

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Image: Sunil060902 | CC BY-SA 3.0