Soham & Wicken Through Time A Second Selection

Soham is a proud town. It is proud of its history and written in the old buildings is a story of its people. Hard working, hard living and independent, they survived on the nearby Fenland or in work associated with it. Along the long ridge that carries the road half way between the racing town of Newmarket and the cathedral city of Ely, a line of windmills creaked and groaned in the wind. You could get anything in Soham from black boots to a black eye. It used to be said of Wicken, ‘one way in, the same way out’, because Wicken was one of those isolated fen villages looking at Soham across the vast Soham Mere, with a road linked to the Newmarket Road, but no through road to Stretham. The isolation brought an independence that helped to keep the last of the old Fen, now Wicken Fen, on its edges. Anthony Day’s images capture the old cottages and scenes and show how the village has changed.