Famously, Haverhill is Suffolk's ugliest small town, although I thought it compared favourably with Stowmarket or Sudbury, and was certainly a darned sight prettier than Mildenhall, or Thetford just over the Norfolk border. Haverhill numbers among its housing estates a European Social Priority area, one of only four in Suffolk. Most Suffolkers could tell you that the big four towns were Ipswich, Lowestoft, Bury and Felixstowe; few would know that Haverhill is fifth, I suspect.

Partly this is because, although Haverhill is in Suffolk, it doesn't feel of it; until recent times bits were actually in Essex, and the two major roads that leave town head into Essex in one direction and Cambridgeshire in the other. There is no doubt that the town is uncharacteristically poor, especially when compared with nearby Newmarket. In Suffolk, we expect that the further west we go the richer it gets, but Haverhill is very much the exception that tests the rule.

The town centre has undergone a considerable facelift in recent years, presumably with the aid of European funding, and the pedestrianisation around St Mary is actually very good. The church itself is now undergoing a refurbishment, and because of this I was not able to get inside. However, I know that, as at Beccles and Bungay, the interior was effectively scoured by a major town fire in the 17th century, and little survived. Externally, the two most notable features are the Stour Valley stair turret that rises above the level of the tower top, and the rood loft stair turret, as at nearby Clare and Stansfield.

Inside, Mortlock tells us that the font cover is the work of Frederick Gibberd, famous as the designer of the Catholic Cathedral in Liverpool, but also the architect of Haverhill's considerable post-war expansion. There is also a portrait of the puritan hothead Samuel Ward, famous as town preacher of Ipswich. But during the Commonwealth he had fulfilled the same role here, and his father was Rector.

It all sounds the model of a Victorianised civic church, although there is another factor which makes it rather different from most of these.

Simply, Haverhill was a hotbed of 19th century non-conformism. This was to such an extent that, in a town of more than 3,000 people as it was in 1851, the Census of Religious Worship that year recorded a regular congregation of barely 200. This compared with more than 500 at the Baptist chapel, and another 500 at the Congregational chapel. Weather forecasts casually place Suffolk in the south east, but Haverhill culturally and architecturally has more in common with the Midlands industrial towns. The vast industrial landscape to the south of the town completes the picture, but on the streets East Anglian accents merge into East End ones, for Haverhill was, like Sudbury, a London overspill town.

Haverhill non-conformism would result in the building of Suffolk's most spectacular Congregationalist church, the bespired and beturreted palace at the Sturmer end of the town centre, which you can see in the left hand column. Visitors may easily confuse it with the parish church, which keeps rather a low profile at the other end of the High Street, but the ongoing facelift seems to be making more of a feature of it.

I left Haverhill under the railway arches - but the railway has gone now, killed in the 1960s when oil prices were low and motorways an exciting idea. Now, anyone wanting to travel by train between Colchester and Cambridge, two of East Anglia's largest towns, must either go via London or dot about on Ipswich and Bury local services for a couple of hours. So short-sighted.

St Mary, Haverhill, is right on the town square. When the refurbishment is finished, I hope it will be accessible to visitors again.

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