The Voice of Independent Accommodation Providers

Visit Godmanchester Cambridgeshire and the surrounding villages and stay in bed breakfast, hotel or holiday accommodation accommodation provided by BedPosts members.

Godmanchester was originally within the historic county of Huntingdonshire. It is an old Roman town, pentagonal in shape, with charters dating back to 1214, when it became a self-governing manor, a form of government which made the inhabitants free tenants, for which the town paid King John £120 a year. It became a borough in 1604. Godmanchester adjoins Huntingdon by the ancient bridge crossing the River Great Ouse. It is said that the bridge, described in Huntingdon, was partly built by the people of Godmanchester and partly built by the people of Huntingdon, that the two ends were started at the same time, without any co-ordinated plan and that by luck the workmen met in the middle, which accounts for the awkward curve in the bridge.

The town has many old thatched brick and timber cottages, ancient farm-houses on the outskirts and a wide common. In the centre is the Victorian town hall. Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School was founded in 1560 and parts of the original building are still in use. Near these two buildings is the delightful Chinese Bridge, constructed in 1827, which leads to the islands in the River Ouse.

The Causeway, which opens on to the river, is medieval, and on its east side is a timber-framed house dated 1597 and a yellow-brick late Georgian building. In Earning Street is a two-gabled house dated 1625. Plantagenet House has gables and an oriel window with bargeboards, and Tudor House, built 1600-3, is timber-framed with gabled wings and overhanging upper stories. In London Road is Porch Farm and the former Shepherd and Dog Inn, and in Post Street is the 17^th century Island Cottage with overhanging stories and, lying back from the street, Island Hall, a large, red-brick building, two and a half stories high with lower two-bay wings. Farm Hall, in West Street, was built in 1746 of red and rubbed brick with a Tuscan porch and cast-iron railings. There is an avenue of limes in the garden and another leading towards the river.

The Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin, one of the largest in the county, is mainly 13^th to 15^th-century, with a tower added in 1623. The church is of brown cobbles and the tower ashlar-faced. The chancel is Early English and has a rare 13^th century mass dial on one of the buttresses. The rood-screen is 1901 , but the misericords on the stalls are late 15^th century and show a variety of finely carved animals. There is a 16^th century brass with a figure of a civilian. The Roman town can be defined by the present roads which encircle it and recent discoveries are the south and west gates and a suite of baths, near Pinfold Lane, which were built about the 2^nd century. Traces of another building of the same date have been uncovered.