St Ives, that used to be in Huntingdonshire but is now in Cambridgeshire, has its fair share of oddities. The ones below are taken from my main St Ives website. If you have suggestions for other ODDITIES of ST IVES, and would like them included, please email Philip Grosset.

Please note: my TAKE BETTER PHOTOS site has moved to http://betterphotos.org.uk


Potto Brown (1817-1871) was a wealthy miller who rented Houghton Mill and subsequently built the mill at St Ives. A strong personality and stern disciplinarian, he was an active nonconformist and lay preacher. He was a generous philanthropist, who built the chapel in Houghton (in the yard of which he is buried), funded local schools, and set up allotments for the poor. He prayed daily that he might be "acute in business, successful at market and able to make money."
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Potto Brown used to take his ledgers (listing money owed him to chapel), and then read out the names of all his debtors, praying for God's help to get the debts repaid. This embarrassed his debtors, who, it is said, tended to pay up just before the service!
He made the major contribution towards the cost of building the new Free Church in St Ives (1864), but then stayed away from the opening ceremony. His £3000 had paid for the basic building, but he didn't really approve of the steeple and what he thought was unnecessary decoration, so he left other people to contribute the extra £2000 required. The story that he deliberately arranged for the spire to be a few feet higher than that of the parish church is untrue, as it isn't!
He did not like having his photograph taken, so this memorial bust, erected in 1879 in the centre of Houghton, was the work of a local farmer, who had never done anything artistic before, but who was guided by an existing pencil sketch.
Potto (that was his grandmother's name) Brown would not have been at all amused to find himself listed here under Oddities! But, if you go to see his statue today, you'll find another oddity: he's been painted green - the work of vandals years ago. Perhaps they too should have had their names read out in church.


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Oliver Cromwell's statue outside the Free Church shows him with a sword on one side and a Bible on the other. It was a previous vicar of All Saints (Father David Moore) who suggested that the book really only contained the addresses of his mistresses. He said this to the Lord Lieutenant's wife, just after a Civic Service in the Parish Church, while her husband was standing by the statue, and she had her camera at the ready. She said, "How wonderful to see Cromwell with the Good Book in his hand!" - and that was his reply. Her look, he says, almost sent him to the Tower of London.
The statue had originally been suggested for Huntingdon where Cromwell had been born in 1599, but the townspeople there rejected the idea. Instead it was happily erected in 1901 in St Ives, where Cromwell had farmed from 1631-6 before he became famous. It is the only statue in the country to have been funded by public subscription.




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What's odd about these attractive-looking houses and apartments in White Hart Lane, completed in 2002?


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Look at the door. There is no door knob or letterbox. The reason is that the doors (and the chimneys) are dummies, just intended to add to the appearance of the place.







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Notice anything odd about the Edinburgh Woollen Mill building on the right of the photo on the left? It looks three storeys
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high, but in fact the upper two storeys consist of just a wall with nothing behind it! Originally there was an old-fashioned grocer's shop here, but when it was demolished it was replaced by this one storey building.
Quite often original frontages have survived above ground level so it is always worth looking up at them.








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You can see other interesting things in St Ives by looking above street level, including this old symbol for a chemist's above the Lloyds Pharmacy frontage








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The new name for Heffers Electrical and the adjoining Lady Jayne's Lingerie in Crown Street? Unfortunately the new sign was only there for April Fools' Day 2009.








Go on to MORE ODDITIES of ST IVES