Town in Lincolnshire, England
Boston
A Lincolnshire port whose church tower guided ships across the Fens, and whose name crossed the Atlantic to give America one of its best-known cities.
Key information
- County
- Lincolnshire
- Nation
- England
- Known for
- The Boston Stump, the Pilgrim Fathers' 1607 arrest and giving its name to Boston, Massachusetts
- What locals are called
- Bostonians
- Famous people
- Herbert Ingram, Jean Ingelow, George Bass, John Cotton
About Boston
The tower that sailors steered by
Boston's skyline is one tower. St Botolph's Church rises to 272 feet, and in the flat Fens you can see it from miles away. Everyone calls it the Boston Stump. The name is oddly modest for something so tall. It probably dates from the days when the tower stood without its lamp, and it has stuck ever since. The top of the tower has long worked as a landmark for ships in the Wash and for travellers crossing the fields. A climb of 209 steps takes you to the viewing platform. On a clear day the view over the Fens and out towards the sea is enormous, because there is nothing to get in the way. The church is named for St Botolph, patron saint of travellers. The town's name is a worn-down form of 'Botolph's stone', and he is a fitting saint for a place that spent centuries welcoming and sending off people on the move.
When Boston rivalled London
The Stump makes sense once you know how rich Boston once was. In the 1200s it was one of the busiest and wealthiest ports in England, shipping out huge quantities of wool and bringing in wine, cloth and other goods. Merchants from the Hanseatic League of northern European trading towns had a presence here. That money built the church, with its great nave and soaring tower, and paid for the guilds and the fairs that filled the town. The Guildhall, built around 1390, is a surviving piece of that confident merchant town. Then the wool trade moved on, and the river Witham silted up. Boston shrank from international port to market town. Its medieval grandeur stayed behind, which is why such a big church sits in such a modest place.
The failed escape that helped found America
In 1607 a group of religious Separatists, later remembered as the Pilgrim Fathers, tried to slip out of England from the Lincolnshire coast near Boston and sail to Holland. They had paid a ship's captain for passage, but he betrayed them to the authorities. The group was arrested and held in Boston. The cells in the Guildhall can still be seen, and the building now tells the story as a museum. The Separatists did later escape to Holland, and then on the Mayflower in 1620. Boston's American link is bigger still. In 1630 settlers in Massachusetts gave the name Boston to their new town, after the Lincolnshire one. In 1633 John Cotton, the vicar of St Botolph's, followed them across the Atlantic and became one of the leading ministers of the colony. A chapel in the church is dedicated to him, and the connection between the two Bostons is still celebrated.
Windmills, sluices and a fenland landscape
Boston sits on the River Witham, a few miles from the sea, and its landscape was shaped by the drainage of the Fens. The Grand Sluice, built in 1766, holds back the tide and controls the water level inland. The Maud Foster Windmill, built in 1819, is one of the great working mills of Lincolnshire. It has seven floors and sits beside the drain of the same name. It still grinds flour, and the shop sells it. The farmland around the town grows vegetables on a huge scale, which explains why Boston's market has always been busy. Local food includes Lincolnshire sausages, sage-flavoured and coarse in texture, and plum bread, a Lincolnshire fruit loaf that is traditionally eaten with cheese.
Boston people and the Pilgrims on the pitch
Herbert Ingram, born in Boston in 1811, founded the Illustrated London News in 1842, the world's first illustrated weekly newspaper. He became the town's MP, and died in 1860 in a steamer accident on Lake Michigan. A tall Gothic memorial to him stands in Boston's Market Place. Jean Ingelow, born in Boston in 1820, was a Victorian poet and novelist, popular in her day. The explorer George Bass, who gave his name to the strait between Tasmania and mainland Australia, served his apprenticeship to a surgeon in Boston. In football, Boston United are known as the Pilgrims, a name taken straight from the 1607 story. They left their old York Street ground in 2020 and now play at the Jakemans Community Stadium in Wyberton.