Julie Thomson

First Contact

Julie is the keeper of the public record of Long Melford. She knows the dates, the names, the architectural terms, the documents, the society’s archive, the order of events. She can walk you through the village and tell you who built what and when and why.

Without Julie and the people like her who work through the Long Melford Historical and Archaeological Society, the historical record of the village exists only as scattered papers, unread books, and half-remembered stories. She is the gatherer of those papers, the annotator of those books, the stitcher of those stories into a continuous account. On a Saturday in April she and Melonie Clubb walked Mash and Bhavani through four hours of the village, in two voices. Julie gave the skeleton. Melonie gave the flesh. Together they walked the archive through Long Melford in the two registers a place properly needs.

That first walk is recorded in the Journal entry for 18 April 2026.

Portrait

Two frames were made in Holy Trinity churchyard, where Julie led the way to the old stones leaning against the ivy-clad wall - graves she has read and researched. In one she rests a hand on a weathered marker mid-sentence, the historian at the record; in the other she stands along the wall among the stones she keeps. That she chose this place to stand is its own quiet statement about what she carries and why.

Future Work

Julie has offered to help with subsequent visits - the Long Melford Heritage Centre, the interiors of Trinity Hospital, the Old School Community Centre where LMHAS meets. Each of those is a future session. This page grows as the work continues.