Bedford Street, Woburn 1980

This 1980 photograph looks along Bedford Street in Woburn, showing the village’s distinctive run of red-brick houses, inns and shops as the road curves gently away to the right. Near the centre is the hanging sign for the Woburn Coffee House, while further along the street the old inn sign and frontage of the Bedford Arms Hotel can be picked out on the right-hand side. Period details include a line of parked cars headed by a light-coloured saloon, the bus stop markings on the road, and the neat sequence of sash windows, dormers and chimney stacks that give this stretch of Woburn its strongly preserved historic character. It is a fine street scene from the end of the 1970s era, capturing Bedford Street before later changes in traffic, shopfronts and village trade, yet with much of the architectural character that still makes Woburn so recognisable today. The Woburn Coffee House occupies a historic Bedford Street building, and Woburn’s village history records Bedford Street as one of the settlement’s long-established historic streets.