SUDBURY has doubled in size in the last thirty years, to become easily the most important town in this part of the Stour Valley. A handful of timber-framed houses hark back to its days of wool-trade prosperity, but its three Perpendicular churches were underwritten by another local industry, silk weaving, which survives on a small scale to this day. Sudbury's most famous export, however, is Thomas Gainsborough , the leading English portraitist of the eighteenth cen... [More]