Lavenham Crooked Houses

While wandering around Lavenham, the first thing you notice are the weird houses. Not only are they half-timbered, but many are painted in rich colors and noticeably crooked, literally.

The medieval wool town grew so fast, that they used GREEN Wood to build with, and as the wood dried, the twisting began. The town went bust almost as fast as it was built, so no one had the money to tear down and rebuild… they just left it like it was. And so it sits today.

De Vere House on Water Street. Movie makers used this house to create the fictional village of “Godric’s Hollow” in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1.”

Other filmmakers who have used the village as a location include Stanley Kubrick and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

It is believed that the distorted, or “crooked”, appearance of many of the town’s buildings inspired the poem, “A Crooked Little Man.”

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

If the story about the “crooked man” is only a legend, there is another that is absolutely true. A young woman named Jane Taylor who lived in Lavenham wrote a poem that is known to this day throughout the world. She simply called it The Star, but we all know it by its more familiar title of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

Location: Lavenham, Suffolk, England.