New decorative village sign installed in Eye after regeneration project

A new decorative village sign has been installed in Eye after the previous sign was destroyed in 2020.

The old sign, which dated back to the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, depicted Hereward the Wake and his wife Alftrude alongside an Anglo-Saxon chapel with a former town crier on the reverse but the wooden structure had already begun weakening before the top half of the sign was blown off in a storm in 2020.

For this reason, the parish council commissioned a new sign and looked through historical photographs to narrow down the subject of the sign, narrowing it down to some of the industrial aspects that have impacted the village alongside its beauty such as the church and the brick pits- which have since been turned into a nature reserve.

The design, which was created by artist Adam Miller, depicts the eight sail windmill that was located on the site of Odam’s Mill- now the Whitby Avenue estate- St Matthews Church and the resident swans in Eye Green nature reserve.

Eye Tower Mill as it was known was one of only seven eight sailed windmills that were ever built in England. The church is depicted with its spire, which was removed in the 1980s for safety reasons.

The reverse shows the Eye Green Northam Brickyard and flooded pit, the aerial ropeway and the railway that once ran across the north of the village.

The brickyard was open for nearly 100 years. The first kilns where built in 1897 and the works eventually closed in 1990. The ropeway carried clay from the Star Pit Brickyard in Dogsthorpe to the Northam yard in Eye so the village works could continue working after the clay in the village pit had ran out.

The railway line which opened in 1866 and closed in 1959 was known as the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway. The line went from Peterborough Station through Eye then onto Sutton Bridge and Kings Lynn. It was demolished to make way for the Eye bypass.

Andy Short, chairman of Eye Parish Council said: “It’s fantastic to see the new sign up at last. The parish council has been working on getting the sign to where it is for some time after the previous sign was damaged in poor weather in 2020.

"Former chair of the Parish Council Michael Holmes who sadly died in April 2022 was actively involved in the project and we hope he would have been pleased with the outcome.

"Thank you to everyone who was involved, we hope it will be a great feature for the village for many years to come.”