Ipswich remained a small country town through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This may be why Ipswich has such a large number of well-preserved seventeenth and eighteenth-century houses: they were cherished as the homes of ordinary townsfolk who could not afford to modernize them and make the kind of changes that might have spoiled their simple Colonial architecture.
Ipswich is still a flourishing port today, handling several million tonnes of cargo each year. The town used to feature a small grass-runway airport with regular flights to the Netherlands, but this has now been re-developed for housing.
Modern figures with Ipswich connections include musician Nick Kershaw, the children's TV presenter Brian Cant, the punk rock band The Adicts, and cartoonist Carl Giles.
Ipswich Centre contains the all glass building owned by Willis Corroon, properly called the Willis Building but still often called the "Willis-Faber building" by locals. Designed by Norman Foster, the building dates from 1974. It become the youngest listed building in Britain in 1991.
Ipswich is the last place in the area to have an independent bus company which has the unusual practice of naming its buses.Ipswich has undergone an extensive gentrification programme (see right) in recent years, principally centred around the waterfront. Though this has turned a run-down dock area into an emerging residential and commercial centre, it is being completed at the expense of much of the town's industrial and maritime heritage and in spite of efforts made by a local group, The Ipswich Society
