"The Chairman of the Suffolk Architectural Heritage Trust who is also the former head of the Ipswich Buildings Preservation Trust, Thomas Gondris, has been awarded the MBE services to conservation and heritage in Suffolk.
Tom Gondris
 

Mr Gondris, 79, moved to Ipswich more than 40 years when his company H. Urban Ltd relocated from London to Hadleigh, He retired as chairman from the firm, which supplies bottling and packaging plants to the food and drink industry.

“I am pleased to have played a part in the restoration of significant buildings,” said Mr Gondris, who lives in St Edmund's Road, Ipswich. He served as a Labour councillor on the former Ipswich county borough councillor and for a short time on the Ipswich district council after local government reorganisation in 1974.

Born in Czechoslovakia, he came to England as a war refugee, his parents being killed in World War II. Mr Gondris is married with three children and six grandchildren"