Janice Turner: Why I love the Suffolk coast (2024)

Eight years ago we bought the house of the poet Herbert Lomas. “Nothing but pebbles,” he wrote of Aldeburgh, “the beach doesn’t prettify itself, or pretend to be kind to the feet, or not cold. The wind comes from the Urals even in summer.”

The Suffolk coast is neither dramatic like Cornwall nor enticing like the Med. It is a stack of horizontal lines in Farrow & Ball greys — the shingle matches the sea and, too often, the sky. The North Sea is a utilitarian working sea, not for nervous swimmers. There is a rip current in Aldeburgh that drags you down the beach, and a steep bank minting low yet mean waves that boot you rudely off your feet as you’re getting out. If the water temperature ever reaches tolerable, the jellyfish swarm. But, like “Bertie”, I love it.

My first job was as a trainee on the East Anglian Daily Times when my boyfriend (now husband) was on the Bristol Evening Post, and I was bitter that while he was covering shootings and riots, I’d have to drive 20 miles to report on a flower show. Yet the landscape and gentleness of a place I found tame when I was young now fills me with joy.

Even back then I loved Suffolk’s coastal towns, which in the late 1980s — before the Boden-ification of the British seaside — were down-at-heel, populated by genteel but thrifty old ladies who’d rent out musty cottages and charge 50p if you lost a teaspoon. The Suffolk coast is somewhere you must deliberately come to — you’re never passing through. And unlike Kent or Sussex, it’s no London dormitory, but its own self, with an accent that actors never get right — except Ralph Fiennes in The Dig. The landscape is calm yet mysterious, quirky and a bit cussed.

I’ll start with Aldeburgh, famed for its women and gays. The suffragist Millicent Fawcett, the town’s most eminent daughter, has a statue in Westminster, yet you’ll find no monument to her in her birthplace, nor to her sister, Elizabeth Garret Anderson, Britain’s first female doctor and town mayor, nor to the composer Benjamin Britten or his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, who lived semi-openly together in Aldeburgh — then at Red House near Leiston — when hom*osexuality was a crime and are buried side by side in the local churchyard in exquisite, minimalist graves.

In fact, the town’s only statue is of a dog, Snooks, the pet of beloved local doctors. The statue, which guards the children’s boating pond, was once stolen, then found for sale at an antiques fair, and now a phantom knitter creates him outfits to mark events such as the Olympic Games and Halloween. Truly nothing could be more Aldeburgh, except that Moot Hall has a little seat where unfortunates pelted in the stocks could take a sort of half-time rest.

Most mornings I take a pathetic jog through the nature reserve to Thorpeness, past the fishermen who land and sell cod, herring and skate — including the nominatively determinate DA Fryer. I admire the strange geometric fauna unique to “vegetated shingle”: sea peas, sea kale, yellow-horned poppy, as though common plants have been reimagined by aliens. I pass the Scallop sculpture by Maggi Hambling (also gay) that still, inexplicably, makes half of Aldeburgh livid.

Thorpeness is like the surreal set of an episode of The Avengers in which Emma Peel finds that the whole village has been put to sleep. In fact, it is a giant rich man’s folly of faux Jacobean and Tudor houses, conceived by the Scottish railways baron Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie as an Edwardian holiday village. There’s also a knee-deep, Peter Pan-themed boating lake called the Meare and the House in the Clouds water tower. Money has moved in lately and Thorpeness has gone a bit East Hamptons bling, which is hilarious given that from the Grand Designs mansions you can see — and visit on a fantastic coastal walk — the throbbing nuclear orb of Sizewell B.

Yet in Suffolk the sea is king, relentlessly pinching land and putting old Dunwich (big in the 11th century) under the waves. I love to cycle from there, over the marshes — reeds swishing, the sea in the distance — to Walberswick (famed for crabbing and the screenwriter Richard Curtis). I then take a rowing-boat ferry, run by the same family for generations, over the River Blyth to Southwold, a children’s storybook idea of a perfect seaside town. North of the candy-coloured beach huts, walk the sandy beach where Juliet Stibbe wrote The Easternmost House, a fine Suffolk elegy, the subject of which is now underwater too.

The Blyth is one of five rivers that enter the sea along this coast, and all can be crossed via capriciously timetabled ferries. Certain friends will kill me for sharing this, but the best place to swim is Butley Creek — velvety water, with fields and woods beyond.

Or you can take the Deben ferry north of Felixstowe, cycling through the ramshackle collection of fishermen’s huts into this underappreciated town, with its kiss-me-quick pier, elegant Edwardian seafront and a splendid fort, where in 1667 soldiers repelled the last seaborne invasion by the Dutch (I confess, I didn’t know this). Further on and fun to watch — honestly — is the container port.

The whole coast is studded with defences against pesky European invaders. There are 11 Martello towers, built to see off Napoleon, including one in Aldeburgh, which you can rent — although the walls are so thick that it needs heating even in August.

The snaking rivers create secret backwaters, hard-to-find places, which is why the government bought Orford Ness a century ago, using it for a range of military experiments, from aviation to ballistics. Take a ferry from Orford quay to see weird pagodas from the days when atomic missiles (without the actual nuclear bit) were tested, to the alarm of villagers on the shore hearing the bangs.

Radar was also pioneered on the Ness, until the Ministry of Defence got sick of rowing across and moved it to a stately home in nearby Bawdsey, where the transmitter station — integral to winning the Battle of Britain — is now a brilliant museum.

The Ness also has a Cold War listening station, with the fabulous code name Cobra Mist, and until recently my favourite building on the entire coast — a beautiful 18th-century lighthouse with the best views in Suffolk. But finally last year the sea, as it always does here, took that too.

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