Notes on East Anglia II (July 19-25, 2025)

July 19 (Saturday). Ely to Hasketon. Cambridgeshire to Suffolk. The second half of a holiday usually proceeds at twice the speed of the first, in my experience. However, on this occasion, my days were spent at an even pace, due to the intensity, number, variety, and novelty of the things, places, and people, I encountered. By this time in an adventure, I’ve no idea what day of the week it is. But that doesn’t matter a jot. I’ve left behind both time and place.

10.15 am: Having bid farewell to the landlord of the B&B (who claims to possess a small Walter Sickert painting), I visited Topping & Company Booksellers of Ely — reputedly the best bookshop in Britain. I find large-scale suppliers intimidating. My strategy is to isolate one category of publication, with which I’ve some familiarity, and work my way outward from its shelves. The promised rain descended. Gratitude, once again.

11.30 am: The road to Hasketon passed signs pointing to Soham. The village will be forever overshadowed by the double-child murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002. A stop-off at Waitrose, Bury St Edmund, where Edmund the Martyr, the King of East Anglia, was buried at an inconclusively identified site. Although, I strongly suspect it wasn’t below the supermarket. (But, then again, Richard III was discovered under a car park in Leicester.) On to Hasketon, through narrow byways and shaded lanes, to a cozy apartment that has been lovingly converted from an old stables by the owner. Some people just have the knack. I don’t. But he’d served as an officer in the Royal Engineers before retiring. ‘I used to build and blow-up bridges’, he amplified. ‘I used to do the same in Lego, as a child’, I added, uselessly.

6.00 pm: I arrived at a highly-recommended seafood restaurant in Orford. I loath seafood, and so settled for an acceptable smoked ham salad. To the left of the restaurant was a chapel tearoom, run by the village’s Methodist Church. The building bore no date plaque. I suspect that, like the church building, it had been founded at the beginning of the 20th century. The chapel has many features typical of Edwardian Methodist and Anglican architecture from that period. Quite a charmer, what with the distinctive Flemish Renaissance Revival influence in the outline of its facade’s upper section.

July 20 (Sunday). 9.30 am: A return to Orford for the ferry across the River Ore to Orford Ness. It’s known as ‘The Island’ by locals — a title that evokes the mystery and isolation associated with its past life.

During the first and second world wars, Orford Ness served as a top-secret military base for testing aircraft, parachutes, radio transmissions, radar, and munitions — including aerially-deployed bombs, and nuclear devices conceived and built in Britain under the oversight of the, then, Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. The atomic weapons — which had no fissionable material at their core (so they say) — were exposed to vibrations, movement, pressure, and drops, to establish the integrity of their shells and detonators.

Most of ‘The Island’ is now owned by the National Trust. What remains of the base is in a condition of, what archaeologists call, ‘managed decline’. It’s a landscape of ruins that are being picturesquely reclaimed by the encroaching natural environment. I was reminded of the landmarks and terrain of derelict collieries in South Wales, where I played as a young boy. The Trust has restored the wet-land conditions of its pre-military history. Some of the craters made by exploding bombs have been turned into lagoons.

Plant life and wildlife have returned in abundance. Sparky little Oyster Catchers tweeted and tripped across the shingle and into the long grass, where their newly born were nesting. The sky was overcast, open, and very present throughout the day. Dark clouds hung heavy over the landscape, mist encroached, while a moderate-to-strong wind blew-in from the North Sea, on the other side of the Ness. Often, the rain beat down cruelly. By the time I took the return ferry, my clothes and belongings were drenched.

But this type of weather is ideally suited to the unsettled and unsettling spirit of the place. Having followed the designated route passed hangars, viewing platforms, a Battery Shop, a Power House, a Control Room, the remains of radio tracking arrays, and the ominous ‘Black Beacon’ … ‘Laboratory 1’ presented itself. Partially covered in a mound of shingle taken from the beach, the building was reminiscent of an Egyptian tomb that had been overwhelmed by the desert sand. (Both are places of death.) The Laboratory is ‘haunted’ by its history. In the main area, atomic bombs (with a potential yield as great and those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) were once suspended from the ceiling gantry high above a deep rectangular pit (which is now filled with rain water). These dark stars are still present, even in their absence. In silence, I stared at the Laboratory’s roof, and the churning, grey sky that was now visible through it. A chill wind blew through the interior.

July 21 (Monday). 7.00 am: Hard rain fell with a sound like shingle upon my accommodation’s roof. 10.00 am: Into that rain, and onto the road to see the Woodbridge Tidal Mill Museum.

The three-storey white, wooden-slatted building (built in 1793) bares a pronounced European influence. I could’ve been in Scandinavia, but, equally, in 19th century Pennsylvania, where the builders of farm houses and granaries had looked back to the old countries for designs and technology. The mill’s sophisticated exploitation of a tidal river, a constructed pond, and gravity to power its waterwheel is one of the most elegant expressions of green-energy efficiency that I’ve encountered.

1.15 pm: Sutton Hoo. I’d watched several documentaries in preparation for my visit. According to one account, the discovery — made in 1939 (the year that the Second World War broke out) — of an interred Anglo-Saxon ship and its treasures had had a supernatural inspiration. Edith Petty, an amateur archaeologist, on whose land the discovery was made, became a committed spiritualist following the death of her husband. In one version of the story, she received a strange dream or vision in which one of the ancient burial mounds in her grounds was surmounted by several warriors. In another version, a friend who was a medium saw their ghosts on the same mound from an upstairs window at Petty’s house. Petty commissioned Basil Brown, an autodidact and exceptional amateur excavator, to begin a dig there. (It’s now known as Mound 1.) Eventually he did, and the rest — as they say — is history (in the most profound sense of that word).

The imagery and metaphors of supernaturalism were, perhaps, an inevitable resource for archaeologists and others attempting to articulate their experience of this extraordinary find. Mercie Lack, one of the site photographers back then, wrote:

The impression of the ship, alas, was of a fleeting nature, a kind of ‘ghost-ship’ revealed for a short time during which it was possible to make records, photographs, and sketches and then the original was gone forever.

The ship’s impress in the compacted sand and acidic soil (the timber has long perished) had an apparitional quality — as though the excavation team were seeing the great vessel slowly dematerialising or sinking back into its own time.

The largest of the 18 mounds (Mound 2) on the Royal Burial Ground cast my mind back to those partially buried laboratories I’d seen at Orford Ness yesterday. (Once again, both are places of death.)

Indeed:

July 22, 2025 (Tuesday). Hasketon to Norwich. Suffolk to Norfolk. 6.00 am: Through the open bedroom door, I could see bright sunlight passing across the landing. Many wood pigeons cooed de-sychronically in the woodlands surrounding the apartment.

9.00 am: On to Norwich, via Woodbridge and Aldeburgh. In a car park at the former, car keys were mislaid and found and a recently purchased parking ticket, irrevocably lost and bought again. (What’s happening!) I visited the Longshed, near the Tidal Mill, where a replica of the Sutton Hoo burial ship was being constructed by a team of volunteers.

Most are retirees. Three were once teachers and one, a serving officer in the army. They’ve been learning to cut, carve, bore, rivet, and dowel like Anglo-Saxons … from scratch. The enterprise is a labour of love, and ambitiously conceived. It will take at least a further year to complete the work. My guide to the project was originally from Barry Island, South Wales. Small world.

From there to Adleburgh. A new town and a different prospect (for me). Stationary trawlers hugged the horizon. This coastal village looks out towards the North Sea. Like St Ives, Cornwall, Adleburgh’s history is intertwined with the arts. The local cleric, poet, and surgeon George Crabbe’s poem ‘The Borough’ (1810) was the inspiration for Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes (1943). Adleburg later became Britten’s home. The ghost novelist and academic M R James’s tale ‘A Warning to the Curious’ (1925) is set in the town (which he called ‘Seaburgh’.) Adleburgh is a strange juxtaposition of an idyllic tourist stop — with fine examples of Arts and Crafts architecture, reputable fish and chipperies, and ice-cream parlours — and an eerie, desolate shingle beach — on which, today, a few figures huddled together in groups, with their backs to the town — overseen by an imposing watchtower, that might have come straight out of a Georgio de Chirico painting. I could well imagine ‘the shape of a rather indistinct personage’ moving towards me on the beach, as it had at speed towards James’s ill-fated Cambridge professor in ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ (1904).

I called in at an open-studio summer exhibition run by a local art group. Some of them were making pictures of the beach on the beach. I never mention that I’m a former art teacher in these contexts, wary that my opinion about the work might be petitioned. In the parish church of St Peter and St Paul (which I visited on my way out of the town) there’s a stained-glass window by John Piper entitled A Tribute to Benjamin Britten (1980). I recalled the Marc Chagall Window at Chichester Cathedral.

3.30 pm: On, then, to Norwich. 5.30 pm: From the window of my apartment, I could see nearly a thousand years of architectural history in a single moment. In the foreground were 19th century, redbrick industrial buildings (which had been converted into bijou apartments); either side, were undistinguished contemporary homes; in the middle distance, the clock tower of City Hall (which was built in 1938, and, while presently either nine hours slow or three hours fast, chimes the correct time), along with churches from the medieval to Victorian periods; and, in the far distance, a castle built by the Normans in the 11th century.

I appear to be in The Eros Suite.

July 23 (Wednesday). 9.45 am: An ambulation through the market area (which has a wonderful Asian food stall), passed the magnificent Guild Hall, where Thomas Bilney — the first Protestant martyr — was imprisoned in a vault prior to his execution at the stake.

From there, I walked to the Royal Arcade — a curious hybidisation of Victorian architecture and Art Nouveau design — and, then, on to the Castle Museum and Art Gallery.

The Museum’s natural history section has a collection of the most convincingly executed dioramas (derived from the Greek word for ‘to see through’) that I’ve ever seen. They were painted by Owen Paul Smyth (a stage-designer and backdrop painter), Horace W Tuck (former Vice-Principal of Norwich School of Art), and Ernest Whatley (a professional dioramist).

There was a solo retrospective exhibition by the Norfolk artist Colin Self in the Gallery. To my shame (and consternation), I’d never heard of him. However, I did recognise some of his work. He was educated, first, at Norwich School of Art and, subsequently, at the Slade School of Fine Art, London in the early 1960s — at the same time David Hockney and Peter Blake were studying at the Royal College of Art, London. They and Self were, and have remained, friends. Indeed, Self is better known among his more famous contemporaries than by the art public at large.

Colin Self, *Humanity Hanging by a Thread* (1982) oil on canvas (with acknowledgment to the Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Norwich).

In 1965, Self withdrew from London and returned to live in Norwich. One of my former art tutors at Newport College of Art, John Selway, who’d studied at the Royal College of Art, just before Self arrived at the Slade, had done likewise. John left the Capital and went back to his homeland in Abertillery. Both were Pop Artists at the time, and eschewed fame in order to plough their own furrow on the margins of the ‘art world’. Self was also a prodigiously talented artist who could work in a variety of medium and styles. You’d be excused for mistaking this solo exhibition for a mixed show. And therein may lie a further explanation for Self’s relative obscurity: he has never had an identifiable ‘badge’. That’s to say, a consistent and marketable style, theme, or subject matter.

Why this is a local only, rather than touring also, exhibition beggars belief. Self’s work throws up many questions about who’d influenced who, with respect to Blake, Hockney, Eduardo Paolozzi, and himself.

Colin Self, *Two Women Waiting and B-52 Nuclear Bomber* (1963) oil on board (with acknowledgment to the Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Norwich).

3.45 pm: A visit to Norwich Cathedral — the site of Christian worship in the city for over 900 years.

There’s a large brass baptismal font at the west end of the nave. I waxed lyrical about the way it summoned the ceremonial bronze laver, which was placed before the Holy of Holies in Israel’s Tabernacle. The reality was more prosaic.

The vessel was originally used in the manufacture of chocolate in Norwich. When the factory closed, the equipment was refashioned and presented to the Cathedral to be used as a font.

Good-‘ol Rowntree Mackintosh: ‘makers of chocolates, toffees, and church furnishings’. The Cathedral building and its grounds have been constructed, extended, and modified ever since 1096, when the east end of the church was begun. They were overwhelming. Today, was my initial orientation.

Well, I never! I’ve no recollection, whatsoever.

July 24 (Thursday). 7.00 am: I awoke to light rain and an overcast sky. 9.45 am: A walk to St Stephen’s Church, nearby, for coffee and conversation with someone whom I’d never before met. He bore a distracting resemblance to a young Otto Dix. The volunteer staff at the church serve tea, coffee, hot chocolate, and pastries for less than half the price of commercial vendors, and offer a wholesome meal to those who need it, for only £1 (or free, if they can’t afford it.) (‘That they may see your good works …’.) Out-of-the blue, a former student at the School of Art introduced themselves. I’d not seen them in over 15 years. Small world.

One of the splendours of clear-glass pictorial windows is the interaction of the stained- and painted-glass elements with the world that’s seen through them. The sacred and secular in superimposition.

The East Window was constructed in German glass over 500 years ago. It was constructed using pieces taken from an earlier window, made in 1533. In 1648, an explosion of gunpowder in a street nearby shattered the window. It was put back together using whatever fragments could be salvaged, plus newer infills. The result is strangely fractured — cubist almost, in some sections. A new whole. During the Second World War the window was removed, so that it would be preserved during the Luftwaffe bombing raids. Norwich was particularly hard hit, due to the munitions and airplane-parts manufactories in the city. It would’ve been ironic if this German-glass window been destroyed by an explosion, yet again, but this time at the hands of a German bomb.

12.30 pm: From St Stephen’s to St Julian’s, and the church dedicated to her. Julian of Norwich was an anchoress in the Middle Ages who lived in seclusion, confined to a cell. There, during a period of great illness, she received so-called visionary revelations, which she wrote down as a theological account of God’s love and grace in Revelations of Divine Love. The original cell, along with part of the church, was a casualty of the war. Both were subsequently rebuilt. I bought the modern translation of her work that would’ve been familiar to T S Eliot, C S Lewis, and J R R Tolkien.

The manager of the Welcome Centre and bookshop next to the church had undertaken a Medieval Studies degree at the University of Wales, Lampeter. Small world. He confirmed my suspicion: Norwich had too many medieval churches. There were more here than in any European city north of the Alps. Put bluntly, the wealthy merchants, civic leaders, and church had overbuilt in the 14th century. (They’d more money than sense, as my Gran used to say.) Some churches were either closed or demolished within 50 years of being founded, because no one attended. Many Welsh Nonconformist chapels, built after the 1904 Religious Revival, suffered a similar fate for similar reasons: an overreaching optimism.

3.30 pm: The Museum of Norwich proved to be enormous fun. It was packed to the ceiling with material culture, including an entire pharmacy, commercial packaging and records, signage, bits of building, examples of local industrial manufacture, and domestic artefacts, such as a Dansette Bermuda record player — much like the one I had as a child.

I was particularly drawn to the replica of a late-18th century textile manufacturer’s dispatch book. It comprised samples of locally-made patterned cloth (known as ‘stuff’) which had been sold to clients. These were arranged in horizontal strips on the pages of a ledger. Together, they looked like a cross between a DNA graphic representation, Fernand Léger’s cubist-inspired abstractions, and serial art. Of course, back then, it wouldn’t have entered anyone’s head that this record — which the retailers had compiled for entirely utilitarian reasons — would one day be conceived as not only an ‘image’, but also a fortuitous anticipation of modes of art and a scientific breakthrough in the 20th century.

At the museum, I bought yet another ghost book: David Chisnell’s Haunted Norwich (2005). (I can’t help myself.) If one day I move to another place to live, then, it must be haunted.

July 25 (Friday). 7.00 am: I heard the seagulls call on awaking. (I could’ve be back in Aberystwyth.) This was my final full day in Norwich. There was as much exploring to pack into the morning and afternoon as clothes into my suitcase. 9.15 am: Off to a highly-recommended coffee shop, nearby, for the best iced-hot chocolate I’ve ever tasted.

10.00 am: I returned to the Strangers’ Hall (having arrived too late in the afternoon yesterday for admission). The house was built in the 14th century, and subsequently modified and extended over several centuries. According to one theory, the ‘Strangers’ were Protestant Flemish weavers who’d sought sanctuary in Norwich from religious persecution in the Low Countries, during the 16th century. In today’s parlance, they were refugees or asylum seekers. The ‘strangers’ contributed to the development of Norwich’s textile industry and prosperity. By 1582, there were 4,678 immigrants in the city, which represented nearly a third of its population. Norwich has a history of welcoming and integrating outsiders. We could learn a great deal from their example today.

There was a needlework sampler made in 1814 by a young girl named Hannah Hannant. (Her surname has Anglo-Scandanavian origins). One line of moralising verse, stitched at the bottom, includes this stern counsel: ‘Scorn the deluding arts’. I wondered what ‘arts’ she had in mind. Likely of not, theatre and novels.

‘Ghost-man’: auto-dematerialisation:

11.30 am: A walk by the riverside before lunch.

1.30 am: I took a tour of Norwich’s hidden streets. It was organised by a local company. Our guide was an engaging and enthusiastic young women who was fully in control of her charge, articulate, funny, and knowledgeable. (She was Welsh too. Small world.) I was transfixed. The tour was tightly circumscribed; it took place within the confines of the company’s office (formerly occupied by Pond’s shoe shop, in the 1950s), at street level and down in its basement. The latter was the ground level of a much earlier and lower street. It still has 18th timbering, and the remains of a lodging house. Moving from upstairs to downstairs, and from one room to another, was like travelling through time in free fall. (Like the landscape of the fens and the burial mounds at Sutton Hoo, this was a history hidden beneath my feet.)

3.00 pm: Another tour, this time back at the Cathedral (looking very 17th-century Dutch landscape, in the manner of Pieter de Hooch).

The guide’s solid historical and religious sense opened ‘the eyes of our understanding’, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it.

5.30 pm: I attended a service of Choral Evensong. It was sung by a mixed children’s choir. I’ve never before experienced so much incense. It was like a gas attack. Following dinner at an Italian pizza cafe owned by a Milanese couple, I returned to my apartment and began packing in readiness for the third and final part of my adventure, tomorrow.