When it comes to second homes for Londoners, largely for practical reasons, there’s a strong element of geography largely. Chelsea and Notting Hill habitues tend to go west to the Cotswolds and Dorset. East London loft-dwellers will opt for coastal towns in Kent such as Whitstable while Battersea and Clapham dwellers have an easier journey if they head to Sussex.
The intelligencia – with a natural home in North London’s Hampstead – have always had a tendency to home in on Suffolk. Early adopters included Sigmund Freud’s son Ernst who bought a home in the coastal village of Walberswick in the 1930s, his descendants still live in the village part time, including broadcaster Emma Freud and her partner Richard Curtis. It’s part of a string of villages and towns that include Aldeburgh, Orford and Dunwich, an otherworldly landscape of marshland and shingle beaches (with some sand) with the odd nuclear power station thrown in.
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Boats on the River Blyth at Southwold harbor and Walberswick, Suffolk, England. (Photo credit: Geography Photos/UIG via Getty Images)
In recent years, there’s been a genteel rivalry between Aldeburgh and Southwold, two classic Victorian resorts with bookshops, boutiques and coastal walks. These days you can add in smokeries and sourdough starters plus seriously good restaurants, including fish and chip shops, plus a roster of festivals, from the serious to the comedy and music-minded Latitude.
Southwold is probably my favourite, where 18th century fishing cottages blend in with Victorian mansions and a lighthouse dominates everything. Local boy George Orwell (he took his pen name from a nearby river) has been commemorated with a striking mural by the pier.
There are lines of beach huts that sell for very substantial prices given that they are something essentially ephemeral (small wooden sheds) and a working harbour. Houses on the seafront go for a minimum of £1 million and today your neighbours are likely to be bankers rather than academics.
Southwold is also the headquarters of Adnams, a much-loved local brewery that has, in recent years, diversified into a gin and vodka distillery and has reinvented several of the town’s pubs into sanctuaries for stressed-out Londoners. Chief among these is The Swan. Backing onto the brewery – you’ll detect a smell of malt in the air – there are now 36 bedrooms and it’s been given a thoroughly metropolitan makeover by Project Orange with emerald green sofas, copper lights and restaurants that apply just enough finesse to harbour-landed crabs and sea bass.
Meanwhile, composer Benjamin Britten is most closely associated with Aldeburgh, 16 miles down the coast. Britten was born in nearby (but rather less lovely) Lowestoft and moved to Suffolk at the end of the Second World War. In 1948, as a response to peacetime, he founded the Aldeburgh Festival which takes place each June.
Originally described ‘a modest festival with a few concerts given by friends’, it’s now one of the leading classical music festivals in the world; the most recent festival examined links between Britten and Leonard Bernstein and had performances from Cedric Tiberghien and Pavel Kolesnikov.
