Secret Aldeburgh to Southwold

Now very much a delightful, fashionable coastal town set amidst Suffolk’s flat farming country, Aldeburgh was very different in the eighteenth century. The poet George Crabbe, a native and local clergyman, characterised the poverty wrought by its ruined agricultural economy in The Village . Today’s residents and visitors walk not only in the steps of Crabbe but also in those ranging from the American-born novelist Henry James to the Arabist C.M. Doughty. The town’s naval past may be well known - Francis Drake’s ‘Golden Hind’ was built here, as was a flagship of the Virginia Company, established to establish colonial settlements in North America - but Aldeburgh was also a place where women’s entry into medicine and female suffrage took significant steps, and all in the house of a man who was the first blind cabinet minister. Here is where flourished one of the most musically creative (but then publicly unacknowledged) gay relationships of the twentieth century, while the coast is caught by the Impressionist Philip Wilson Steer. At nearby Framlingham the tombs of the Howard family include that of an illegitimate child of Henry VIII. Victorian industrial invention and agricultural depression, Tudor royal family rivalry and a Saxon burial ship, murder and UFOs; Aldeburgh’s present picturesque prosperity hides a significant and volatile history that has ebbed and flowed like the sea that has shaped it.