A convenient place of refuge
I was born in Lincolnshire, and therefore know what it’s like to walk along a beach in winter in a howling easterly wind, when you have mixed feelings if the top of your ice cream is blown away because the weather was really too cold for you to be grazing on such delights. A cup of good hot strong tea is more to the point. East-coast seasides need some shelters, so you can drink your tea or just get out of the wind, and they know this just as well at Aldeburgh, Suffolk as they do in Skegness, Lincs (famously ‘so bracing’) or anywhere else.
This shelter is not far from the Moot Hall in my previous post and that bit of patterned brick nogging, low down between the timber uprights, is a sort of homage to genuinely old buildings like the Moot Hall. I suppose this shelter is 20th-century – maybe it was built in the interwar period, although the nogging, with its pristine pointing, looks like a recent repair, and the whole thing could be post-war.* But its age doesn’t matter. It’s not unsightly, incorporates public lavatories, and provides a useful refuge. Good enough for me.
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* However, looking at old photographs, there doesn’t seem to be anything on the site of the shelter in 1910. Another image labelled ‘interwar’ includes it.
4 comments:
There's something reassuringly English about that lovely building. I really like the east coast of England. My grandson has just been accepted to do criminology at Lincoln so I foresee some more visits up that way perhaps with a stop off at Southwold and Aldeburgh!
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Yes, Bazza. I agree. Sounds as if you could have some enjoyable east coast journeys ahead when your grandson is installed at university. Southwold and Aldeburgh are of course marvellous. Lincoln is good too – terrific cathedral, loads of interesting incidental buildings around the city; it's a place that has kept a lot of its old fabric, but hasn't shunned the new either.
The Aldeburgh Cinema is also a half-timber building but probably interwar as well.
Peter Badger: Yes. I believe the cinema was first on that site in 1919, although the building has probably been modified quite a bit since then.
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