Snape, Suffolk

 

Vernacular nostalgia

Sanding by the river at Snape Maltings and looking across at this house I was suddenly transported back decades to the time when, as a small boy, I began to realise that houses varied in their appearance according to whereabouts in England they were. It must have been on one of our family trips from Gloucestershire to visit my grandparents in rural Lincolnshire. It had been pointed out to me that many of the older houses in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds were built of local limestone; although we did not live in such a house, I soon got used to seeing them everywhere in the area around where we lived. In Lincolnshire, by contrast, my maternal grandparents lived in a tiny farm worker’s cottage built of brick with a clay-tiled roof. My cousin’s farmhouse was bigger but similar in materials and overall architectural style. In perceiving the differences between these kinds of vernacular architecture I was starting to develop a sense of place.

There are many similar houses to those Lincolnshire ones in East Anglia too. This one in Snape reminded me instantly of what I’d grown used to in Lincolnshire. Walls of brick laid in Flemish bond, curvy pantiles on the roof. Shallow brick arches over the windows and doorways. Such houses are testimony to the fact that in many areas hereabouts, the local building stone (flint or chalk) is not as well suited to construction as Cotswold limestone. Bricks began to be used in East Anglia earlier in the Middle Ages than in most parts of England – thanks largely to sea contact with the Low Countries, where bricks were common.

Hence these lovely houses, built in a material that people soon grew to like, adding aesthetic preference to practicality. There was a time, when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, when houses like this were regarded as old fashioned. They had low ceilings (look how close the windows are to the roof in this Suffolk example). They were ‘pokey’. Bigger windows made houses that were lighter. And so on. Thanks to depopulation following the mechanisation of agriculture, many were simply demolished, like my grandparents’ house in its field. Now they’re fashionable again, as more and more people appreciate traditional buildings and their practical advantages (small windows and rooms are easier to keep warm, for example). I think there are enough of them left so that they can still be part of that blend of the natural and the man-made that comes to together to create a sense of place.

Snape, Suffolk

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

Another memorable visit we made when in Aldeburgh for the poetry festival was to Snape Maltings, five miles up the road from Aldeburgh itself. We went to Snape not for the music for which it is now so famous but for the architecture, for a coffee, and for an exhibition which made a deep impression on us both. The architecture is on such a large scale that I managed to drive past the entrance, in anticipation of yet more wonders of brick, slate, and weatherboarding. But I soon managed to turn round, park, and take in this complex site – there are about seven acres of buildings, apparently.

The place owes its scale to Newson Garrett, son of the Garrett engineers of my previous post. Newson Garrett bought the site in part because of its position on the Alde estuary: there was a port of some significance in the Victorian period. By the early 1850s he was in the business of malting, and was shipping huge tonnages of malt to breweries around the country, especially to those in London. Garrett throve, and the business continued for just over 100 years, finally running out of steam in the 1960s. That left a large group of vacant buildings – maltings, storage buildings, offices, and so on – in the middle of what was a mainly agricultural area of Suffolk. A local farmer, George Gooderham, bought the site and began to find uses and users for the buildings, and then Benjamin Britten turned up.

Britten lived at Aldeburgh and had been running the Aldeburgh Festival since 1948. The festival’s concerts took place in local churches and halls, but such was the quality of the events – featuring a galaxy of Britten’s starry colleagues from all over the world, as well as premiers of many Britten pieces – that these venues were often far from ideal. Britten and his partner Peter Pears quickly saw the potential of the big malthouse at the heart of the site: it would make an ideal concert hall. The maltings was converted by Derek Sugden of Arup Associates, who kept as much of the building as he could and refrained from embellishing what was left. The structure is visible inside in the form of bare brick walls and the framework of the enormous roof. Outside it’s also all about the roof, which sweeps dramatically down almost to the ground in a manner that would take my breath away if it wasn’t so familiar from Britten record sleeves. As is well known, the triumph of the concert hall turned quickly to a disaster when the structure caught fire in 1969, but the work of restoration was redone and one of the most successful concert halls of its time has continued to flourish.

Also apparently flourishing are numerous shops, eateries, and art galleries dotted around the Maltings site. We visited quite a few of these, and what stuck in our mind was the exhibition War Requiem by Maggi Hambling, in the Dovecote Gallery. This compact installation, in a single room plus mezzanine, consists of a couple of dozen paintings by Hambling portraying human heads (the victims of war) and devastated landscapes, done in oils with Hambling's characteristic thick impasto. These are hung in the most spartan of settings – a windowless room with walls lined with plywood. The Lacrimosa movement of Britten’s War Requiem* plays through concealed loudspeakers. This is bleak stuff, which I’ll not attempt to describe further. I merely want to add that we found it utterly compelling. The exhibition has closed now, but has been shown before in other venues, and may reappear: if you have the chance to see it, here or elsewhere, go.†

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* Containing a setting of Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Futility’, from which my heading is a quotation.

† There’s more on the exhibition here.