Southwold, Suffolk

Going Dutch

We didn’t get the chance to go inside Southwold Museum on our recent visit to the town. But I spent a few minutes to admire its modest but lovely exterior, which was built as a house in the late-17th or early-18th century, and was converted to a museum in the 1930s. I have a weakness for this kind of thing: small buildings on which a bit of extra effort has been expended; curvy ‘Dutch’ gables; the combination of brick and pantile; odd-shaped windows.

By 1933, when the building was left to the town on the condition that it was made into a museum, this small house was in a dilapidated state. According to the museum’s website, much of it had to be rebuilt, and the brickwork of the walls does seem to be of various dates. The restorers maintained the overall design of the street front, with windows of the same size, shape and position, although the side windows got longer to give the interior more natural light. Structural strengthening was needed too – the ends of tie rods can be clearly seen on the street front and the side wall.

Today, the building is full of charm. It doesn’t worry me that that Venetian window is oddly proportioned, or that it interrupts the horizontal band of bricks that marks the eaves level. I’m happy that the building is there, and represents a small example of that kind of brick building, Dutch-inspired and curvy-gabled, that can be seen on the east coast of England, notably (for me) in my native county of Lincolnshire. It’s a bit of local distinctiveness that seems entirely right for a local museum. I hope my next visit is not in the winter so that the museum is open and I can look inside.

Southwold, Suffolk

Summer days, 2

This bit of seaside domestic architecture made me pause, and took me back. It’s years since I saw the film Mary Poppins (in fact, I was a child when I saw it), but I seem to recall that near the beginning there’s an old telescope-wielding sea captain watching the clouds from a balcony high on the roof of his house. ‘The wind is changing,’ he says, and the wind soon brings to our eyes Mary Poppins herself, floating on her umbrella, to create enjoyable disruption to the ordered life of the Banks family. An old sea captain who liked watching the clouds of the ships could do a lot worse than a balcony like this.

It sits atop a house near the sea at Southwold, and would be ideal for such a character. I’ve no idea how it got there – whether it was a perch for a ship-owner or merchant of days gone by who needed to keep an eye on the traffic out at sea, or a watchman’s post, or simply a modern jeu d’esprit, a place to sit out or admire the view. However it got there, it’s a diverting bit of seaside architecture that sums up the way in which coastal houses often celebrate the meeting of indoors and outdoors. Balconies, verandas, terraces, look-out points, big windows or French windows from which you step straight out of your living room into the garden or even on to the sea front – all these things abound at the seaside. If spas like Cheltenham are the places for cast-iron balconies, seaside towns are the place for wooden railings, painted white or in pastel shades, whether simply designed like the ones here or with more complex timberwork.

There’s a sense, in making ornate railings or in having a balcony at all in a place where, as here, you need a special staircase to reach it, that builders and owners have made that extra effort to make the place really special. And that life is lived partly on show – we can see you up there, almost as clearly as you can see us – so the building at least is good to look at. Oh yes: people go to the seaside for the sun, the sea, the fresh fish, for sailing (even for crazy golf). But also for things like this.

Southwold, Suffolk

Corner shop

The Resident Wise Woman is a great one for coming home from the shops with bargains, and she is in the habit of including in her bargain baskets a few of what the supermarket is offering in the way of bottled beers. They’re an interesting lot, too, ranging from the products of microbreweries I’ve never heard of to beers from stalwarts such as Shepherd Neame, Martson’s, and Adnams.

When I see a bottle of Adnams I usually think two things – that this is going to be a good glass of beer and that it comes from Southwold, one of Suffolk’s most beautiful towns. And in Southwold is Adnams’ wonderful shop*, which has one of the best 19th-century shopfronts you could wish for. This is, they say, a building of the early-19th century (it originally housed a chemist’s) but the actual frontage, with this glorious semicircular, bay, is from about 1860.†

I am, as regular readers will know, a sucker for buildings that turn a corner memorably and there are few corner shops that do so as memorably as this one. It’s not just the curving window, nor the neat Doric pilasters that frame the doorway, nor even the way that the line of the pavement echoes the curve of the window. It’s also the lettering of the sign – gold, standing out against its red background, with pleasant proportions and pretty good spacing. I can even live with the fact that the comma in ‘Ltd.,’ is rather eccentrically lying on its side and that part of the leg of one of the Rs is broken. It’s all part of the character of this very characterful facade. Cheers!

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* It’s actually Adnams wine shop, and adjoins the Red Lion pub. Adnams also has a newer shop elsewhere in the town. There’s more on Adnams stores here.

† I was first alerted to this shop front by seeing a picture of it in one of the beautiful pocket books that Peter Ashley did for English Heritage some years ago. The book is Local Heroes: Pubs and Inns (2001).

Southwold, Suffolk

Unity in diversity

There’s a long tradition in the east of England of colour-washing houses in pastel shades. I admire this approach (and have noticed it before on a visit to Essex), finding in it a welcome contrast to the all-pervading bare stone found in my native Cotswolds, much as I like that too.* One thing that struck me in this street in Southwold is how this variety of pale colours has in fact given the row of houses visual unity. When you look at it, you don’t think ‘What a hotchpotch’ but ‘How good to see these creams, yellows, greens, and blues together, all looking of a piece’. The agreeable variations of building height, window size and chimney proportions, are all drawn together by this colour scheme. Other things unify the street, of course – the traditional pantiles on the roofs, the continuous black plinth, the almost universal sash windows. But the paint finishes on the walls do their bit too.

Another effect is that, on the green house, the colour bridges both some once-bare brick on the upper storey and a smoother plaster surface below. Not everyone likes painted brick (and some will lament that the pantiles are not accompanied by red brick walls), but not all bricks are beautiful rich reds, and the effect of the gentle ripple of the brick courses beneath a coat of pale blue or cream, as here, is rather beautiful too. Why should the beach huts of Southwold have all the colour?

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*Although I did joke in my Essex post that Cotswold walls can seem a bit beige...