Читать книгу Suffolk Coast and Heath Walks. 3 long-distance routes in the AONB: the Suffolk Coast Path, the Stour and Orwell Walk and the Sandlings Walk онлайн

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Culture and Heritage

The slow pace of life and clean air of the Suffolk coast has long attracted writers, artists and musicians. JM Barrie, author of Peter Pan (1904), was a regular visitor to Thorpeness, and its artificial boating lake, The Meare, has many landings named after places in the story. The small former fishing village of Walberswick became the adopted home of Philip Wilson Steer and a circle of English Impressionists in the 1890s, and the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh came to live and paint watercolours here in 1914. The writer George Orwell, of Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) fame, once lived and taught in nearby Southwold.

A little further south, Aldeburgh was famously the adopted home of composer Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears; the Aldeburgh Festival, instigated by Britten in 1948, remains an important event in the cultural calendar. The Suffolk coast informed much of Britten’s work – the opera Peter Grimes, with its libretto based upon the poems of the Aldeburgh poet George Crabbe, tells the tragic tale of a local fisherman. ‘The Scallop’, a large steel sculpture in the form of a shell by the Suffolk artist Maggi Hambling, stands on the beach at Aldeburgh and bears a quote from Peter Grimes – ‘I hear those voices that will not be drowned’ – as a tribute to the composer.