If you enjoy this blog, you may well be interested in a Writing East Anglia workshop at Writers’ Centre Norwich, with Jeremy Page, an author steeped in the local landscape. He writes sad, soulful books about loss, which seems to be the only appropriate form for the hardness of the fens. But perhaps other, more [...]
Entries Tagged as 'suffolk'
Purple Podded Peas
December 12th, 2009 1 Comment
Celia Hart is a printmaker and illustrator born and bred in East Anglia. She translates the world around her into block prints in hazy colours reminiscent of old book illustrations, as well as blogging about cosy studio life and the rich harvest of her walled garden.
She edits out the sad things of life away [...]
Tags: block prints · celia hart · gardening · magic cochin · printmaking
What to do in East Anglia when it’s wet
August 7th, 2009 No Comments
Call me cynical and depressed about the weather, but I thought a round up of some good places to spend wet afternoons might be a timely and useful thing for a British August. I personally like knocking around big museums when the weather is bad. Coming across beautiful and interesting things is always an antidote [...]
Akenfield
July 9th, 2009 No Comments
It’s forty years away since the publication of Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, but it still has an unmistakeable air of truth about it. For the uninitiated, it is a documentary book by Ronald Blythe who describes it as “this statement about living in an East Anglian village at the beginning of the second [...]
Tags: akenfield · books about east anglia · documentary · east anglia · farming · history · oral history · suffolk · village life
Christchurch Mansion
June 24th, 2009 No Comments
The children of Ipswich are lucky indeed. Not only do they have an estimable town museum, they also have Christchurch Mansion, where they can go and develop their taste by looking at beautiful domestic objects from centuries past, in a beautiful old house surrounded by parkland for running around in afterwards.
The interiors are from every [...]
Tags: christchurch mansion · furniture · ipswich · museum
Ipswich Museum
June 8th, 2009 4 Comments
Inching into Ipswich through an endless traffic jam on a wet Wednesday, I never expected to fall in love with it. Too many ugly 1980s buildings, depressing 1970s bungalows and grey drizzle turning everything it touched sticky and sad.
And yet… that’s just the face it shows to casual visitors. As soon as I parked the [...]
Tags: animal bones · ethnography · fish skull · fossils · giant stuffed woolly mammoth · ipswich museum · stuffed animals · victorian curiosities
Denmark to Suffolk
June 4th, 2009 2 Comments
In the small Suffolk village of Fressingfield opposite the old flint parish church is an outpost of a purist Scandanavian aesthetic. A building that in the last century was the village post office is now the Pottery, workshop and showroom of Lars P. Soendergaard Gregersen, a Danish potter who makes domestic pieces in hand thrown [...]
Tags: china · craftsman · east anglia · fressingfield · hand thrown porcelain · pottery · soendergaard design · suffolk
Now with added map
June 2nd, 2009 2 Comments
I just wanted to draw your attention to the fact that from now on I’ll be plotting the geographic location of the things I write about on a google map, which can be found though the ‘navigate using map’ link on the right sidebar. It seems appropriate given the heavily localised nature of the blog, [...]
Tags: cartography · east anglia · google map
Walking in the footsteps of giants and legends
June 2nd, 2009 2 Comments
I just stumbled on a fascinating little site that simply pulls together all the myths and legends associated with specific places in Norfolk and Suffolk, whether it’s a secret tunnel or a giant’s grave they will be there. It’s a labour of love by a chap called Mike Burgess in Lowestoft, who keeps it updated [...]
Tags: fairies · folklore · giants · legend · myth · norfolk · secret tunnels · suffolk