The crowds cheered and laughed as I struggled along the High Street, a sleeping 2-year-old fairy slumped over my shoulder. It was Carnival day. I’ve already stated how much of a fan of the Notting Hill one I am, but this annual event – held a week before – is special in a quite different way.
Aldeburgh is an ancient, rather lovely fishing town. Around 3 hours’ drive from London, it’s on the country’s easternmost reach of coastline.
Alongside some celebrated fish ‘n chips and the dramatic ever-shifting shingle beach, it also keeps a positively urbane cultural calendar. This is due in large part to the Festival, founded by composer Benjamin Britten and based since the 60s a few miles inland across the marshes in repurposed Victorian Maltings at Snape.
The concert hall, its quality performances and the marsh-front setting along the banks of the River Alde, are uniquely arresting. Music dominates the local agenda and ensures the town always feels decidedly highbrow. But it’s the simpler, if still quite refined, bucket and spade pleasures Aldeburgh offers that bring the families back through generations.
As this year’s summer season reached its apex, the quintessentially eccentric Carnival drew us to the town, as it has done forever. Family lore has it I was conceived in the top room of Orlando, an imposing holiday rental property on the sea front named after the Aldeburgh-based children’s books about a marmalade cat. Doing the gestational mathematics, it would have been the Carnival weekend of 1971.
In 2013, the event itself was celebrating its 71th year. And as ever, curious but keenly observed traditions persist. People race in the sea. The lifeboat launches. There is a prize for the best fancy-dressed house.
We paid a pre-lunch visit to the fairground that always pitches up next to the Grade I listed 16th Century Moot Hall. This beautiful building was once at the centre of the town, but the massive coastal erosion that has repeatedly changed the area’s fortunes now means it sits right beside the beach.
The rest of the year, this one-time village green is a world away from the Carnival’s over-excited candyfloss-fuelled mayhem. Wooden sailing boats gently compete on the small pool built for that purpose alone. Fresh fish are landed, then filleted and sold virtually still twitching, from a row of huts right on the shingle.
We took the minor stroll up the beach towards local sculptor Maggi Hambling’s controversial piece, ‘Scallop’. Opinion was hugely divided when it arrived a decade ago as a tribute to the music of Britten. The work was soon daubed with paint. Twice. Aldeburgh folk are famously always up in arms about something. Right now it’s the less glamorous yet potentially more serious battle with an edge-of-town Tesco.
Further north still from Maggi’s oversized shell, which sits lonely on the otherwise unbroken sweep of shingle (hence many of those objections), lies the strange holiday fantasy village of Thorpeness. Built in the 20s as a private retreat for a wealthy Scottish barrister and his friends, it features the famously odd ‘House In The Clouds’, a holiday home perched high on top of a water tower in an inventive if incongruous attempt to hide it.
The kids enjoyed its heavenly proximity, way above the treetops and the surrounding fields, before we turned on our heels for a wander back through the High Street.
The focus of the shops these days might best be described as ‘upscale seaside’. The yacht club crowd have an abundance of casualwear options. But it was the muted Suffolk linens and earthy homeware of boutiques like Runaway Coast that lured us in, like hapless cod on one of the beach angler’s lines.
Dining options run across the board, from higher end broadsheet darling The Lighthouse, through a range of similarly modern English focussed menus at OneFiveTwo and The Regatta to the ever-popular choice of thick cut chips and local fish, devoured perched upon sea wall (look out for predatory gulls).
Accommodation is predominantly taken care of via the many old cottages (mind your head on those low beams) dotted around the town and bigger apartments along the sea front. The Wentworth (doubles from £115 per person) offers a deliciously British hotel experience including traditional dining and rooms with excellent views.
Proving further still that Aldeburgh culture isn’t fixated on music alone, September 27th sees the start of the annual Food & Drink Festival, where organic producers will muscle the cellists aside at Snape as a fortnight of fringe events including all manner of talks, walks, activities and eating will tumble forth.
A taste of Carnival will return from 4th-6th October for the Flipside festival, a celebration of Brazilian literature, music and arts, with the likes of Will Self and Ian McEwan speaking with authors Bernardo Carvalho and Milton Hatoum, and local theatre company Wonderful Beast presenting legendary storyteller Tuup’s tales from the rainforest for all the family.
As posters for these forthcoming delights fluttered in the sea breeze alongside acres of bunting, I joined the carnival procession this week with my coy fairy charges in tow. The fancy dress theme was vaguely seaside based, but with stalwart drag and saucy buxom proponents, plus nuns on mobility scooters gyrating to the Suffolk school of samba band keeping the proceedings suitably quirky.
As the crowds laughed and the overtired daughter flaked out, memories of my own star turn in this very parade, aged three, flooded back. It was 1975, the year a streaker first made headlines at Lords. My parents came up with the topical ‘costume’ of me walking the route completely naked, modesty only preserved by a strategic if not entirely complimentary ‘Third Prize’ sign.
Later, as dusk fell, Chinese lanterns hung high on bamboo canes emerged from every doorway to fill the streets. They moved slowly, like hot lava, flowing around the Moot Hall towards the beach and a grand firework finale. Thousands of little candles on the shingle, the full moon turning the sea silver. Previously, beautiful if controversial sky lanterns would float up and out to sea, creating imaginary mountain ranges with their steady light, but a successful ban this year was strikingly well observed.
Despite my obvious deep associations with this town, stark naked or otherwise, and the relatively recent history of this annual ritual, it’s an equally magical moment for everyone else present too. The wide eyes of the children confirm its beguiling power. Happily there is much magic to tide the visitor through the rest of the year too. Our slumbering fairy has plenty to look forward to.
Words & Pics: Tom Kihl
Flipside Festival 4-6 Oct
Wonderful Beast theatre company
