Tickled Pink
They are shell and rose, geranium and raspberry – the signature hues of the county scene. Come walk with us and find out why Suffolk is suffused with pink houses.
CAVENDISH VILLAGE GREEN wouldn’t look out of place on an old-fashioned biscuit tin. You know the sort. The ones that originally had toffees in, which your grandmother had stashed at the back of her pantry. If anything it’s too perfect. It’s suspiciously picturesque.
At the edge of this immaculate baize trapezoid, bordered with plump trees, is an L-shaped row of cottages. They crouch in front of the parish church, leaving just the tower-with-turret peeping haughtily above the thatch and red-brick chimneys. But what’s most striking about them is their flamboyant shell-pink rendering. Anywhere else (excepting Tenby in Pembrokeshire, or Balamory of course) this flamingo facade would be conspicuous. But not here. This is Suffolk. And pink is everywhere.
Admittedly it’s not wall-to-wall pink in this neck of East Anglia. But in towns and villages from Halesworth to Hadleigh it’s a colour adorning a goodly number of old buildings, along with pale yellows and the occasional pastel blue. So prevalent are shades ranging from rose to raspberry, they’re collectively known as ‘Suffolk Pink’. Property owners can’t just slap on any old tin of magenta however. In conservation areas, the exterior wall colour of listed buildings is strictly policed by local authorities. There are even approved ‘heritage’ colourways issued for the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
Those who’ve fallen foul of council by-laws include celebrity chef Marco Pierre White, who made a blushing apology back in 2013 when the ‘blancmange’ paint applied to his 15th-century pub drew tuts of disapproval from Lavenham residents. It was swiftly substituted for a hue more in keeping with tradition. But where did this stringent fad for particular pinks all begin? For answers we can slip on our walking boots and look to the countryside.
If Lavenham sounds too much like a swanky honeypot for a post-walk tipple (albeit one beloved of filmmakers and hailed as the bestpreserved medieval town in England), scooch south until you come to the Upper Stour Valley. Upriver from Dedham Vale, it escapes heavy footfall, but the walking here is as good ▶
as any in the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty that straddles the border with Essex downstream. Its small towns and villages are also threaded by the Stour Valley Path – a 62-mile waymarked trail that shadows the river along Suffolk’s southern fringes, from headwaters near Haverhill down to its estuarine swansong below Flatford Mill. At a leisurely pace the whole route takes under a week to walk. But if you’ve only a day to spare, we can wholly recommend the 9½-mile portion between Long Melford and Clare for pinkness aplenty, with a short bus ride to whisk you back.
A number of cherry-washed properties line the broad main street of Long Melford. It will be familiar to anyone who remembers BBC One’s Lovejoy, which charted the antics of Ian McShane’s roguish antiques dealer. With a nose for a mystery, the eponymous protagonist was no stranger to fakes and forgeries. He’d be just the chap to interrogate the provenance of Suffolk Pink. But there’ll be time for that later. For now, let us saunter up Long Melford’s telescopic village green, past the thick, secluding walls of Melford Hall, to the equally monumental ‘wool church’ behind the palatial almshouses at the top.
Like the wonky timber-framed and colourwashed houses of Lavenham, and similarly opulent churches elsewhere in the county, it’s a legacy of East Anglia’s medieval boom years. Dedicated to the Holy Trinity, it’s Grade I listed and often cited among the cream of English churches. Its elaborate flushwork (the flint inlaid walls) and stained glass windows were endowed by Melford’s wealthy farmers and cloth merchants, at a time when prized textiles from Suffolk were exported as far away as Russia. At its peak in the 15th century, the wool trade here raked in huge profits for the industry’s kingpins, not only enabling them to build lavish homes and guild halls, but to earn a place in God’s good books by sponsoring ecclesiastical works. Among the richest was John Clopton of nearby Kentwell Hall – the moated Tudor manor you’ll glimpse from the trail a mile up ahead.
The fortunes of wool towns like Long Melford, Lavenham and Clare relied on the talents of Flemish artisans. War in their native Flanders coupled with hefty export taxes on raw fleeces from England had brought them to East Anglia. And among the fullers, spinners and weavers arriving from the Low Countries, were cloth dyers skilled in the use of natural colourants.
As you set off across the fields in the direction of Glemsford, it can be tempting to think they had a hand in concocting Suffolk Pink. The ingredients for it still grow here in abundance; if you believe the popular origin story, that is. Tradition holds it was these medieval dyers who set the trend for rose abodes, blending elderberry and sloe juices (the latter foraged from the scrubby blackthorn tree) with the limewash finish used to weatherproof the wattle and daub walls of half-timbered buildings. It’s also claimed the blood of pigs and oxen was added to thicken the mixture and produce richer shades. But another school of thought pooh-poohs the tradition for pinkwashing altogether.
According to official literature approved by the Suffolk Preservation Society, the evidence for coloured walls before the 18th century is scant. Prior to that time, the local fashion seems to have been for natural plaster or whitewash. You need only hold up a magnifying glass to the landscapes of Suffolk-born painter John Constable to see that vivid pinks and pale yellows are notably absent from his Dedham Vale scenes. The same can be said of Thomas Gainsborough’s home turf sketches depicting Sudbury’s bucolic surrounds.
Far from being a medieval palette, it seems the Battenberg cake colours widely seen in Suffolk today were popularised by the Victorians at the turn of the 20th century. And while they might have dabbled with sloes and damson skins early on, it’s
thought they mostly used earth pigments to produce the uniform pink and cream tints. This fashion took root as the decades rolled on and by the seventies it was taken as gospel that colour-washing was a longestablished tradition. As for a dash of ox blood in Suffolk Pink’s story? It’s probably a load of old squit, as they say down this way.
Suffolk Pink might well be a phony tradition, but many of the characterful buildings it has jazzed up for the last hundred years are the real deal: superb examples of vernacular architecture, constructed using local methods and materials. Around the Stour Valley this meant oak timbers from trees felled close by to make the frames, often with jettied upper storeys projecting into the streets. Walls were originally made from wattle panels woven from locally-coppiced rods and infilled with daub – a mixture of dung, clay and straw. Roofs were likewise thatched using straw from the fields. As William Wordsworth wrote of the cottages in his native Cumberland, they ‘may rather be said to have grown than to have been erected’. They are buildings deeply rooted in their landscape.
It’s a landscape that unfurls in troughs and creases as you step out from Glemsford on the Stour Valley Path; an undulating patchwork of fields ▶
and paddocks, garlanded with hedgerows and studded with pockets of ancient woodland. But much like Suffolk Pink, it’s far from being a timeless look. The Stour Valley you see today appears very different to how it would have done in the late Middle Ages. Come midsummer, pounding the field paths that wiggle their way to Cavendish and on to Clare will see you wading through swaying acres of wheat and barley. Underfoot it’s baked and fissured ploughland nearly all the way. But back in the 15th century this was sheep farming country.
You’ll have met a sizeable flock keeping the grass in check as you passed through Kentwell Park. But it’s nothing compared to the sheer number of woolly creatures you’d have encountered had you been walking this way 500 years ago. ‘Half the wealth of England rides on the back of the sheep’, it was said. But the good times weren’t to last.
Bust followed boom as cheaper and lighter fabrics made by Dutch weavers flooded the market in the 16th century, with Henry VIII’s wars in Europe not helping matters. Though weaving and sheep farming continued in the Stour Valley, they would never again be so lucrative. The economy of rural Suffolk took centuries to recover, which is why so many medieval buildings survive, leaving us with time capsule towns like Lavenham and Clare. Most people simply couldn’t afford to rebuild their homes in new and fashionable styles. So instead they made do and mended. They tinkered and they titivated.
Away from the prosperous centres of Suffolk’s wool trade, the decline was felt in small villages like Cavendish too. It’s easy to find yourself waylaid here, perusing the delectable medley of colourful old buildings. Here too you can see the changing tastes in architecture as well-to-do householders installed sash windows and neoclassical doorcases, emulating the ‘polite’ styles of later eras – much like the trendy home improvements made to 1960s semis today.
Like the church cottages by the green, some halftimbered buildings were rendered in their entirety, covering up shabby wooden beams. Elsewhere in England, weatherboards and tiles were used for cladding. Another way to tart up wattle-and-daub walls was pargetting – the decorative plasterwork
which started appearing on East Anglian buildings in the 16th and 17th centuries, with herringbone and ropework patterns being favoured in Suffolk. Curiously, it was known as ‘pinking’ over the border in Norfolk. The craft was revived by the Victorians, who as we already know, loved a splash of rustic rose tinting.
The next three miles of the Stour Valley Path weave stealthily into Clare – a fitting place to end our Suffolk Pink saga. The county’s smallest town was an early centre of the wool trade and its spectrum of buildings tells the whole story, all of them shrunk to train set scale as you peer down from Clare’s Norman castle motte. The pastel colours may divide opinion, but it can’t be said they don’t enrich a walk here, infusing this slice of East Anglia with a potent sense of place.