The Selling of Southwold

Southwold and Aldeburgh are considered unrivalled queens of the ‘heritage’ East Suffolk coast. Both were old fishing villages turned genteel resorts that appeared timeless and untouchable, protected from development and mercantile encroachments by residents who understood the vulnerability of their old-world character. Picturesquely sited by the gull-scudded North Sea monotonously turning its beer-brown wave over the shale, Southwold seems eternally snug – and just a little smug, fussily concerned with itself and preserving its special attraction to a paying public, a necessary lifeblood. Today Southwold is seen as a select refuge from the busy urban world and is constantly promoted in culture supplements for its preserved remnants of traditional Englishness, an England of the partially real and partially imagined past.

As a child George Orwell felt the Southwold atmosphere as cloying, but he did claim to have seen a ghost in the churchyard of Walberswick, Southwold’s terminally gentrified sidekick. Walberswick, with its romantic sprinkling of fishing huts, slick souvenir emporium, gourmet wannabe pubs and seemingly hoovered grass would be unrecognisable to Orwell and his ghost must have long since scarpered. Equally gentrified, Southwold at least appeared protected from the sterile replication that typifies the modern British high street. Until a decade ago, Southwold had a rich range of traditional shops; fishmonger, butcher, two greengrocers, several bakers, traditional teashops, bookshops, (both new and secondhand) independent shoe shops, camera shop, fishing shop, ironmongers and so on. In 2018 only the last plucky survivors cling on. The loss of the fishmonger was painfully symbolic. In the fabled Sailors’ Reading Room above the beach, celebrated by WG Sebald in The Rings of Saturn (1996), the walls are lined with sepia photographs of old fisherman whose salt-scarred, sun-tanned faces beneath caps or wide brimmed hats face us resolutely or resignedly, or appear in stark profile suffused with an air of tragic nobility like those of

doomed Native American chieftains. The reading room, with its cabinets of delicate model ships and maritime paraphernalia, its high-mounted gleaming figureheads, its ancient clocks ticking at different tempos and producing an unlikely sense of calm, provided shelter for sailors and local fishermen. Here they could relax in old armchairs by the fire, read, play board games, gossip and wait for the storm to pass. Thankfully little has changed. To sit awhile in one of the chairs by the old gas heater amidst that ticking of the clocks mixed with the soft clicking of snooker balls from the secretive games room and the song of the sea outside is what we might term an authentic experience, a unique sensory moment, pure atmosphere which remains unassailable if left undisturbed.

The Sailor’s Reading Room is protected, not so other important elements of Southwold’s character. The fishmonger a street away was forced to pull down his blinds in 2008, after 110 years of trading. People, it seemed, would rather fish caught in a different area of the UK were brought to their doors in the costly freezer of a Tesco or Waitrose delivery van. Of course the fishmonger’s premises quickly became a fashion boutique better suited to South Kensington or Crouch End. These high end clothes shops, in their turn attracted the likes of Fat Face, Joules and Sea Salt. Their avocado, dormouse and sage Farrow & Ball facades have proliferated, along with a glut of indistinguishable gift shops selling perfumed candles, mini wooden beach huts and the ubiquitous seagulls on spikes.

Naturally, city-based people seek a rural bolt-hole that is a contrast to their urban routine, but at the same time they recoil at losing any of the accustomed comforts. Sophistication is addictive and progressive. Thereby the destination they have chosen must accord to their design, be re-shaped, re-aligned. Yes, the countryside, but only a choreographed version of it, with winery, artisan bakery, delicatessens, gelato bars, coffee culture. Eventually this willed or blindly accepted transformation corrupts the secret ingredient which made the place unique. The original spirit is dislodged, exposed to forces it cannot withstand. Southwold thus risks becoming a tragic doppelgänger of its former self, a waxwork, whose architectural features appear trapped by their physical presence in a place where any

animating force has ebbed leaving only their outlines. The Southwold of today is turning into a scrupulously maintained stage set whose seaside location appears increasingly the opportunity for a captive sales area.

And what about Southwold’s once revered bookshops? Shockingly, in 2018 there are no independent bookshops left, either new or secondhand. Exorbitant rents and falling footfall guillotined them one by one. But wait, what about ‘The Southwold Bookshop’? This duck egg blue newcomer appears independent but is in fact cunningly a Waterstones in disguise. There is surely something depressingly symbolic in this, where the sole existing bookshop in Southwold is not what it seems. The recent rapacious colonising of the town by chains has forced vulnerable Southwold into a new role, as a conduit for consumption, with local brewery kingpins Adnams applying the coup de grace with their beer supermarket behemoth. How did this brutal transformation in Southwold happen so suddenly, so completely? One moment any materialist incursion was steadfastly repelled and the next Costa were through the door like a stabbed rat. Costa were the first plague spot to appear, a sinister sighting like the arrival of an enemy tank in a fallen city, or the first JCB swinging its demolition ball down a street of condemned houses.

In 1997, newly arrived on the Suffolk coast, I worked over the winter in the ‘The Drunken Boat Bookshop’, a second-hand trove tucked away on Pinkneys Lane, which specialised in European literature. It was all in the name, taken from a famous poem by the French poet Rimbaud. Customers were few at that time of year, entries in the ledger sparse. Like most shops in Southwold, it relied on the summer harvest to survive the lean months of winter. The bitter wind coming off the sea left me in danger of frostbite, but for the tiny electric heater I placed as near as I dared to my feet without toasting my toes. ‘The Drunken Boat’ slipped beneath the waves just after the millennium. Today, the building houses a smart estate agent specialising in second properties. Two bright pails holding box topiary stand like skinny sentinels either side of the door, guarding the vacuity within.

Recently I stopped off in Southwold after visiting nearby Lowestoft, a

decayed hub of the fishing industry, abandoned on the furthest eastern edge of England, and last in lights at the dawn of the new millennium. Poor Lowestoft gamely seeks a way out of its decline, like a patient slipping in and out of coma, whose prognosis is grim. Yet unlike at Southwold down the coast, here on the bleak esplanade of the high street, an expressway for the inexplicably high density of invalidity scooters, the corporates, led by McDonalds, fit in. They pose no threat because their immediate environment has no historical story. Whatever once held any aesthetic meaning or historic pertinence is long ripped out, cleared away, expunged, so what remains is a blank canvas, an anodyne backdrop purpose-built for the visibility of predictable brush strokes. Yet at least ugly Lowestoft is authentic.

In Southwold the delicate seismograph of the past still issues its readings in vain. On this visit I noted sadly that the spirited independent shoe shop ‘Daddy Longlegs’ had finally succumbed and its robotic replacement Mountain Warehouse stood brazenly in its place. Six months earlier I had chatted with the doomed staff at Daddy Longlegs as if with defendants about to go into the dock, already knowing the sentence, and I recall the touching way they had voiced their distress at the loss of Southwold’s long standing mosaic of family-run businesses. They however resolved to fight. Now they have lost.

Southwold has changed and will never be as before because the people who sell and the people who buy have also been irrevocably changed. A mist has descended but not this time from the sea, and it is harder to make out old landmarks. Though we may walk again from the pier to Gun Hill, past the colourful beach huts with their cheeky names, amidst the same gull cries, the same wave sound, we will not find it so easy to see our way back.