Our first family holiday after we had returned to the UK from our world travels which had taken us to Nigeria and Hong Kong was in Aldeburgh in April, 1959. We took a caravan (the park is still there today) and every morning I used to walk across the fields (now a desperately disappointing new-ish housing development) to a dairy to collect the milk in a jug (alas, that's gone).
We walked to Thorpeness and boated on the mere and laughed at the large converted water tower.
It could howl a gale or be windy-warm but I just loved the light and I fell in love with the place. Not much has changed. A Chinese takeaway - the locals fought against it as they knew they would - has opened and the likes of Jack Wills and a couple of very good delis have added to the High. The number of Art Galleries seems to fluctuate but Thompson's goes on forever. I've been a regular buyer there and at the amber shop (now down to one).
In 2003, after a year's work in trying to resolve how to create her Scallop and find the funding, Maggi Hambling (now a CBE) - thanks to the usual suspects (including Chris Smith at DCMS) and the brilliant work of Sam and Dennis Pegg who did the leg work, designing and building it in their local engineering company - it was put into place on the beach a little closer, rightly, to Aldeburgh than Thorpeness. Of course the locals rose up to have it put behind a toilet or removed all together but it had had proper planning permission and the usual oiks had approved it. Thankfully.
This was Maggi's appreciation of the work of Benjamin Britten (and indirectly Peter Pears). Absurdly, the same moaners and do-gooders of Aldeburgh have yet to put up their own monument to Britten and can even be ambivalent about the Aldeburgh Festival too. Maybe, it was his relationship with Peter Pears perhaps generations simply secretely abhorred it.
I've been back countless times to Aldeburgh since my first forage their fifty years ago and may yet take retirement there............Maggi's work is a joy and seven years on it has rightly become one of the great works that have started to re-appear at our sea-side resorts.
And why should I bring all this up just now? Why Maggi has brought out a wonderful notebook entitled
The Aldeburgh Scallop, origins, drawings, indignation and all. It's a beauty.
The Aldeburgh Scallop by Maggi Hambling; foreword by Stephen Fry
and published by Full Circle
www.fullcircle-editions.co.uk