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GREAT YARMOUTH to ALDEBURGH to BLAXHALL - July 6, 2006

A theater in a church, and a good deal of history around Great Yarmouth, then a lovely beach town recommended by Susan, and finally a wrecked abbey…..

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Saw the road-sign indicating this village, and what reader of Harry Potter could resist?  Yes, it DOES say “Snape”.....although there is no serpent in their crest!

UPDATED with photos….

July 6, 2006

Got up lazily and cooked a big breakfast – poached eggs with toast, fruit salad with yogurt dressing (including the last of the fabulous strawberries we bought at a stand just outside the farm - reminded us of Silverado Trail) and toast with PB real English marmalade.  Packed up and left about 10:00 a.m., then drove around town trying to find the old and historic part of Great Yarmouth.  Almost impossible!  Badly signed, lots of one-way streets, others blocked off, and seemed like we drove around and around in circles.  Finally found a piece of the medieval city wall and the best-preserved of the defensive towers
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However, as we drove away from this spot, attempting to find the tourist information site, or the medieval merchant’s house, or anything else that was in our informational material, we ended up really frustrated - to the point of nearly leaving town.

To give it one last chance – we really did want to see the other places - we decided to park (NOT in a “pay and display” spot), get out and walk to a nearby church – it was Greek Orthodox and no way in, but from there we saw a nice-looking (old) building, and we walked down to it. 
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It was a theater, and knowing that Thor would never forgive us if we passed it by, we went in and asked if we could look around.  The guy who kind of runs the place took about 45 minutes to regale us with the history of the church, and of the theater, and all the troubles he has with the council, and how the waves of Portugese and Scots and Greeks have affected the town….it was great. 

The church was built about 200 years ago when Great Yarmouth had 8,000 people and a big fancy church holding about 1,000 people.  They were running three sessions each Sunday and still couldn’t get everyone taken care of, so the city council actually put a tax on coal and built THIS church…..because stone is difficult to come by in Norfolk, it was made all of timber and designed by local shipwrights.  The facing is a mixture of stone and brick and it has a tower which is now covered with scaffolding for repairs.  It was used up until fairly recently, but then sat empty for 10 years, during which time no one did any maintenance.  The ceiling fell in and smashed up many of the pews, and a local amateur theater company asked to use it as a venue – they promised to clean things up.  They used it for a couple of years (this was maybe 10 years ago) and then decided to demolish it to make a roundabout for traffic, and to expand the parking lot for a nearby hospital.  But, someone had gone to London and reported this nice historic building, and London had slapped a Class 1 historic classification on it!  Suddenly, there was money available, and the council couldn’t touch it…..heh.  The ceiling hasn’t been replaced, and probably will not be – the acoustics are too good as it is, and looking at the construction up there is fascinating, besides.  There is a balcony all around – not currently used – and the space underneath it has been walled off for other uses.  It’s a lovely venue, and we would like to have been in town when it was being used.

Anyhow, he told us how to get to the tourist information place, and they gave us a brochure detailing the locations of the places we wanted to see.  The first was a house from the 1400s, divided and re-divided over the years as it went from a prosperous merchant’s place to a slum.  Somehow, the wood paneling and lovely molded ceilings of this house were preserved – even through the bombing by German zeppelins (WWI) and then the Luftwaffe (WWII) that destroyed most of medieval Great Yarmouth.  We went through the old rooms, up and down the cramped staircases, and marveled at the relative comfort available to the moderately well-off, even 500 years ago.  Of course, we have no sense of what it means to live without artificial light, pure running water, and convenient sanitary systems…to say nothing of disease and infection control. 

Across the alley and in the next block was a different sort of house, but it also had a history of remodeling, division, etc.  Again, the different stages of the house’s life were well-presented, and English Heritage had displays of domestic life at different times, and also of a lot of architectural pieces like window-frames, doors, joinery, tiles, etc. that were salvaged by a single man in the years after WWII – he went around the old neighborhoods that had been bombed, and pulled interesting things out of the rubble, saving AND LABELING them with the addresses of the houses from which they came.  It was amazing.  Imagine the foresight of this man from very humble circumstances.  He salvaged stuff from as early as the 15th century!  I’m sure people thought he was nuts, but imagine what we would have lost without him.

Next we wandered down to the National Trust’s house near the City Hall – this guy was REALLY rich!  The Trust has only a fragment of the original house – someone in the 1700s divided it and the other part “got away”….by the time the Trust was offered the house a few years ago, it had been so badly used that they couldn’t do anything with it.  Fortunately, the piece that remains was well cared for, especially in the mid-1800s when one of the sons who inherited took an active interest in the history of the house, and actually re-installed the beautiful paneling of an upstairs room that his father had stripped!  Unusual for a National Trust property – at least in our experience – this one encouraged us to touch things, and even have clothes for kids to try on, and toys for them to play with!  It was a great place, and we enjoyed it a lot. 

So much that it was after three when we got away to head south.  We ate sandwiches, carrots and apples as we drove out to Aldeburgh, where Susan Beringer’s father and grandfather used to spend a lot of time sailing, and it’s just as nice as Susan told us. 
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The town is right on the beach, but the houses are mostly houses, not hotels or guest houses, and certainly not casinos, entertainment piers, etc.  It’s a genuinely lovely place.  Some historic stuff there, but people mainly come to sail, to play some golf, to lie on the (shingle [that means rounded stones from fingernail up to tennis ball size for you Yanks])  beach, to swim a bit, and to enjoy the sun.  Very nice. 

We left there and before going in to Blaxhall, we stopped by an old abbey ruin – once staffed by an order of ordained priests.
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Leiston Abbey was suppressed at the Dissolution, and the church and buildings became a quarry for local builders.  In Georgian times, a house was built, using a couple of the walls that remained, and that building was expanded to form a music school (boarding) for boys and girls.  English Heritage has some explanatory placards and it’s quite picturesque and interesting.  We found a spot where some of the kids come to smoke – no other reason for all those butts in one place!! 

Then we drove by a market to get some goods, and came to Blaxhall for supper and bed – we’re really out in the country here….but there’s a (recalcitrant) washing machine, so we’ll have a lot of clean clothes tomorrow.  Gail is arranging hostels for the next several nights – a bit of a bother when the ones you want don’t want YOU!  I think it’s going to work.  We’re set through Monday night, at least – even if not in exactly the order we had planned. Tomorrow we scour the area around us here, and then head south for Medway.

Somehow, I failed to take a photo of the Blaxhall hostel—a mid-20th century schoolhouse…not very prepossessing, which is probably why I missed it.  Ah well.

 

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Next entry: TOURING AROUND THE BLAXHALL AREA - July 7, 2006

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