By Richard Walker
There are several definitions of what constitutes a landscape, depending on context. In common usage however, a landscape refers either to all the visible features of an area of land, often rural historically but increasingly urban. And considered in terms of its aesthetic appeal. It might be a pictorial – painting or photo – or a written description which represents the landscape. And often features not just naturally occurring elements but also humans and the structures or interventions they’ve made like farms, animals, crops, roads, bridges, villages, castles, harbours or mines.
I’ve just arrived on a glorious English midsummer, June afternoon, to spend a few days in a landscape which is effectively the second one I grew up with. It’s the flatlands of Suffolk in East Anglia. I’ve just had a cup of tea on the balcony of my friends’ house which fronts a pebbly beach dotted with fisherman’s huts and fishing boats. As I relax after a longish drive from Oxford I know that if I walked down the beach and into the North Sea and was strong enough to swim to the other side, I’d reach the Netherlands. Another territory dominated by the sea, dykes and marshlands. My friends will probably drag me and some of their neighbours into the water tomorrow morning before breakfast. They have and the bracing North Sea water has set me up for the day.
I reflect that no other person will have the same response to this landscape as I do. We bring our inner landscape with us and the natural one we observe often mirrors that back to us. I was at a boys boarding school in Suffolk from 1964-69. And each time I return to the area it conjures up scenes from that time in my life. Walking across muddy fields after rugby to get to the pub in time to have an illegal pint or two of beer at the Butt & Oyster pub in Pin Mill, a hamlet on the south bank of the River Orwell – from which the writer, Eric Blair, took his name to become George Orwell. I write about this in Act 2 of Highlife, ‘The Poor Man’s Eton & The Poet’.
Pin Mill was once a landing point for ship-borne cargo and goods from London, a centre for the repair of Thames barges and home to small industries such as sail making, a brickyard and a maltings where grain is converted into malt by soaking it in water. The malt is then used in brewing beer and whisky.
On my way here yesterday I stopped at Snape Maltings which was established by the composer Benjamin Britten who lived with the singer Peter Pears in the area. It was converted into a world class classical concert venue and opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1967. This evening instead of going to listen to a new opera, A Visit to Friends, based on the life of Chekhov, I’m going to the Pumphouse for some local musicians playing indie pop and folk music.
This is a former pumping station now converted into a performance space. Pumping stations were pioneered in the nineteenth century and became critical in water supply, the operation of canals and the drainage of low-lying land as well as the removal of sewage, all defeating the gravitational pull when water will run or seep to the lowest point in the landscape. In land drainage, stations pump water to prevent flooding in areas below sea level, particularly throughout the counties of Norfolk, Cambridge and Suffolk known as East Anglia. A landscape which merges with a waterscape brilliantly evoked in Graham Swift’s stunning novel Waterland (1989).
It’s often difficult if not impossible to talk or write about landscape in an England which is so densely populated without also referring to how human intervention – for good and bad – has altered the landscape whether through railways, housing estates, canals, factories, pylons, agribusiness and perhaps most controversially in this part of England, where a third nuclear power station Sizewell C is under construction. Sizewell B features in Act 5 of Highlife, Last Dance after Lauren’s diagnosis with terminal cancer; we go to Minsmere to try and hear the boom of the Great Bittern, a heron-like bird, which lives in the reed beds of this coast and is rarely seen.
So much of England’s industrial landscape has been re-purposed. The Pumphouse in Aldeburgh for a performance space; the Maltings in Snape as a classical concert venue are just two of thousands probably hundreds of thousands of examples. In the final Act of Highlife the penultimate scene features the Oval cricket ground where I take Lauren to see a Test match between England and Pakistan. Adjacent to the ground is the single remaining Gasholder, number one, which was constructed in 1845. Now approaching two centuries later it’s recently been converted into luxury apartments. I describe the scene as follows: “Residents will be encased by the wrought-iron frame of the Industrial Revolution; sitting on their balconies they’ll be gazing through the skeleton of the industrial past to the present and an unknown future.”
I don’t state it but, of course, the scene silently mirrors Lauren’s unknowable future.
This watery East Anglian landscape had an immense impact on my imagination between the ages of ten and fifteen. Part of that was the contrast with the West African coast in Ghana which I’d just left behind with my transfer from my Accra primary to secondary boarding school alongside the river Orwell running from the north sea up to Ipswich. Gone were the coconut palms, the long sandy beaches with Atlantic breakers crashing their surf and foam up to the waterline. The monsoon and tropical storms when my sister and I would run out of the house and dance in the rain because it was never cold. Quite unlike the biting Siberian wind blowing across the north sea and lacerating my knees, permanently in shorts for two years both on and off the rugby fields. It wasn’t until the third form we were allowed to wear long trousers. Mangoes and pineapples in our Burma camp garden. The only fresh fruit – apart from oranges at half-time if you played in the rugby team – which we ate regularly were Cox’s apples. I accepted the extremes of the different landscapes, climate and food and learned that each had its own rhythm, purpose and beauty. The aroma of a new cut outfield and a just mown cricket pitch can be as intense and cutting as the taste of papaya and lime juice. Both have their evocations in the memory if you’ve experienced either.
In Aldeburgh on the pebbly, shingly, sloping beach – it’s impossible to walk silently – is a huge sculpture of a scallop by Maggi Hambling who comes from the region. It’s her tribute to Benjamin Britten and, in particular, his opera Peter Grimes. ‘Scallop’, created in 2003, is composed of two halves of a broken shell. It was fabricated locally in steel. One half faces the sea to the east. The other half of the shell has the following lines from Peter Grimes cut into its upper edge:
“I hear those voices that will not be drowned.” Yesterday morning I walked along the beach at dawn, around 0500. As I approached the scallop and the sun rose those words glowed like a neon sign on fire with the fierce, pulsing light of the sun rising over the eastern horizon. Hambling presents ‘Scallop’ as: A Conversation with the Sea. For me it was a Conversation with the Sea, the Sky and the Sun. An epiphany of nature and art working together in harmony.
Richard Walker’s memoir, Highlife, & my other lives has been published by Amaurea Press. We will be publishing a new edition of his first novel, A Curious Child, in November 2025.
