Suffolk

by Laurence Mitchell

This new, expanded and thoroughly updated third edition of Suffolk (Slow Travel), part of Bradt's award-winning series of Slow travel guides to UK regions, remains the only full-blown standalone guide to this gentle but beguiling county within easy reach of London and Cambridge. Expert local author Laurence Mitchell helps visitors discover what makes Suffolk tick, combining personal insights, enjoyable anecdotes and up-to-date information on the best places to visit, stay and eat. Covering both popular sights and places beyond the usual tourist trail, he caters for walkers, cyclists, families, foodies, culture vultures and wildlife lovers alike. Suffolk is a popular holiday destination, with events such as the Latitude festival and the Aldeburgh Music Festival at Britten's Snape Maltings helping keep its profile buoyant. Despite being comparatively low-lying, Suffolk boasts varied landscapes, from undulating farmland and sandy heaths to extensive forests, important nature reserves and soft, dreamy coastal landscapes comprising river estuaries, remote marshes, reed-beds, shingle beaches (notably Shingle Street, with its myth of World War II invasions) and dunes. Suffolk's coastal towns and villages – Southwold with its old-fashioned pier and colourful beach huts, but also Aldeburgh, Orford, Walberswick and Dunwich – are steeped in art heritage, with links to artists including Maggi Hambling, John Piper, Philip Wilson Steer and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Venturing inland, you can make for ‘Constable Country' and the Stour valley, Bury St Edmunds, Framlingham, Bungay, Beccles or Halesworth. Alternatively, you can visit some of Suffolk's wealth of medieval churches, learn of Rendlesham's UFOs or revere Suffolk's Anglo-Saxon heritage, notably the medieval ceremonial burial site at Sutton Hoo (whose discovery is reimagined in the 2021 Netflix film The Dig) and the reconstructed Anglo-Saxon village at West Stow. This guide makes a virtue of being selective, pointing readers to the cream of the area. It is organised into locales to encourage ‘stay put' tourism and thorough exploration. It suggests options for car-free walking, cycling, river boats, buses and trains. Written in an entertaining yet authoritative style, Bradt's Suffolk (Slow Travel) is the ideal companion with which to discover this county.

256 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2023

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book. Looking for 'holiday homework' a recent edition of a Bradt Slow Travel guide for the area was compelling and I wasn't disappointed. With guide books only usage really tells but I do have a little familiarity to suggest this is good. I am not going to be there for long and have a couple of ideas of what I want to do, with the book being really helpful for ideas about what else might work around it, during the stay or going to or from.

I did feel a little irked by the number of mentions of the 'Slow' theme and suggestions that various things do or do not fit it, in a way which clashed with my own thoughts on what it means. As an example, I'd say that getting a view over Felixstowe container port is the kind of interesting 'getting to understand a place' thing that I want rather than to be grudgingly taken in or actively avoided. And I am still wondering whether stones described as coming from Northern Ireland's Devil's Causeway really did come from such a place or whether that was a mistake for Giant?