Beautiful UK seaside town with charming high street named among the best
This breathtaking seaside town is a little escape from the hustle and bustle of the surrounding villages, providing an abundance of experiences and activities for visitors and residents alike.
Aldeburgh in Suffolk is right in the middle of the River Alde and a stunning stretch of coastline overlooking the North Sea. This alluring town offers a whimsical escape from neighbouring towns and has even been named the best seaside spot by The Times. The little pebbled beach features a stunning four-metre-high sculpture of a scallop, created by popular Suffolk-born artist Maggi Hambling entirely of steel by Aldeburgh craftsmen Sam and Dennis Pegg, providing picture opportunities like no other shoreline.
Steeped in charm and history, Aldeburgh is a town where every corner tells a story. Its colourful Georgian houses line the seafront, creating a picture-postcard setting that's every bit as charming as it is authentic. The town's heritage as a former Tudor port is still evident today, with historic buildings like Moot Hall, a 16th-century timber-framed town hall that now houses the Aldeburgh Museum.
While in town, boutiques filled with clothes, art, and antiques line the high street, alongside independent bookshops and a classic cinema. The high street is also home to culinary delights, from the renowned fish and chips to fine bistro dining, pizzas, and, of course, it's not a beach town without some ice cream!
When visiting the town, be sure to stop by O&C Butcher. This 130-year-old clothes store has everything you need and more to kit yourself out for a weekend on the coast, selling beloved UK brands like Gant and Barbour. You can even treat your little furry friend to a matching coat, too!
Aldeburgh is well known for its link to Benjamin Britten, the founder of the Aldeburgh Festival, which takes place annually in June. The Aldeburgh Festival has been a pilgrimage for lovers of classical music and culture since 1948.
The town is also praised for its outstanding fish and chips. The local fish and chip shop has been in operation since 1967 and has received an overwhelming number of positive reviews from national publications, ranking it as one of the best in all of Britain.
There's lots to see and do in Aldeburgh, the historic Quatrefoil Martello Tower is a great immersive experience for the whole family, a relic of coastal defence from the Napoleonic Wars.
Walkers have a wealth of enjoyable routes available in and around the town. Among these, the 9.7km Aldeburgh Circular Walk stands out as a popular choice, rated as moderate. This beautiful trail leads you along the striking Suffolk coastline and through the adjacent heath and meadow.
Whether you're leaving the city, enjoying the local attractions, or simply looking to try the local chippy, Aldeburgh is an ideal spot for a family staycation.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Hotel Oloffson is ruined – and so is Haiti
Earlier this month, in Haiti's tatterdemalion capital of Port-au-Prince, armed gangs burned down the Hotel Oloffson. As news of the attack spread, both Haitians and foreigners mourned the loss of one of the most beautiful gingerbread mansions in the Caribbean. Thinly disguised as the Hotel Trianon in Graham Greene's 1966 novel The Comedians, the Oloffson had served as a meeting place for writers, journalists, actors and artists of every stripe and nationality. Past guests include Nöel Coward, John Gielgud, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, Jacqueline Onassis and Mick Jagger (who wrote 'Emotional Rescue' there). Laughably, a room had been named after me as the author of a book on Haiti. The manager, Richard Auguste Morse, had been overseeing the hotel remotely from the United States since 2022 until it closed to guests two years later because of escalating gang violence. Rumours had long circulated that it was under threat of arson but news in Haiti is always haphazard: often there is only the teledyòl, Creole for 'grapevine'. So Richard didn't know what to believe when he heard the hotel had burned to the ground. 'I did what I usually do, which is call someone who has drones and have them go take a look,' he said. 'This time, when they called back, they said, 'Take a seat.' I knew then that this wasn't like the other times.' Two policemen were killed in crossfire while the fire raged. The hotel's destruction is emblematic of the destruction of Haiti's history and culture. Over the past two decades, the country has degenerated into a gangland tyranny where cocaine smuggled from Latin America has made the shanty-town drug kingpins ever more violent, unpredictable and powerful. The Oloffson was built in the late 1880s as a private residence for the Sam family who would supply two Haitian presidents over the next 30 years. It was a fairytale folly of spires and conical towers, with lacy white grille work on the eaves and balconies, and pomegranate and breadfruit motifs painted on the clapboard ceilings. The murder of President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam by an enraged mob in July 1915 provided the US government with an excuse to invade Haiti. Throughout the 19-year occupation that followed, the Sam mansion was a military hospital. After the Americans left, a Swedish sea captain called WernerGustav Oloffson converted it into a hotel. Hidden beneath a rug in the bridal suite was once a drain for sluicing the tiles; the suite had been an operating theatre. A succession of eccentric hoteliers followed, among them the American stockbroker Maurice De Young, who raised a species of cayman in the swimming pool and drank endless rum cocktails with Malcolm Lowry, the dipsomaniac author of Under the Volcano who was seen to walk fully clothed into the pool still holding his glass. Richard, a Princeton anthropology graduate, ran the Oloffson for almost 40 years. His mother was the glamorous Haitian danseuse and folklorist Emérante de Pradines. With his Haitian wife Lunise, he performed in a world-class Vodou rock band named RAM, after his initials. Tall and lanky, he seemed to regard the business of managing a hotel in beautiful, bedevilled Haiti as something of an amusement. Most nights he could be found reading a book by the light of a storm lantern in his cubbyhole of an office. 'There's another power cut as you've probably noticed,' he would say, 'and the telephone lines are down. It's the same old, same old.' Papa Dog, the hotel's resident mongrel, liked to flea his rump in the driveway while emaciated goats strayed in for morsels of food. Beyond the Oloffson the roads were clogged with buses known as tap-taps from the noise of their vintage engines. One day in the hotel I met the Haitian journalist Aubelin Jolicoeur, a cane-twirling Firbankian gadfly who appears as the gossip columnist Petit Pierre in The Comedians. Jolicoeur delighted in his fictional counterpart; on the author's death in 1991 wrote: 'I was grateful to [Graham] Greene to have enhanced my legend to such an extent that some fans kneel at my feet.' The hotel staff nicknamed Jolicoeur 'Jolifleur' – pretty flower (his full name actually translated as Littledawn Prettyheart). Dapper in a white linen suit and paisley ascot, Jolicoeur was inseparable from the hotel's history. In 1990 I proposed marriage in the Oloffson, going down on two knees to Laura after a burst of gunfire outside startled me. Thirty–five years on, we're still married. The Oloffson had survived military coups, dictatorships and earthquakes. Now it has gone, and Haiti is plainly ungovernable.
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Beguiling grot, TfL surrealism and Insta-art: contemporary art roundup
Last month, I got the train down to Margate to interview the Egyptian-Armenian artist Anna Boghiguian (b. 1946), whose exhibition The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories was about to open at the Turner Contemporary. Long story short, the conversation did not go well: Anna reacted to my questions with some irritation, swatting them away like low-flying bluebottles. I got flustered, she got bored, and eventually so did I. We wrapped things up around the 20-minute mark and I ran away to stare into the abyss. It was a shame, because the show was, for the most part, really good. A political scientist by training, Boghiguian makes installation art that examines how the complex historical, social and political forces that shaped the modern world came into being, often taking an unorthodox point of reference as a means to work her way into the twisty narratives she spins out across her gallery-filling set pieces. There are three such here, the best of which, 'The Salt Traders' (2015), is the first thing we see. For this, Boghiguian decided to look at the history of commerce and empire through the prism of salt, a commodity once so valuable that it gave us the word 'salary'. The aesthetic is resolutely DIY and grungy as hell. The floor is covered with bags' worth of sea salt, and a good third of the space filled with a wooden structure posing as a Roman shipwreck, its sail bearing the image of a map displaying historical trade routes. There are grease-stained swathes of fabric, grimy sheets of paper onto which Boghiguian has scrawled notes on medieval economics, colonialism and god knows what else; there are also 30 worn-out beehives. Everything looks as though it's spent a decade at the bottom of a used ashtray, and that grottiness works on a visceral level. I'm still a bit annoyed, but my verdict is thus: she's 79, and she can probably do what she wants. Back in London, I heard Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964) had an exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ in Soho. The Swiss-born artist is a blue-chip favourite and a prime peddler of photo-friendly spectacle. He works across a bewildering range of media, sometimes falling back on a handful of visual signatures – cutesy sculptures that look like the Easter Island heads as imagined by Pixar; monumental Day-Glo land art – sometimes not. The only thing that really unites his diverse body of work is a slightly winsome quality, and the fact that every time I see his art, I come away feeling that something's missing: call it substance, call it ballast – hell, call it 'soul' if you like; I don't detect it. This show is probably Rondinone's most Instagram-friendly yet: the entire gallery is decked out in violently bright rainbow colours from floor to ceiling, the space interspersed with life-sized polychrome sculptures of ballet dancers in repose or mid-move. It is, in the literal sense, spectacular: the assault on the eyes will leave them adjusting to the real world long, long after you've left, and when I visited, the place was full of tourists taking selfies from every conceivable angle. Still, it left me cold. If the aspiration here is to create a kind of visual poetry, the effect is rather like watching an artist perform an after-dinner magic trick to the thunderous applause of a chalet full of oligarchs. Or worse still: like 'accessible' art as imagined by some terrifying, AI-generated curator of the future. This got me down, but not half as much as what I had in store: a 25-hour visit to Paris in order to end my marriage. I had planned to get blind drunk afterwards but was instead directed to visit Mark Leckey's exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations. If you're not familiar: Leckey (b. 1964) is a ferociously intelligent autodidact who mines the margins of pop culture without slipping into Banksy-like inanity or pseudo-academic overthinking. Instead, his films and installations blend everything down into a murky purée of sound, vision and atmosphere. That last word is key here. For starters, the whole, massive space is lit like a motorway underpass at 3 a.m. on a December morning, as muffled rave basslines and booming, slowed-down voices seemingly emanate from the bowels of the building. For a moment it feels like the worst psychedelic drug experience in history, but your senses adjust and you're suddenly on a planet where Transport for London's ubiquitous road-safety posters carry strange symbolist poetry and slogans; where a map of the artist's local park comes labelled with visionary symbols; where, in one film, shiny pink CGI-generated toys invade a hallucinatory version of Margate. Leckey is an artist so English that it's a wonder the famously Anglo-averse Paris art world ever let him in. For my sake, thank god they did.
Time Out
6 hours ago
- Time Out
The Pope's former private chef has opened a restaurant in SoHo
Chef Salvo Lo Castro's resume is truly a journey. The Italian-born chef has cooked all up and down the peninsula, from firing the burners at the three Michelin-starred Enoteca Pinchiorri to manning the kitchen of the five-star hotel San Domenico Palace in Sicily's Taormina region. But perhaps the most stunning of them all in this CV flex: For over a decade, chef Castro spent his time as a private chef for the Vatican, preparing meals for both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. As of 2022, the chef moved stateside to introduce New Yorkers to the way that coffee should be consumed with the opening of CASASALVO. Made the Italian way, his four cafes sell espressos, Americanos and cappuccinos at the low price of $2.51. Continuing to cater and work as a private chef on the side, Castro decided it was time to break out on his own, opening his first NYC restaurant in SoHo. As of July 20, chef Castro's restaurant, also named CASASALVO, is now open on 195 Spring Street. The restaurant reads like an elevated neighborhood find with a dining room marked by crisp white tablecloths, Italian walnut paneling and lemon and olive trees that frame the whole thing. The illuminated onyx bar comes fully stocked with over 350 wines for the choosing, sourced from the reaches of Italy and France to New Zealand. But if you are more of a cocktail stan, you can take to the terrace facing Spring Street, as the streetside bar is dedicated to the one and only Aperol Spritz. The menu explores Castro's Italian and Mediterranean influences with starters that include truffle-topped beef carpaccio and deconstructed Mediterranean salad with blocks of feta. However, the meatballs may be his most personal, as the dish takes a page from his mother's kitchen. Pastas and risottos travel all around Italy: Think bowls of paccheri with guanciale and pistachios, and Carnaroli rice with parmigiano crema and summer truffle. From the sea, Dover sole is cooked in a tomato sauce and garnished with mint, while the whole branzino comes with a touch of flair, getting deboned tableside. All meats are cooked over charcoal, including the filet mignon, Colorado lamb chop and house ossobuco. And on the sweet's menu alongside seasonal fruits, eclairs and gelatos, one dessert clearly
