England
Aldeburgh
Salt wind and Britten's music haunting a shingle beach where fishing boats still launch.
Shingle rasps underfoot for miles, wind-scoured and open, until you reach Maggi Hambling's Scallop sculpture catching the sunrise on the beach. Aldeburgh is a fishing town that became a music town — Benjamin Britten's legacy runs through it like the tide.
Britten composed Peter Grimes in 1945 — an opera about an Aldeburgh fisherman, its libretto drawn from Crabbe's poem The Borough, itself set in the town: literature and landscape feeding each other across two centuries. The festival Britten founded still fills the Snape Maltings concert hall each June with world-class performances. On the beach, fish shacks sell the morning catch straight off the boats — smoked sprats, fresh cod, whatever came in — and a Martello tower from the Napoleonic chain pins the southern end of the shingle. The beach runs north to Thorpeness and its eccentric House in the Clouds water tower, south to the bird reserve at North Warren, and the famous chip-shop queue stretches past the lifeboat station most lunchtimes, which the locals treat as a fixture of the landscape.
Solo
The beach runs unbroken in both directions, the high-street bookshops reward browsing, and the Scallop divides opinion in a way that makes its own internal conversation.
Couple
A concert at Snape, fish from the beach shack and a shingle walk at sunset — Aldeburgh layers culture over coast with an understatement that is specifically Suffolk.
- Hambling's steel Scallop stands on the shingle, catching sunrise and dividing opinion.
- Beach shacks sell Suffolk's freshest catch, smoked sprats to morning cod.
- Britten wrote Peter Grimes here, and his festival still fills the Maltings each June.
- The wind-scoured shingle runs for miles, punctuated only by huts and upturned boats.
A famous chip-shop supper, the queue trailing past the lifeboat station.
Fresh-smoked sprats from the smokehouse, eaten on a bench facing the sea.
Cunda Island
Turkey
A Greek island resettled by Cretan Turks, its cathedral now a museum, its chapel a library.
L'Anse aux Meadows
Canada
The Americas' only confirmed Norse settlement lies as low green earthworks on a windswept shore.
Tomonoura
Japan
A harbour so intact that Miyazaki lived here two months and drew Ponyo's world from it.
Battle Harbour
Canada
A restored salt-fish capital waits on a Labrador island, reached only by boat past drifting ice.
Ely
England
A lantern tower floating above the fens like a ship's mast on flat farmland.
Richmond
England
A Norman castle above a river gorge, with a Georgian theatre still staging plays.
Hay-on-Wye
Wales
Two dozen bookshops turn a Welsh border town into a literary treasure hunt.
Ludlow
England
A medieval fortress town where the butchers, bakers and market square set the pace.