Dedham aims to be a cliché of the English rural picturesque. It made its money from the wool trade, to which the huge knapped flint church and large mediaeval merchants’ houses, now re-fronted with elegant Georgian facades, stand testament.
But it was John Constable who made the lowland pastures, rivers and mills of the Stour valley famous: the so-called ‘Dedham Vale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’ basically occupies an entire room of the National Gallery because of him.
Gainsborough, Munnings and Cedric Morris were also locals. Now hoards of tourists crawl from Flatford (The Haywain) amidst the cows and alder trees to the ice creams of Dedham. The slightly more adventurous demonstrate their suburban origins while ostentatiously failing to row kitsch clinker boats.
When I was little, Dedham was dominated by culture-elite types and World War Two generals (Do you know Venice? Well, I took it), but now post-big-bang bankers have brought their brand of tastelessness. The feuding network of old Dedham has now had to end its exclusivity and let former Fulhamites join in. But they continue to win the battle against streetlights and skate parks, although the antique shops and a stuffy clothes shop have slowly been replaced by delicatessens, a farmers’ market, a beauty parlour and a manicure parlour.
For big towns, there’s Colchester, a Ghurkha garrison town which reminds visitors that Dedham, despite its smarter Suffolk pretensions, is actually in Essex, and Ipswich, the ugly commercial county town of Suffolk, which is improving rapidly with a vast redevelopment of the docks, including a new University, the hyper-cool University Campus Suffolk. Both towns provide the usual array of high street stores and dismal clubs. These occasionally have pretended to the glamorous by hosting half-hearted shootings. But Colchester, despite the best efforts of sixties town planners, still wins due to its Norman castle and its maltreated Roman walls, all testament to the glory days when it was actually worth Boudica’s time to burn it down. It also boasts Rafael Viñoly’s unwanted art gallery, which has sat uncompleted for years.
But the glories of the Essex-Suffolk frontier are not urban: here we come to celebrate Cicero’s otium cum dignitate, not Catullus’ urbanitas. The best places are the small villages and the coastal waters, the country house parties and The Sun Inn, the hub of local relaxation. Also, of value is the Siberian Manningtree station, only 59 minutes from the centre of the City of London.
