Unconnected communities

 

Shingle Street, a tiny hamlet in Suffolk, is the end of the road, the last few houses before a deserted beach.

What is the romance of a road that leads nowhere? Part of the pleasure is just to visit the last destination on the signpost.  

You have almost certainly never heard of Shingle Street: it is the end of the line, in deeply rural Suffolk. The nearest town or village of any size is is Woodbridge, 25 minutes by car away. Hence the magic: from a busy dual carriageway from Cambridge, into rural Suffolk, then to single-track roads, until the final destination. The contrast between busy and deserted. The lack of noise; there was nothing to hear, except for seagulls and oystercatchers. Then you notice the sound of agricultural machines (about which more later).

Shingle Street is simply one street – and it’s hardly much of a street. At one end, a row of coastguard cottages; at the other, a converted Martello Tower, looking as ugly and forbidding as it must have been when built. In between, a handful of individual houses, each of them a separate design, although design is hardly a way to describe a distinctly ramshackle collection. No shops, but certainly plenty of shingle: the beach, which extends for miles in either direction, is all pebbles, with fascinating plants, including verbascum and sea kale growing directly out of the shingle. There were stern warnings as you approached the beach not to disturb the plants (which, to be honest, didn’t look very disturbed), but to follow the designated paths to the waterline (there weren’t any paths). As for the plants, they clearly ignored that notice, and it was indeed as if they existed in a different universe to that of the standard beachgoer: they were getting on with their job, ignoring where visitors walked, and growing in a random fashion. As for visitors, just a handful: one or two people fishing, a couple with their dog, a group who had clearly come from some distance and even brought chairs to sit on the beach. Nobody swimming, as far as I could see: not that kind of day, not that kind of beach. Out at sea, vast container ships were visible on the horizon – waiting for high tide so they could berth at Felixstowe, a few miles further south. 

The “street” wasn’t really a street at all. There was a rough track for cars at the back of the houses, but at the front, the tiny gardens opened straight on to the beach. Two or three of the gardens had people sitting in the open, talking. There was, briefly, a moment of interaction as a woman and a child, with towels wrapped around them, ran from the sea back to a house, clearly ignoring the signpost stating not to disturb the plants. Then quiet again. There was a rusted winch for dragging a boat up the beach, but the current inhabitants of Shingle Street no longer had any relationship with the sea. 

We walked from Shingle Street to Alderton, the nearest village, a couple of miles away, across a very sandy landscape, with more Martello towers and World War II pillboxes, one of them with a tree growing out of the entrance. Although the soil looked very unsuitable for growing anything, the surprise on the walk was the intensiveness of the agriculture. Vast, oversized tractors and cropping machines were harvesting potatoes as we passed. The village of Alderton was almost shaken to its foundations by a convoy of agricultural vehicles thundering through. As they passed us, pinned to the hedge to avoid them, one of the drivers waved half-heartedly, as if our presence was incidental to the main business of harvesting those potatoes. There were a few hedgerows, some trees, some birds, but the overriding impression from the nature on the walk was that it barely survived the onslaught of modern agriculture: in the contest between nature and large-scale agriculture, nature was the loser. Any wild plants you saw were incidental survivors from what was really an industrial landscape: vast fields with hedges and borders removed, farmed by one or two machines. One field of sweetcorn had plants growing dramatically, already reading five or six feet, so clearly very healthy; but there was absolutely nothing growing beside them in the middle of the field. It was a pure monoculture, that could only exist by highly specific fertiliser and herbicide to encourage the sweetcorn, and at the same time obliterate everything else. 

Alderton itself was a small, unassuming village, with a rather sad local shop and a church with just a very plain hall nave, half rebuilt by the Victorians, a porch that was so decayed you could hardly make out what the carvings on it had been, and the church’s most distinctive feature, a tower that was half-collapsed. This was one of those unmemorable churches that you only remember for what is not there. The stump of the tower remained, but fenced-off, and trees had grown around it, so one end of the church had become a wild space, the opposite of the what the church authorities would have wanted: fenced off, with notices saying “the tower is dangerous: keep out”, as if the danger came from the wildness, not the loose stones. Inside the church, the wildness was emphasised by the way the tower entrance was cordoned off in a haphazard, unplanned way, with some railings, as if the tower collapse had been yesterday, and nobody had worked out how to deal with the door that now led to a heap of rubble. Despite all that, the impression was that the church had once been the centre of something, and that something no longer existed. 

As usual in English villages, there were a few new cul-de-sacs of recent housing development, with new houses in no particular style looking as though they could have been built anywhere. Who lives there? Do they use the shop? Do they have any organic links with the village of Alderton? They looked entirely oblivious of the old village, the handful of listed buildings, the church and the old rectory.  

At the end of the day we went into Woodbridge. Compared to Shingle Street, Woodbridge is a major town, but in reality, it still does not have the feel of being part of the modern world. It has a small quay, boats with people living on them, some individual (rather than chain) shops, and station on a line that goes from nowhere to nowhere. As we queued up for our fish and chips, we saw diners in the adjacent pizza restaurant looking monumentally bored. Couples in their sixties, each of them looking at their phone, not talking. The only thing to wait for seemed to be for the meal to arrive, after which there would be no need for further conversation. They didn’t seem to be engaged with anything much outside themselves. 

Of course we all dream about how things once were: the myth of a golden age, when the countryside was a small-scale working and farming community, that was never really like that. I was very moved by Eamonn Duffy’s The Voices of Morebath, that used parish records to suggest a community around a pre-reformation parish church, a community that changed forever with new religious practices, but I acknowledge that it is a romantic, one-sided presentation by an author with an agenda.

Nonetheless, here was a day with a powerful sense of fragmented communities. The residents of Shingle Street, sitting in their gardens looking at the sea; the farm workers; the inhabitants of the new developments at Alderton; the church, the sea kale and verbascum. Are all lives so fragmented?

The rise and fall of cities and their art

 

Rubens, Samson and Delilah, c1610, commissioned by Nicolas Rockox, mayor of Antwerp, for his own house

I am intrigued to learn more about cities. That very vague idea is not very helpful – a glance at bookshops for books with “city” in the title rapidly runs into hundreds. It needs to be a more precise interest. How about this? 

Some cities give the impression that they were always big: London and Paris are examples. Their history can be found, but isn’t very visible among the constant renewal and rebuilding of the centre. In contrast, former cities display much more of their history even to the casual observer. By “former”, I mean a specific group, which enables me to refine my interest in cities to something much more specific: cities that experience a dramatic change in fortune, whether growing or retracting, and ideally both. Think about it: cities that were once great, but no longer: Venice, Bruges, Dundee. In England, Norwich, Kings Lynn. Further down the scale, think of Boston, Lincolnshire, with its enormous spire as evidence of a time of wealth, and now looking down on some quite significant poverty.

So, a reading programme about why cities decline. It seems to me a good combination of reading with visiting, since the evidence on the ground will be very apparent – nobody had the money to demolish all the remains of former wealth. One problem, however, is that there always seem to be more books written about “golden ages” (which could include Amsterdam, Antwerp, Venice) but much less about the decline. I find the long slow cultural decline of Florence under the Medici a fascinating subject, even if it shows an inverse relationship between wealth and artistic quality. Or, more precisely, while the Medici remained rich, there was no longer a wide art-buying public.

Does Antwerp fit this scenario? After a couple of visits my superficial impression was the very significant presence of 17th-century buildings and culture. The Rubens House, and his vast output, is entirely 17th century. The Plantin printing and publishing operation had a monopoly of publishing liturgical texts for the Catholic Church. The Rubens House was begun 1610. The Snijders & Rockox House dates from 1603 onwards. Yet we are told the Fall of Antwerp in 1585 reduced the city to a shadow of its former self, losing 40% of its population.

Perhaps it is my contrary thinking, but it looked to me that Antwerp (and surrounds) did not appear to be suffering too much in comparison with its northern neighbour, The (northern) Netherlands. It’s not, in other words, a simple claim that Protestantism is linked with artistic quality. 

But artistic quality may have a link with economic success. At least, in the eyes of Maarten Prak, who writes (in Five Books on the Dutch Golden Age):

There is a big debate about the economic origins of the Dutch Golden Age. The debate is about whether it was the result of Antwerp merchants moving to Amsterdam, and taking Antwerp’s ‘golden age’ with them in their bags, or whether things had been happening already in the Dutch economy before 1600 that helped launch the Dutch Golden Age.

But what interests me is what of course should be obvious, that great art happens when there is economic success. Perhaps it’s just a matter of statistics: painters in the Italian Renaissance painted a lot of pictures because they were being paid well, and widely, to do so. Similarly, in the Dutch Golden Age, there was a vast market for domestic paintings (and paintings paid for by private clients for display in churches). Among those thousands of pictures, a handful will be exceptional. That happened in 15th-century Flanders, in 16th-century Antwerp, and in 17th-century Netherlands. Maarten Prak again:

A group of painters emerged, including van der Weyden and van Eyck, the best of whom were producing for courtier audiences, but still operated in urban environments, and also had an urban clientele … You see that happening in Ghent and Bruges in the 15th century, in Antwerp in the 16th century, and then in Amsterdam, and other towns in Holland, in the 17th century.

But you also see it in 17th-century Antwerp, with Rubens, Jordaens, and others. Why should this be?