Live the dream at Snape Maltings

Fancy a duplex in the middle of beautiful countryside, yet across the road from one of the world's finest concert halls? Well fancy no more. You can live the dream at Snape Maltings.

I have already written about the inspirational new creative campus at Snape that builds on the artistic vision of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. As part of this redevelopment some of the redundant Maltings buildings are being converted into residential properties. In my header visual the concert hall is on the left, the new creative campus in the center, and the new properties are on the right. Below are two visualisations of the properties.


The first eighteen properties went on sale off plan late last year. As I write just three are still available. They are all two bedroom duplexes. The cheapest is £425,000 (US$875,000), the most expensive is £550,000 (US$1.13million). This is for a property with one parking space and a six mile drive to the nearest shops and railway station. Jet set conductors and other wealthy readers can find more details of the properties here.


Now playing - Benjamin Britten's The Building of the House op. 79 with Simon Rattle conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. The 1967 Aldeburgh Festival opened with a visit from Queen Elizabeth and a concert in the new Snape Maltings Concert Hall which included this overture, composed to celebrate the ‘building of the house’. The music is as lively as the wonderful acoustics in which it was first performed. The version performed in 1967 was for chorus and used an English text of Psalm 127 adapted by Imogen Holst, but there are alternative versions which omit the chorus.

Now read how about the rebuilding of the house.
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Britten's sea interludes via webcam

See the Suffolk seascape that inspired so much of Benjamin Britten's music in real time via the new Snape webcam, screen grab above. You will also see the weather that I'm experiencing!

Check out the multi-media clips while on the Aldeburgh Music website. And more images of Aldeburgh here.
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East Anglia faces stormy sea interlude

Thousands of people in East Anglia have been advised to evacuate their homes amid fears a storm surge from the North Sea will cause severe flooding. The Environment Agency has warned flood defences in Norfolk and Suffolk may not be able to cope. The storm surge is expected to peak there at 0700 GMT today. Norfolk Police are advising people in 7,500 Great Yarmouth homes to leave and hundreds of Suffolk homes are at risk - from BBC News.

For back story see East Anglia 1953 - New Orleans 2005, and for playlist see Britten and Stravinsky - After the Flood. Photo of north Norfolk coast by Pliable (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007.
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I am a camera - avian flu H5N1

The photographs here were all taken by me a few hours ago at the scene of the first ever outbreak in Britain of the potentialy deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu. The outbreak, which was announced yesterday, happened in East Anglia at the Bernard Matthews turkey farm at Holton, in Suffolk, The farm is shown in my photograph below. All 160,000 birds there are being slaughtered, and an exclusion zone of two miles has been set up around the farm.


Holton is a tiny picturesque village six miles inland from the fashionable seaside town of Southwold, and close to the Suffolk coast made famous by Benjamin Britten. The farm where the outbreak occured is on a plateau above the village, and is built on a disused World War 2 airfield. This airbase was the home of the 56th Fighter Group, or as they became known, "The Wolfpack", one of the most famous USAAF fighter units in World War 2.


The first UK outbreak of the potentially deadly bird flu virus is major news, and the world's media have descended en masse on this remote area of rural Suffolk, as my two photographs here show.


Poultry farming is a major industry in the region. In my photograph above the modern and enclosed rearing sheds on the Bernard Matthews site can be seen, in the background, behind the assembled world media who are broadcasting from the scene via satellite links. The media presence is huge because the H5N1 virus is reported to have jumped to humans in Vietnam and Thailand with fatal results. For the past two years Britain has been stockpiling the anti-viral drug Tamiflu. Bernard Matthews' sites have previously been the centre of protests about poultry farming on an industrial scale. There are 22 turkey sheds at Holton, and the photograph below shows protesters there today.


United Nations co-ordinator for bird flu David Nabarro has said the presence of the disease in the UK is inevitable as it is "going to be in bird populations for several years to come. The way in which we'll deal with it is by implementing the well-rehearsed plan, which is to stamp it out at source. We've got to learn to accept that, not see it as a serious problem and just get on with normal poultry-rearing and consumption." The virus has killed 164 people since 2003, mainly in South-East Asia. So far, all those who have been infected worldwide have come into close contact with infected birds.

The UN may not see the H5N1 "as a serious problem". But I suspect the residents and workers in the tiny village of Holton, which is shown in my final photograph below, will have a different view today.


All photographs (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007.

Now read how another viral pandemic decimated Europe and killed a great musician.
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East Anglia 1953 - New Orleans 2005

I know I am dying….Please bury me here, by the path to this chapel. Then, if travellers from my dear country pass this way, their shadows will fall on my grave, and plant a yew tree in memory of me.

The Ferryman recount’s the words of the dying boy abandoned by the river in Britten’s church parable Curlew River. The work was premiered in 1964 in Orford Church, Suffolk, on the East Anglian coast.

Eleven years earlier, on the night of 31st January 1953, Suffolk and the whole of East Anglia had suffered one of the worst floods in living memory, and one of the biggest environmental disasters ever to have occurred in the UK.

During the evening, freak winds and a rising tide pushed the sea to dangerous levels. Inadequate flood defences were breached by huge waves, and coastal towns along the English east coast from Lincolnshire, through Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex to Kent were devastated as sea water rushed into the streets. There were 1200 breaches of sea defences along 1000 miles of coastline. 24,000 homes were flooded, and 307 people were drowned. 160,000 acres of farmland were flooded, and 46,000 livestock were lost.

The inquiry after the disaster concluded that the floods in 1953 were caused by a 'storm surge.' This was a freak of nature, and statistically should only happen once every 250 years. A web site about the tragedy says the following: "Storm surges are a problem associated with hurricanes. Many people consider the strong winds to be the main feature of such a storm, but the associated rise in sea level and heavy rainfall are responsible for most of the deaths associated with hurricanes."

The findings of the analysis is available on the Environment Agency web site, where there is also information on managing flood risk. To avoid a repetition millions of pounds have since been spent on protective measures. Sea defences have been re-engineered to the extent that the sea would need to rise six feet above the 1953 levels to flood the same areas. Massive artificial reefs of imported stone have been built to diffuse the force of waves coming off the North Sea. (There is no natural rock in East Anglia, which is the reason why it is so low lying).

One of the main findings of the inquiry was that there was a lack of communication between the UK Meteorological Office and National River Authority, and this resulted in inadequate warnings. Gales were predicted, but the deepening of the low pressure and the severity of the strengthening winds was not forecast. Today all information on storms and floods is co-ordinated by a single body, the Meteorological Office. An advance warning system is in place to predict high tides on the East Coast. The Environment Agency provides three level of flood warnings – yellow when flooding is possible, amber when flooding is likely, and red means serious flooding probable. These flood warnings are updated on their web site every 15 minutes. I live in East Anglia, and this warning system is rigorously enforced, and has a high profile in the media.

But the fact remains that despite massive expenditure and Herculean efforts it is financially, and practically, impossible to protect every mile of the East Anglian coast adequately. Less serious breaches of the sea defences occurred in 1978, 1996, and 2000. Because of the rise in sea levels caused by global warming alternative strategies are now under debate. One of these is controlled retreat. This means allowing the sea to flood some low lying areas naturally, rather than trying to protect them artificially.

Our tenure on earth is finite. East Anglia 1953 and New Orleans 2005 remind us that the force of nature is infinite. At the end of Curlew River the cast join the boy’s mother praying at his graveside.

Go your way in peace, mother.
The dead shall rise again,
And in that blessed day,
We shall meet in heav’n

Now take an overgrown path to Easter in Aldeburgh
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk