Southwold has a lighthouse in the middle of it. Not on a headland or a breakwater but standing white among the houses, and the Sole Bay Inn sits in its shadow. The pub is the Adnams brewery tap, built around 1835 and named after a sea battle, which means it pours the full range of Adnams cask beers a few streets from where they are made. Adnams was founded here and still brews in the town, and once you know that you notice it everywhere — the Cellar & Kitchen store on Victoria Street, the beer trademark, which is a wooden man from the church.
He is called Southwold Jack, a 15th-century painted clock-jack under four and a half feet tall, dressed as a Wars of the Roses soldier with a sword and a battle-axe. He strikes a bell at the start of each service and to announce arriving brides. St Edmund's, where he lives, was built across sixty years from the 1430s and is Grade I listed; Pevsner rated it one of Suffolk's finest. The rood screen runs the full width of the church in three sections and is considered the best in the county.
The town is close to being an island — hemmed in by the sea, the River Blyth, the harbour, marshes and Buss Creek — which is why it never sprawled. Around 300 beach huts line the promenade from Gun Hill to the pier. They have sold for between £150,000 and £250,000, which is a lot for a shed you cannot sleep in.
Every pub in town is an Adnams pub. The Lord Nelson, up near the clifftop off East Street, is known to locals as "The Nelly," and drinkers spill onto the pavement to take in the sea. The Harbour Inn, a proper old fisherman's pub down on the Blyth, still carries high-water marks on the wall from historic floods and serves a daily menu of fresh local seafood. The Crown on the High Street changes its menu depending on what the chefs sourced fresh that morning.
For food to take away there is Two Magpies Bakery, which opened its first branch here in 2012 and now runs ten cafés across two counties; the Black Olive deli for pies and sausage rolls; and Mills & Sons & Daughters, the butcher, who do pigs in blankets at Christmas.
Walk out along the Ferry Path beside the marshes to the mouth of the river, past the huts selling the day's catch, and cross the Bailey footbridge to Walberswick — or take the rowing-boat ferry at weekends.
The great fire of 1659 destroyed much of the town, and the burnt ground was never rebuilt, which is where Southwold's open greens come from. George Orwell's parents brought him here in the 1920s; he wrote *Down and Out in Paris and London* at 3 Queen Street. Getting here still takes effort — the nearest station is nine miles off at Halesworth, and you reach the town by the A1095 off the A12, or the 99 bus from Lowestoft.
Out on the pier, Tim Hunkin's Under the Pier Show has twenty hand-built machines with names like "Whack-a-Banker" and "Pet or Meat." You put a coin in and a man who made the whole thing himself decides what happens next.