Aldeburgh is a small town on the Suffolk coast, set behind a long shingle beach where fishing boats still sell the day's catch from huts above the tide line. It has the old-fashioned look of an English seaside town, but its identity is sharper than that: music, sea wind, good fish, and a constant awareness that the North Sea has taken bites out of the coast before.
Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears made Aldeburgh one of Britain's great music towns. Their home, The Red House, is now a museum and archive, while Maggi Hambling's Scallop sculpture on the beach has become the town's most argued-over landmark.
The older town is still there too. The Moot Hall is a rare Tudor timber-framed public building by the sea, and the Martello Tower at the southern end of town marks the old fear of Napoleon's invasion fleet.
Aldeburgh is easy to underrate if you only drive through for lunch. Stay on foot: walk the beach, buy smoked fish, look at the old streets behind the front, and let the place be spare and salty rather than pretty in the usual postcard way.