Harwich is a useful base for the southern Suffolk and Essex coast. The Harwich Harbour ferry runs across the estuary in summer to Felixstowe and Shotley, on the Suffolk side — a small adventure in itself. Felixstowe offers a long Victorian seafront and the country's biggest container port, which is a strangely compelling sight from the seafront pubs. The pretty Stour estuary villages on the Essex shore — Manningtree, Mistley — are a half-hour drive away.
For real ambition, Colchester, Britain's oldest recorded town with a Norman castle and Roman remains, is forty-five minutes inland. Constable Country — the watery flat landscape of the Stour valley that John Constable painted endlessly in the early nineteenth century — starts twenty minutes west of Harwich and rewards a slow day with a car.