Amanita muscaria toadstool in the woods at Walberswick
Is it wrong to think that one of the benefits of living in Essex is that you can easily escape to the next county (or two) up?
We went to Lowestoft to visit Rich’s mum, and spent much of Saturday in Norwich. I’ve always liked Norwich – particularly the market – but we don’t get to go often from Chelmsford. Perhaps that’s why it’s still special.
Anyhow, we did the usual – wandered around the shops, looked at the river, went to see Rich’s old college and watched the puppet man from a table outside Starbucks. It was quite nice to see him there as we both thought we’d seen something on the BBC about him retiring on the news a couple of years ago. Turns out we were right. I guess he had second thoughts.
Like that? Check out his YouTube channel.
Anyhow, that was Saturday. On Sunday, after a lazy morning of breakfast and cards, we headed out to Blythburgh, and a walk in the woods at Walberswick. They’ve just kidnapped a herd/flock/pod of 26 ponies from Dartmoor and released them in the woods, and over the course of two hours we spotted 17 of them. Not a bad rate considering the density of the trees when you get away from the paths.
They were so friendly they were happy to be tickled and stroked and have their picture taken at very close quarters.
Despite it being a pine forest, which keeps its greens throughout the year, the air felt distinctly autumnal. The sun went down quickly, the air cooled, and the damp, shady parts were home to a generous crop of brilliant red toadstools. The seasons are changing.
Dartmoor pony at Walberswick
The University of East Anglia’s Norwich campus is a home to a strange and varied mix of buildings. Much of it is brutalist in nature, with unforgiving concrete buildings forming an almost unbroken wall stretching from one end of the campus to the other.
It’s a strange place to spend a Saturday afternoon if you’re not a student, but we were in the city and wanted to check out the famed Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, the free gallery and museum set up by beneficiary Sir Robert Sainsbury, one time chairman of the supermarket that took his family name.
It’s worth a trip for the building alone. An early Foster creation, you can see its influence on later projects like Stansted and Chek Lap Kok airports, with a grand, gently-arched roof curving gracefully over a cavernous, yet still strangely intimate interior.
There are no visible supports to break up the gallery, yet somehow the grandeur of the place does nothing to belittle the exhibits within. You could rightly expect that 4000 year old masks, and tiny statuettes no larger than your thumbnail would be lost in such a building, but they’re not. That’s thanks, in part, to clever use of temporary dividers and display boards that break up the space into manageable parts.
Entry to the gallery, which brings the University a return of between £1m and £1.5m each year, is free, and the coffee shop – an essential part of any gallery visit – is both well stocked and surprisingly cheap.
The only disappointment was that the building itself, so impressive in person, is very difficult to photograph from the outside. The stark, unapologetic ends are perhaps the most interesting parts. Exposing the roof and wall supports, they make it look like the building is merely a chopped-out section of a larger whole.
Even that, though, doesn’t hint at how impressive a structure it is, how ahead of its time it must have been, how important it was as a harbinger of future British architecture, and how forward-thinking and brave Sir and Lady Sainsbury were to have commissioned such a radical design when they were already well into old age.
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museum, norfolk, norwich, gallery, sainsburys
