Tag: Suffolk

Flat: Port of Felixstowe – Port of Britain

Flat is a series of pieces on some trips I made into the heart of East Anglia with a little bit of music listening thrown in for good measure along the way. This is the second part of what will comprise seven posts and it covers the time I spent in Felixstowe where I ended up on a bookshop called Treasure Chest.

After my drive through South Suffolk, with Def Leppard’s highly dryly incredible High ‘N’ Dry blasting through the sound system of my trusty old Prius, I rolled up on the seafront in Felixstowe at around 2 pm. This pretty much meant I had been 4 hours on the road, or not quite, because I had taken a stroll around Braintree Freeport which taken around 30 – 40 minutes and which of course had resulted in me bagging a load of clothes from a Next Outlet shop. Good thing about Felixstowe, great thing in fact, was that you could park up on the seafront and not have to pay a single dime which of course is very much not the way of things in 21st  century Britain. Just park up if you found a space, get out of your car and go for a walk by the sea; nuthin’ more, nuthin’ less, how fab is that?

The entrance to Felixstowe I came in on was one which made the driving easy. Turning off the A14 it was half a mile before going over a set of lights just past the rail tracks, then straight down the road and onto the seafront. Something cool about it, as if the council had just decided to let things roll, cut people a little slack, keep things simple and in the process open things up. In some ways there was an American feel to the place, with its big wide streets, all so easy to negotiate and relatively empty as well. It was cooler once I got out of the Prius, cooler on the coast than in Braintree Freeport. With those North Sea breezes blowing in it was too cool for me to walk along in just a t-shirt, so I took my long sleeved top from out of my back pack. Might have been that all those things were necessary after all, despite my earlier vexation over the amount of stuff I had to bring along with me. As well as the cooler temperatures, Felixstowe had a completely different feel to it than all that pretty perfect Suffolk and Essex countryside I had been driving through prior to getting onto the A14 at Bury St Edmunds, rougher around the edges that was for sure, and all the better for it.

Felixstowe is the biggest container port in the country, trading under a banner which simply reads – Port of Felixstowe: Port of Britain – and it has miles and miles of container parks with stacked up lorries all over the place waiting to either load or unload. It is linked to one of the main arteries of the country – the A14 – a road which almost slips by unnoticed when compared to motorways such as the M1, M4, M25 and M6, but make no mistake, its importance simply cannot be overstated. Now I have to say that there always seemed to be more than one or two people who looked pretty wrecked in Felixstowe. There was just something about the place, like it was an end of the line town, out on its own facing the North Sea, which in years gone by would have had Vikings on the other side of it, Vikings who were no doubt making preparations to come on over. Wild West out on the east coast in miniature scale, or something like that, well not quite I guess, because nowadays what lay on the other side of those grey waters was just a ferry terminal at the Hook of Holland.

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Flat: High & Dry In South Suffolk

Flat is a series of pieces on some trips I made into the heart of East Anglia with a little bit of music listening thrown in for good measure along the way. This is the first part of what will comprise seven posts and it covers driving up from Woodford in Essex to Felixstowe on the east coast of England.

It was a trip I had been meaning to make for a while but just hadn’t the chance, in fact it had taken me years to do it, dunno why, a straight through the heart of Essex ride into South Suffolk and then all the way to Felixstowe on the east coast. I was out of the blocks by 10 in the morning, with How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful by Florence + The Machine burning onto the hard drive of my Toyota Prius. Yes, my faithful old Prius, a car I had bought brand new, the only time I had ever done so, and which had now done over 84,000 miles in what would soon be coming up to nine years of proud ownership.

Once out of Woodford I drove straight up the M11 to Stansted just past junction 8. A few years ago it seemed like I was going up to Stansted quite often, every other month in fact, but over the course of time all that had tailed off considerably, now it was probably over 10 years since I had last been there. How time flies, whilst I hadn’t, or at least not from Stansted. I had driven past it plenty of times in that period though, usually making my way up the M11 to either join the A14, A11, A1 or to just go to Cambridge, so it was familiar enough territory.

It was a fine Friday, not deep blue skies but light blue skies with high clouds warm and bright, the land looking dry, early June in what was possibly going to be a long, hot summer. The choice of Florence + The Machine for the car ride had been a direct consequence of buying their How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful album after seeing them support The Rolling Stones at the Olympic Stadium in London back in May. Bought it at the HMV Store in Stratford Westfield, yes, bought Florence on one of those HMV 2 CDs for 10 quid special offer bundles I was so fond of and which I have indulged in so many times over the rollin’ years. Now I was in the process of playing and burning it onto the Prius hard drive, on which could be transferred over 100 CDs of music, something that I always thought was pretty cool, although of course in terms of how music’s currently consumed, is now tremendously outdated.

In that regard I had brought along a couple of other CDs to burn for the trip, Vessel by Twenty One Pilots and Def Leppard’s classic 1981 album High n’ Dry, this one being freshly re-mastered and taken from out of their CD Collection Volume One box set which had been released at the beginning of June and which I had just recently purchased. Needless to say I had filled up all the space on the Prius hard drive many moons ago, but the great thing about it was that albums could be deleted once I got tired of them, thus freeing up space again to stick some new stuff on. All in all these three albums would be more than enough for me to be getting on with as far as the listening to music in the car was concerned whilst making my way up to Felixstowe and then back down again.

Made fast progress up the M11 with there being no major incidents to hold things up, within 25 minutes I had filtered onto the A120 and was soon flying past Stansted. It was not that busy on the dual carriageway stretch, all was clear and driving on it was like a dream. A bit of a surprise to be honest, and I realised it must have been around 20 years since I had last driven on that part of the A120. Back then it had not been a double lane affair and driving it had been a bitch, stop start all the way, with the pinch point place of Great Dunmow being particularly painful, all in the days when I had a lot less patience than what I have now, or at least what I hope I have now. This time it was a different story and in the best possible way. As I headed due east towards Braintree, with open skies above me and clouds beginning to break into the blue beyond, there was nothing to stop me from going as fast as I liked, well apart from the fact I was driving a Toyota Prius of course, and not an Audi. 

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