East Anglia is an area of rolling landscape and wide open scenery encompassing the Counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Cambridgeshire.  

Suffolk the easternmost county of England has an area of 1,466 square miles (3,797 sq km) a population of 630,000, and at its highest just 128 m (420 feet) above sea level. Originally covered in Oak forest until the 18th century, much of the forest was felled to enlarge the navy fleet to cope with the threat from Napolean. The land types of the country supported deciduous woodland that provided the basic building materials that give Suffolk’s ancient buildings their character. Flints mined from chalk were ‘knapped’ to produce dark-hued building-stone of uniform size. Flints are to be seen in the some of the finer churches in the country. Unworked flints picked from fields or beach were used in churches of lesser importance and rural buildings. Many fine homes have been build with bricks made from Suffolk clay, similar construction is also to be found  in churches as well as castles at Orford and Framlingham.

Oak timber has been used as a building material and is to be seen all over Suffolk. Some of the finer examples of hammerbeam roofs are to be found in Suffolk churches. The most notable being Mildenhall and Needham Market’.  Suffolk has 500 medieval churches, each distinctive in its own right.

Lavenham stands out as a village of fascinating Tudor style buildings. On first view the crooked nature of the architecture of some of the buildings in Lavenham (and elsewhere) suggests buildings that to New Zealanders appear to be in advanced stages of falling down. Nothing could be further from the truth, in fact many of these buildings were constructed to these shapes when they were built. During construction the builder would often shape the building to suit the timber available, in fact some buildings are known to contain main structural beams that once were sailing ships masts and may have travelled to far off places before retiring to their final resting place in the building.

The riverside and meadows of the Stour Valley where Constable painted remain as beautiful today as when he painted them two centuries ago.

Further to the East, Suffolk’s lonely expanses of estuarine marsh, a feature of the coast, have attracted  writers as well as artists. The sky in East Anglican scenery takes on a different dimension to other parts of England.

There are two masters who remain well known for their skills. John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough. John Constable was born in East Bergholt in 1776 and intended to be a portrait-painter. However he loved to paint landscapes and found inspiration for them in everyday scenes that he saw in the Stour valley. In those days the Stour River was a hive of activity and he has captured this in his work. He was thirty-five years old when his landscape of Dedham Vale made him known, and this was followed by further masterpieces such as Leaping Horse and The Hay Wain. Only 20 of his paintings were sold during his lifetime.

Thomas Gainsborough was born in 1727 in Sudbury and trained in London before returning to continue his work in Suffolk.

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