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A new exhibition at Gainsborough’s House gallery – The Masterpieces of Kenwood – is the latest of many good reasons to visit the pretty town of Sudbury in Suffolk
Few towns can boast a mummified cat and the decapitated head of an Archbishop among their tourist attractions.
Fewer still were home to one of Britain’s greatest painters, and are surrounded by ancient commonland where cows freely pasture.
Sudbury is a beautiful town with a rich industrial and cultural history, yet like many of the sweet settlements in East Anglia, it suffers from its location.
“We’re on the way to nowhere here. No one comes to Sudbury by accident,” a volunteer in Gainsborough’s House Museum tells me as we admire the gallery’s latest exhibition – a selection of 18th-century masterpieces borrowed from Kenwood House in Hampstead Heath.
Sudbury’s problem is that it’s very much at the end of the line. The Gainsborough Line to be specific. You’ll have to take the 50-minute train from London Liverpool Street to Marks Tey and change onto a three-carriage trundler, which emerges from leafy cuttings to ride high above the pastoral beauty of the Stour Valley on a 32-arch viaduct (the second largest brick-built structure in England) before terminating in Sudbury.
It also finds itself competing with its neighbours in the informal ‘great beauties of Suffolk’ rankings. Seven miles up the road is Lavenham, Britain’s best preserved medieval village where rickety houses dyed pink with pigs blood limewash line the streets. Over on the coast the pastel colours of Aldeburgh sit above a wide East Anglian pebble beach. The most direct competition comes 15 miles down the River Stour in Flatford, where John Constable painted The Hay Wain.
Today the white mill that inspired the painting remains as it did in the early 19th century, like much of Constable Country does as it merges into Gainsborough territory while you make your way back west along the Stour River to Sudbury.
Approached by foot, the town could exist at any point in the last thousand years, thanks to the meadow’s commonland status which have kept this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty a haven for moorhen, field mice, collared dove and, as my niece kept pointing out, “ducks!”
On a sunny day a table up on The Mill’s terrace is the best place to sit and watch the wildlife, the cattle roaming and the toddlers toddling by the water.
When the sun is shining is also the best time to visit Gainsborough’s House, due to the way the light bounces around its spacious galleries, filled, of course, with the artist’s work, but also modern pieces responding to Thomas by the likes of Royal Academician Katherine Jones. After looking around, you could do worse than a cup of tea beneath the branches in the museum’s garden.
Other places in the town to enjoy a bite include vegan joint Cradle, brunch specialists Painters at the Angel and, as everyone I met kept recommending, The Henny Swan. The 17th-century pub is an hour’s walk out of town along the Stour and rewards those who make the journey with a riverside garden and an esteemed Ploughman’s.
“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing–absolutely nothing–half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats,” Ratty once opined to Moley in A.A. Milne’s Wind in the Willows, and he is right.
Happily, to this end, both the Henny and the Sudbury Boat House are on hand with cheap rowing boats, paddle boards, and kayak options, which can be used to travel between Sudbury’s riverside pubs.
Once you’ve done messing about on boats it’ll be time to get down to the serious business of Sudbury’s second and third most popular tourist attractions – the mummified cat and the head.
The poor moggy is entombed in a glass cabinet at the Mill, where she was found during a conversion in 1971. It’s likely that the cabinet had been there for 300 years, in line with an old Suffolk tradition that saw live cats buried in the foundations of buildings to ward off witches, warlocks, and fires.
The head is arguably less sad but more appointment viewing.
Simon of Sudbury was another local lad done good, the wise young man working his way up from Rector of Wickhambrook to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the 14th century. Unfortunately, he took his seat and the role of Lord Chancellor just as the Government decided to pay off the King’s huge war debts with a poll tax. In came the revolting peasants from the Home Counties, and off came Simon’s head.
Before the spike he was impaled on was used to hold up the later defeated People’s Champion Wat Tyler, Simon’s head was spirited away back to his hometown and tucked away in St Gregory’s Church. Today, if you ask the caretaker nicely, they might get it out of storage and give you a look.