OT Ipswich, pt 3
Rik Shepherd
We start Saturday by finding that the shower has a rather impressively high
pressure, and that I can have pancakes in maple syrup for breakfast.
Obtaining a not too detailed map from reception, we set out to walk to the
tourist information office, which is in an ex-church in the centre of town.
And it's a pleasant walk there.
Walk to TI
At the TI I ask about the Orwell River cruises we;ve been seeing adverts
for, but apparently they're just taking bookings for Easter. The very
friendly lady gives us a full set of instructions on where to visit today -
the ancient house, Christchurch Mansion, and the Ispwich museum, which was
basically what we'd planned anyway - a better map, several brouchures and a
full timetable of every bus and train serving the Ispwich area. This is
because we plan to visit either Woodbridge (for Sutton Hoo) or Felixstowe
(for the docks) on Sunday. Now, the TI lady can't find any mention of a
Sunday bus to Sutton Hoo, but suggests we nip into the bus station and ask
there.
So we do.
The bus station has a nice wrought iron sort of gate, in the shape of a
Vikingish boat. It's also got a portacabin with "Information" so we go in,
to ask for some information. When we ask about the possibility of a bus to
Sutton Hoo on Sunday, we are told, with a sigh, that they don't do buses to
Sutton Hoo and that we should go to the Tower Ramparts bus station and ask
them. We did have the definite impression that we were being extremely
unreasonable in asking for information. She gives us our second copy of the
bus and train timetable, and we scurry out.
We walk back past the TI, and go to look at the Ancient House. Apparently
bits of this are medieval, and most of it is Elizabethan (or, at least,
pre-Australian), so quite where they get the idea it's 'ancient' eludes me.
It's apparently a fine example of pargetting (or plastering, as it's known
everywhere else in the world), and has four bays, each with a symbolic
representation of a continent (four because Australasia didn't exist at the
time). Luckily, each bay is clearly labelled, which is good because you
would guess which was which by looking at the figures.
There's a short pause while we nip into the Edinburgh Woollen Mills shop to
buy me a sweater, to avoid freezing to death.
We continue to walk through town, in the general direction of Christchurch
Mansion.
Things we notice about Ipswich - it's full of churches; they've got no
decent stone in the region, so there's lots of brickwork, and there's lots
of plastering, and a lot of flint sort of stuck on the walls in a decorative
manner. And they're not afraid to paint the outside of a house pastel blue,
yellow or pink.
Arriving at a street called Tower Ramparts (which has no visible ramparts or
towers) we visit Ipswich's second bus station, and again enquire about
Sunday travel to Sutton Hoo. We mention we've been to the other bus
station, and get, with what's probably a wry smile, a "Bet you didn't get
much information from *her*", which we had to agree with. This guy does
admit his bus line could take us to Sutton Hoo, but not on Sundays. He
gives us more timetables.
Now burdened with three copies of the same bus timetable, we proceed to
Christchurch Mansion. This is at the bottom end of a massive park, most of
which we ignore because (a) it's cold out and (b) it's not until later we
realise how much we actually ignored.
The mansion is another building that's been remodelled extensively over the
years. At one point someone doubled the size of the house by building a new
great hall on the front, so that one wall of the hall used to be the front
wall of the whole house, and some Victorians decided that black and white
tiles would be a better floor surface. In 1924 or so the council tagged
another Tudor building someone had knocked down elsewhere on to the side of
the mansion, which seems a little odd. Anyway, the mansion has a tearoom,
so we warm up with a coffee, then investigate the mansion.
On the way to the artistic rooms, Carol notices a desk covered in tourist
leaflets, and quickly offloads our two surplus bus timetables. There's a
small collection of Constable landscapes, which, I'm afraid, do not impress
us, as he appears to have painted them in the dark. And the paintings are
rather badly hung, unless you actually like reflections of the light
fittings. Scampering upstairs, there's a bunch of Gainsborough portraits,
which are better than the Constables. Then there's a corridor of 17th
century portraits of 'the English school', which I prefer to both
Gainsborough and Constable. There's room of 20th Suffolk art, my favorite
being a picture of dunes and nuclear testing bunkers on Orford Ness. And
there's also a whole set of rooms decorated in various periods, some with a
rather disturbing headless mannequin modelling period clothes.
The best bit of all is a tiny little 10 foot square room called the 'Little
Closet'. This is lined with a series of extraordinary panels from Hawstead
Place (near Bury St Edmunds), which were either commissioned by, or painted
by, Lady Drury after her only daughter died in 1610. The Drury's also asked
John Donne to write an epitaph for their daughter; he wrote a full scale
elegy as well, which was apparently his first printed work. The panels are
all painted in a fairly simple style, using images based on books of symbols
which were apparently very popular with Puritans at the time, and are
adorned with suitably improving (and miserable) Latin tags. It seems that
Lady Drury, having acquired the closet spent most of the time her husband
was away (ie, most of the time) in the closet pondering on the general
badness of the world. Exactly what she got out of looking at a picture of a
giant eagle carrying off an elephant (or a normal eagle carrying off a tiny
elephant) with the caption "I have no time time for petty things", I'm not
sure. I'd have taken these home with me, if I could. Which I couldn't, of
course.
In the Tudor kitchen, I listen in to a mother and daughter looking at the
fake cooking -
"Look, it's a pig. Why's it on that pole ?"
"So can they turn it to roast it"
"Why are they roasting it ?"
"To eat it"
"That's horrid, eating pigs.... do I eat pigs ?"
"Well, you like bacon don't you ?"
"Bacon's not made from pigs ? Eeeew! I don't want to eat pig!"
We pass the desk of TI handouts and are pleased to note that someone has
taken one of the bus timetables...
We scamper across town to the Ipswich Museum, which is conveniently situated
on Museum Street. This is a neat little place, with a number of modern
galleries on the history of Ipswich, Anglo-Saxons and Romans in East Anglia,
and the Ancient Egyptians (not known for being in Ipswich, ever), around a
Victorian natural history stuffed animal collection.
After we're invited to leave the museum, we walk through the town, pausing
to look at a largish statue of Grandma and family from the Giles cartoons,
back to Neptune Quay and the hotel.
We've decided to eat in the hotel restaurant, so it's a bit annoying to find
that the gas has been cut off and there's no food. Or hot water. They
offer to book us in another restaurant, and, after a while, we're booked in
at The Galley.
After a nap, we scurry back into town, to the The Galley, which is a
pleasant looking building on St Nicholas Street. We have a slight suspicion
we shouldn't really be there - the table fits neatly into a gap in front of
a half door into the kitchen, and the specials board was leant against it
when we got there... also, all the staff seem to know we've come from the
Salthouse Harbour, and we're given a free glass of champagne each. Carol
starts with a very nice brown lentil soup, and I have homemade pasta with a
creamy smoked haddock sauce; for her main course, Carol has an Aberdeen
Angus fillet steak, while I have a large portion of feta in filo parcels.
This is all accompanied by a very nice white wine from Suffolk, and
completed with a creme brulee made with real vanilla beans. All this is
rather delicious - Carol says her steak is up there with the Ubiquitous Chip
in Glasgow - which is lucky as, by the time we've finished the chef has come
out front of house and is talking about food to all the customers. It turns
out that one of the reasons we've been so welcomed might be that we're the
first diners to be referred by the Salthouse.
And then we Walk back to hotel, where we find the heating is on again.