SAILORS' READING ROOMS I Southwold, Suffolk, England

Channeling old sailor vibes in one of the UK’s most beautiful towns

Images and text by The Coracle

Two snooker balls clunk together, an old clock ticks away slowly and seagulls screech in the background. There’s even a reassuringly Suffolk accent in the member’s room, only visible through a porthole in a shiplap door. Inside, the sun creeps around the walls suitably slowly. Outside half-term day-trippers pause to take in the sea view. The Sailors Reading Room sits prominently above the sandy beach, all brown linoleum and densely hung pictures in oak frames. The images hint at many stories, now mostly forgotten. The building is overlooked by Southwold’s famous lighthouse which is 28 years younger and next to the wonderful Lord Nelson pub.

At the opening of the Sailor’s Reading Room in 1864, Reverend Imrie declared ‘..outside there is rock and storm, whirlpool and destruction; inside there is peace, quiet and safety. Let this be your public house.’ Constructed in nearby Victoria Street it was said to have opened with great ‘eclat’ which apparently means luminosity. Paid for by the widow of a Royal Navy captain and subsequently owned by a series of philanthropically minded souls, it was built as a refuge for sailors and mariners, to keep them out of the pub. Possibly we’d all turn to drink in the face of a dangerous life at sea. Its Christian origins lay in bible readings at a redundant lifeboat house on the beach, the gentry looking after the spiritual well-being of the hoi polloi. Aside from keeping an eye on the state of the sea, you could also play snooker, the current table has been in use for over a century. The reading material was always more about newspapers than books. Did it achieve its objective? Robert Jellicoe, one of the town’s historians, tells us: ‘while it was effective in some cases it didn’t stop them all’. All this is mildly ironic given that Southwold still reeks of the Adnams brewery, which owns much of the town.

Fishing News describes Southwold as ‘a town in the upper league of seaside gentility, with property prices to match’. Large fishing families used to be packed like sardines into two-up, two-downs but WW2 and a shift to industrial fishing, killed off the last of the fisherman still working from the beach below. What’s left of the town’s fishing industry is now a half mile away at the harbour but most people arrive in their Range Rover Vogue SE, not fishing boat. Southwold is one of the UK’s most beautiful towns and is otherwise known as Hampstead-on-Sea, so don’t expect many sailors of the kind that wear sou’westers. If there were still any beach fisherman, they probably couldn’t afford to live in town, could they even afford to drink in it at today’s prices?

There used to be 200 reading rooms in Suffolk alone. Down the road, Dunwich stills holds the bones of one, Barmouth in Wales has a similarly beautiful room to Southwold’s and St Ives greedily has three structures serving a similar purpose that nestle in prominent positions over the town’s beaches, albeit more functional looking from the outside. There are a dozen Fishermen’s Missions active in towns across Scotland; it’s thought provoking that they describe the life of deep sea fisherman as ‘the most dangerous peacetime occupation’.

Tom is one of the room’s five trustees, skippering it through the ages. He explains that what was once a place only for working people (he probably doesn’t mean lawyers and landowners) has changed over the last 20-30 years. The 350 strong membership is now a mix of locals and holiday makers in a town which has 801 residents in winter and 5000 in summer. There might be less sailing chat but snooker players and paper readers are still the main users. As Tom gently makes clear; ‘we aren’t preserving it in aspic but we aren’t leaping ahead to be modern either’. No one here seems to feel the need to dominate it. The building is Grade II listed, a registered charity/museum and despite getting no government grants, the new card machine has helped them break even with donations, one of the saving graces of COVID and the shift from a cash economy. Anyone can pop in, get respite from the weather and see what the headline is in the East Anglian Daily Times. You could also pop next door for a pint in the Nelson, if that isn’t too heretical.

In putting fish on our plates, an average of one fisherman is killed every six weeks. Text ‘FISH MISH 5’ to 70085 and £5 will be donated to the national mission to deep sea fishermen https://www.fishermensmission.org.uk

You can find out more and become a member here, at £15 per year it’s less than three pints of Adnams.

More info on the St Ives rooms in this great project by Barbara Santi

Barmouth vibes here

Read more about the beach fishermen of Southwold here