Suffolk's secret seaside beauty – in the shadow of a mega port

Telegraph

14-05-2025

A ride on the 9am number 75 bus from Ipswich to Felixstowe is a humdrum affair, through commuter traffic, suburbs, flat fields, housing and industrial estates. The slow service avoids the throbbing A14, but you keep catching glimpses of convoys of HGVs on their way to the UK's largest port.
The beach, then, comes as a wonderful surprise. I arrived on a clear, sunny day; the Channel was calm and blue. Felixstowe's long pier, opened in 1905, looks best from a distance; it's home to a traditional amusement arcade, but the half a mile or so of rotting timber is off limits. The Prom ambles between rows of pastel-painted beach huts with names such as Buoys and Gulls, and a sweeping beach of sand and shingle, steep and protected by groynes. A proper seaside walk needs space; here there are four miles to fill your lungs.
Turning round to face inland, things are equally lovely. Eight carefully tended gardens, inserted into the low coastal cliffs at the end of the Victorian era, sit between rows of low-slung houses and frilly porched guesthouses flanked by palm trees. Felixstowe is the only East Anglian seaside resort that faces south, and flowers and plants naturally love it.
Architecturally, the accent is on unassuming prettiness rather than grandeur, but one prominent building is the white-painted Italianate South Beach Mansion, where Empress Augusta Victoria of Germany, the wife of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and her family stayed during their summer holiday in 1891. Some credit her visit with making the resort fashionable, but she would never have gone in the first place if it hadn't already been so.
In an era when people take seaside holidays in the Persian Gulf, Maldives and Mexico, and faddish British resorts vie for attention in the media, it's perhaps hard to imagine Felixstowe as anything other than an also-ran or has-been. But the town has a rich heritage that adds depth to the surface appeal. In 1338, Edward III used Felixstowe as his base before sailing to fight the French.
The grandson of Charles II and his mistress Nell Gwynne, Lord George Beauclerk, was governor of Landguard Fort – the extraordinary bulwark at the southern end of Felixstowe beach, built and rebuilt over several centuries to protect Harwich harbour. George V was a regular visitor. During the First World War, the late Queen Mother worked as a nurse in Felixstowe and allegedly turned 'spycatcher', alerting the authorities to suspicious-looking characters.
In the 1930s, it was home to Wallis Simpson during the abdication crisis, and in the 1970s and 1980s the Princess Royal visited Felixstowe College (a part of which, called Tamarisk House, was once owned by Queen Camilla's great-great-great-great-great-grandfather). The excellent museum at Landguard Ford reminds visitors that Felixstowe has a storied naval and military history, from submarine mining to seaplanes. Perhaps it's time for the town to be rechristened Felixstowe Regis.
Long established as a des res town for retirees – as I passed an open door at the leisure centre on the front, a group of silver-haired gymnasts could be seen cutting shapes to music – it also attracts lots of senior seaside tourists. Beside one of the town's three surviving Martello Towers, the Sea You café (naff names seem to be a thing) is a popular meeting place for locals as well as visiting coach parties.
Arnold, 71, from Chelmsford, who had come up for the week with his wife, Sandra, said: 'Why would we travel the length of the country when we have this up the road? Felixstowe is safe, peaceful and beautiful on a day like today.' In another seafront café, the Alex, Mike, 66, said he was walking the coast path. 'There's a lot of birdlife on the riverside, just behind the port,' he explained.
Sarah, 55, a local resident, was walking her dog. She said: 'We don't have a trendy gallery or anything like that, like Margate or Brighton, but we don't really want one. Felixstowe is happy being a bit of a secret.'
If it's sedate, it's not sleepy. Beach Street is an open-air space for food vendors in repurposed shipping containers. Bao buns, waffles, stacked burgers, pizza, vegan food, craft ales, tapas, and 'wok wraps' are all on sale, as well as pie and mash and jellied eels for those who want to imagine it's 1950 while humming Cockney classics. To be fair, locals lamented the passing of a traditional pie and mash shop, Sally Jane's, in 2022, and this new venture has gone down very well. The Felixstowe Food Festival will be hosted at Beach Street on Friday June 6 and Saturday June 7.
Before it boomed as a resort, Felixstowe was visited principally as a health-giving town. Bracing sea air was seen as curative; sea-bathing as a treatment for all manner of ailments. The town also boasted spa waters. Early on, a humble shed was built at the foot of the cliffs to provide private access to water sourced from a spring. An old advert declared it 'a capital medicine for those suffering from nervous deposition, depression and overwork'. The Spa Pavilion, originally opened in 1909 as the New Floral Hall and now a theatre and sea-view restaurant, pays homage to this history, as does the name of Convalescent Hill.
After an excellent plate of haddock and chips at Fish Dish, near the front, I decided to weave together the health-giving theme with Mike's comments on the birdlife, as well as my need to get back to Ipswich.
The Stour and Orwell Walk is now a section of the King Charles III England Coastal Path – just in case this corner of Suffolk needed a further regal connection. Forty miles long, it runs from Felixstowe to Cattawade. The leg to Ipswich follows the course of the Orwell and begins with a slightly surreal crossing of the railway tracks that bring freight trains into the port, but soon plunging you into woodland. Gantry cranes loom over the treetops and, to be honest, you can see them almost all the way to Ipswich. But my gaze soon switched away from the river and sea to the wonders inland.
First came the glory of Trimley Marshes, an RSPB reserve that provides a habitat for avocet, marsh harrier, curlew, greylag and Canada goose, little egret and, the board on a hide claimed, nightingale. I could hear geese and ducks gossiping on one side, warning sirens from the port on the other. Approaching the last gantry, a small bulk tanker passed at the end of the footpath track. The much larger MSC Katie was being loaded with containers. It had come from Colombo, Sri Lanka, a shipping radar site informed me.
The saltmarsh and mudflats, a 'managed realignment', are part of the Suffolk and Essex Coast and Heaths National Landscape. Lapwing and redshank populate the scrapes. Bitterns overwinter in the shelter of the reedbeds. At Levington Creek, a brackish lagoon, formed following the 1953 floods, was now a haven for estuarine birds. Approaching Nacton, I came upon a cool but sun-blessed, Caribbean-looking beach. I totted up my bird spots so far: two kestrels, a shag, lots of waders and seabirds, sandpipers, an egret, passerines galore.
Ipswich announced itself with a big bridge, but it too turned out to be a surprisingly lovely and overlooked town – though that's another story. As for Felixstowe, it has to be one of the UK's most distinctive seaside towns. Tranquil and expansive, elegant but not stuffy, it has as much history as some small cities and the presence of the country's largest port is both an oddity and an irrelevance. The proximity of precious wetlands and wading birds adds a dimension not readily available in other resorts, and somehow links back to the original reason we travelled to the coast – to connect with nature and restore physical and mental health.