The Easternmost House... an interview with Juliet Blaxland

As a companion piece to the third of our essays by Anna Iltnere about literary seaside houses – The Easternmost House – we present an interview with Juliet Blaxland...

Interview by Anna Iltnere:

Juliet Blaxland, writer, architect and illustrator, had lived in a coastal house by the North Sea with her family for more than a decade. The house doesn’t exist anymore but continues to live in a book she wrote about it. The Easternmost House: A Year of Life on the Edge of England was published last April, when the house was still standing on the edge of the cliff in Suffolk, England, overlooking the sea. The Easternmost House was demolished this February, so it wouldn’t fall into the sea. 

I contacted Juliet Blaxland to ask her about her relationship with the sea, her view on the seaside houses and what she misses the most from The Easternmost House.

The book is a love letter to a house that no longer exists. Was it easy or hard to write it?

I found it oddly easy to write The Easternmost House because by the time the idea of a book occurred to me we had lived there for ten years or so, and I grew up in the countryside nearby, so it was very much familiar territory. It seemed sad to me after so much had happened at the Easternmost House, and so many people had known and loved the house, its immediate surroundings of the beach and the farm over the centuries, that one day soon, there would be only empty sky where the house had been, and ‘the people on the beach below will not know’.

I don’t know why it bothered me that ‘the people [of the future] on the beach below’ would not know, but it did, and that became the incentive to write, so that they would know. And now, the people on the beach below, and the people of the future, will know. That is how the book ends, with that image of the empty sky over the beach, where the house and the cliff once was.

What is your understanding of ‘sense of place’? What creates place?

‘Genius Loci’, the Roman religious concept of ‘spirit of place’, is perhaps my starting point when thinking about sense of place. A sense of place can be found in all different environments: desert, farm, city, church, country house, town house, skyscraper, mountain, forest, and so on. What seems to define the ‘place’ to me is some sense of its essential character and ‘spirit’. There is a knack to finding the spirit of a place, but I believe that this can be found in any place, and I also believe that some people seem to be more attuned to feeling that 'spirit of place more instinctively, more easily, than other people. Some don't seem to feel a ‘sense of place’ at all, and nor do they seem to need it. I think most people do feel it and need it, even if they might not be able to pin down exactly what they mean or what they need. Most of us know the feeling of being in our own ‘right place’, literally or metaphorically, and it is a great gift if we can find that place of calm in our minds, as it goes with us wherever we are. 

I am an architect, so I have often thought about the idea of a ‘sense of place’, ‘genius loci’ or ‘spirit of place’, and its uncatchable but knowable feeling still intrigues me, as it has done since I was a student and unwittingly since I was a child. The old house and farmyard where I grew up had a 'sense of place' in spades, and my mother still lives there, so it is still an ongoing preoccupation to work out what it is. 

What do you miss most about the Easternmost House?

What I miss most is the visual emptiness of living right on the edge of the cliff, so that from our windows, from our bed, the view was of the sea, the horizon, and often some 'big' weather, far beyond what we normally experience in more sheltered places or inland.

We have been lucky in that we have moved only a mile or two up the coast, and can still walk to the Easternmost House site, and see it from afar, and we still live only about 500 metres from the sea and the cliff edge, but the sea is now a big field away not 10 metres!

Are seaside houses somehow different from other houses?

To me it is the isolation and the open view that is the difference, not necessarily the sea, although the sea certainly adds a vast and different dimension to everyday living. A ‘seaside house’ in a seaside town, perhaps a holiday place crowded in summer, would to me be less appealing than a isolated cottage on a farm or similar. I don’t mind the inconvenience of living in the countryside, as I grew up with it. The sea adds enormously to the different sounds you hear, and the very different birds and animals you see on the coast, seals, oystercatchers, bitterns etc.

Two of my favourite books are The Outermost House by Henry Beston and Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell, both of which describe an extraordinary life in an extraordinary house ‘on the edge’, of the land, on the edge of the norms of society and on the edge of the mass of humanity. Both of these houses were destroyed by natural forces, a storm and a fire, respectively. The Easternmost House having been destroyed by coastal erosion seems a natural companion to these two (the books and the houses themselves). 

We have visited the site where the Easternmost House used to be, and it is strange to see an empty space where so recently we lived. The trees and surrounding landscape is still there and completely recognisable. It is only us, and the house, that has gone. It some ways, it is probably a good thing, to leave a nice, clean, quiet cliff, so that the birds and other wild animals are no longer disturbed by our chatter, and our greyhound, and our just ‘being there’.

What the sea means for you?

I think we all have quite a complex and conflicted relationship with the sea. The sea is mesmerising to be near, or to swim in. It connects us to the rest of the world, and that is one of the things I like about being near the sea. I think islanders tend to be culturally less insular than land-locked peoples, as islanders are constantly look outwards not inwards, and have a history of accommodating those who have arrived or invaded by sea. I am fascinated by the sea and sea people in different parts of the world, different fishing methods and so on, and I love the more remote parts of Venice and the Venetian lagoon. On the other hand, I always feel the enormity and dangers of the sea, and at night when we listen to the BBC Shipping Forecast, your mind tends to wander, to think of ‘those in peril on the sea’ as that famous hymns puts it.

***

Read Anna’s essay on the Easternmost House here

Anna is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia and the author of our ‘Unreal estate’ series of essays on literary houses by the sea. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Unreal estate No.03: The Easternmost House

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

By Anna Iltnere:

In the third of a series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to The Easternmost House Juliet Blaxland’s book of the same name. Next week, we will also publish a companion interview to this essay with Juliet herself.

“On a stormy night, sleeping at the Easternmost House is like sleeping in a boat.” - Juliet Blaxland, The Easternmost House, 2019

Juliet Blaxland, writer, architect and illustrator, had lived in a coastal house by the North Sea with her family for more than a decade, until the eve of 2020. The house is not there anymore, but continues to live in a book she wrote about it. “The Easternmost House is a portrait of place that soon will no longer exist,” Juliet writes in the introduction of The Easternmost House: A Year of Life on the Edge of England, not yet realising how very soon that will be. “It is a memorial to this house and the lost village it represents, and to our ephemeral life here, so that something of it will remain once it has all gone.” 

The Easternmost House was published last April, when the house was still standing on the edge of the cliff in Suffolk, England, overlooking the sea. It was demolished this February, so it wouldn’t fall into the sea. 

“The erosion process is historic and ongoing, with years of stability followed by great crashes of land-loss in a single tide.” 

The House

“From the sea, it appears as a house from an old fashioned story book,” Juliet writes, a house located “east of London, east of Ipswich and east of all the rest of England”. The name of the house is also a nod to The Outermost House, a seminal book by American author Henry Beston and one of Juliet’s favorites. In both books the land runs out, a fact that Juliet writes you can even sense without seeing, when driving along the road about a mile away.

“It is a windblown house on the edge of an eroding clifftop at the easternmost end of a track which leads only into the sea,” she writes. “There used to be a village here and there used to be several hundred more acres of farmland.” There was a time when the Easternmost House wasn’t a house on the edge, there was another building, which was demolished a few years earlier because of erosion. “Here, the history of houses and farmland being lost to the sea reaches far away back into time, a known unknown.” 

It was originally a row of three estate cottages, built for farm labourers or similar around 1800. “Practical, solid, honest and well-proportioned, with fireplaces and original features intact, but also a bit butchered by ‘improvements’ over the years.” It was red brick, with dark pantiles, “referred to in Suffolk as ‘blue’ pantiles, but actually as dark grey-black, and very typical of the local vernacular.” The wall facing the sea was painted pink, also very typically Suffolk. 

The house had its original bead-and-butt doors with Suffolk latches, “and the old threshold timbers are worn into soft curves by the boots of farm labourers past, hinting that it might be older than it at first looks.” The defining feature of the house, that made it recognisable from afar across the fields and trees, or from some distant part of the beach, Juliet writes, was its chimneys. “Because of being originally three cottages, with two being mirror images of each other in plan, plus the one nearest the cliff-edge, the chimney line goes: chimney, space, space, chimney, space, chimney. “Something like this: I__I_I”.”

The book is organised by months: there are twelve chapters, from January to December. Each is filled with the author’s observations, memories and details that help to re-create a strong sense of place on the page. A coastal house is never just a building. It is a place with a huge view of the sea, ever-present, ever-changing, while Juliet sits at a “clifftop kitchen table” and watches it, day by day, season by season. 

And so the seaside window is married to weather and its dramas, as are the inhabitants of the house. But it is not just what you can see; there are also smells and sounds. “A common sound of life on a windblown cliff is that of hammering nails into timber after gales. Repairs.” 

To help the reader imagine what the Easternmost House feels like inside, Juliet Blaxland writes about her own vivid childhood memories, because she lived somewhere nearby, in a different house as a kid. “A curious aspect of my childhood was the complete absence of modernity about it, even though it was the 1970s.” 

She remembers how old everything was, and not just the big things like the house, furniture or pictures, but the small, everyday items as well; she recalls that even the soap seemed to smell of ‘oldness’. “We went to bed in old beds, with old sheets, old blankets, old pillows, and old eiderdowns with the feathers falling out.” And she still did, while she wrote the book, because the Easternmost House was furnished “with a distillation of those same ‘old things’, it being filled with all the ‘old things’ that other members of our families didn’t want. The house itself is a refugee from a larger estate and most of the contents are similarly refugees from a past life larger than ours is now.” 

Juliet Blaxland keeps returning to scale in her book. The house appeared as a tiny dark rectangle in an enormous skyscape, she writes, “like a little matchbox placed on the mantelpiece in front of one of the larger of Turner’s most abstracted weather-inspired canvasses, sometimes all dark blues and steely greys, sometimes the wildest fires of unnaturally loud pinks and oranges, dazzling vast and bright and all-encompassing.” 

Juliet is an architect and is used to playing with scale in her work, drawing a building 1:50, “each line one-fiftieth of its real size, drawing a site plan at 1:500, making a model.” But it is more than just making models, it has become a mindset for her, and partly because of the place where she lives. “Living on a crumbling cliff with a dark night sky and a view of a sea horizon which hints at the curvature of the Earth, encourages consideration of scale on a grand scale, a universal scale, and the effects of thinking about a scale in this way can be mesmerising and amusing.” 

Time is a scale, a dimension that opens a more philosophical pocket in the book. It is also the time of tides, a clock of coastal erosion, inevitably ticking if you live in a house by the sea. “Living in a place where the church fell into the sea three hundred years ago makes it quite easy to imagine life in the future: not just a decade hence, but fifty years, a century, or three centuries hence. What will be exactly here, at X? What will the world be like?” 

One of the more peaceful passages in the book is when Juliet describes a warm June night spent outside with her family. “For a night on the dune we need no camping kit, no cutlery, no rucksack, no map, no whistling kettle, no nothing. Just an old wool rug and the billy-kid sausages and the rosemary twigs.” Juliet imagines for a moment what would be left if a freak wave would suddenly wash them away: just buttons of their shirts and soles of their sun-bleached canvas shoes, while wool, cotton and wood is biodegradable and would leave no trace. “We lie out on the dune, in silence under the vast universe, as the waves shush us to a state of half-watchful near-sleep, then just the waves and breathing, and then the sleep itself.”

The house has disappeared now, leaving no trace in the landscape. In early March Juliet Blaxland published a photo on her Twitter account. It was the familiar scenery of land, of sea and sky, but now without the tiny matchbox of the Easternmost House.

***

About the author: Anna Iltnere is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Katrina Gelze’s website

A Quiet Edge of England

By Alex Gray

I’m in England for the first time in a couple of years. I had only planned to spend a few weeks here visiting family, but then the corona virus swept its way across Europe and my plans, like everyone else’s, changed.  

Suffolk, on the east coast of England, is only a couple of hours from London by train, but it feels a world away. Here you can find the last lingering remnants of that English idyll where village traditions follow the seasons. It’s a land of farms, scattered woodlands and slow WiFi. At different stages of my life its remoteness has felt like both a prison and a refuge. Now it’s a combination of both.  

During most of February and early March I spent hours sitting at my laptop, refreshing maps tracking the spread of the virus and calling friends in other parts of the world to compare the situation. Almost all of them were in the same predicament as me, stuck at home and waiting for normality to resume. I video called my girlfriend and she said, “It feels like I’m waiting for you to come back from a war.”  

I laughed and told her, “It’s a very boring war.” 

But for a lot of us it’s true that so far this ‘war’ has been defined by an underlying unease and anxiety as we brace for an invisible wave that we know is coming and have little control over.   

As March continues winter eases into spring and better weather. I take the dog for long walks across the open countryside and begin to rediscover this quiet edge of England. There’s not much breath-taking about the Suffolk landscape. There are no spectacular mountains or waterfalls. Instead the beauty here is mostly subtle and undemanding of attention, in a way that I realise makes me love it all the more. A herd of deer on a distant field. Ancient twisted oak trees creaking in the wind. Waves of the North Sea lapping softly against the beaches. 

The ghostly shape of a barn owl at dusk. A gentle wildness. 

My parents get the local newspaper each morning and between the headlines about the coronavirus there are smaller articles, often about Suffolk’s vanishing coastline. The county has always been badly effected by coastal erosion and over centuries in certain places has literally disappeared into the sea.  

During my newly found free time I visit some of these places, defined by what has is no longer there. Dunwich, which in the Middle Ages was a bustling international port, is now a small village with a few ruins of an abbey on the cliffs. The subject of folktales and songs:  

“By the lost town of Dunwich 

The shore was washed away 

They say you hear the church bells still 

As they toll beneath the waves” 

The coast at Covehithe also has one of the highest rates of erosion in the whole of the UK. Fallen trees scatter the beach, one road simply drops away from the cliffs, and only a cluster of houses remain. But it’s also a great spot to walk and look for sea glass, twinkling like gem stones on the beach.  

The church here is another oddity. It sits within the ruined walls of a larger medieval church. Walking around this half destroyed structure, and with the sound of the nearby sea in my ears, I difficult not to think about the impermanence of our ways of living. Maybe it’s because everything suddenly seems so fragile.   

And perhaps for the first time I feel very lucky to have this place at all, even if it won’t be here forever. What I’m feeling is probably familiar to anyone like me who has grown up knowing only one home. A place to return to, and keep returning, to gather thoughts, and take shelter in troubling times.  

***

Alex Gray is a writer and teacher of English literature from Suffolk, England. He is a former sub-editor of 52 Insights Magazine and holds an MA in Creative Writing. Since 2017 he has been based in Hanoi, Vietnam. His most recent writing focuses on travel and issues affecting indigenous communities. Website.

Return to Lakenheath, Suffolk, England

 By Rosamund Mather:

When I was four years old, I moved to a village with a foot in two camps. Tucked into the northwestern corner of the eastern county of Suffolk, Lakenheath straddles two climates; search for it on Google Maps, switch to Satellite Mode and zoom out a little bit. You’ll notice that to the west, it is light green, and the villages are few and far between. This is the Fens, a marshy area spanning four English counties and lying almost three metres below sea level. To the east, there’s a clump of dark green spilling out, denoting an abrupt contrast: the Brecks, the driest part of Britain.

And funnelled right in between these diverging landscapes is a strange organelle. This is RAF Lakenheath, a base that has hosted United States Air Forces since the 1940s. Its presence meant that the new classroom I had stepped into was a microcosm of the US.

Today, I have made a trip to Lakenheath with my mother. We’ve been doing this every couple of years. We say it’s out of curiosity, but we both know it’s more for reassurance. The school looks the same. Some shops are still there, others have been pulled down.

The car grumbles along the track to the Warren’s entrance. Comfortingly, the crunch under the tyres hasn’t changed since those weekends of putting the bikes into the wide boot of the red Volvo.

The Warren is where the Brecks portion begins. It is a mysterious place. There’s a touch of Roswell about it; electricity substations, tall wire fences, juxtaposed with a sandy heath, houses concealed by tall bushes. If you’d asked me to describe the Warren as a child, I would have said it looks just like Mars; perhaps grassier, but very dry, certainly, with patches of sharp fringing the dusty craters. The fields are dotted with Scots pine, which I always thought were the same trees in the African Savanna. When I learnt the word "drought", I associated it with this place. Before any of us were alive, the Brecks were characterised by their seas of sand. What’s left behind is what makes the area so supernatural. It doesn’t look like it belongs in damp England at all. Even when it is grey, it glows.

‘There is a rusty light on the pines tonight;
Sun pouring wine, lord, or marrow.’
'Emily', Joanna Newsom, Ys (2006)

Mum and I traipse over the thin, golden grass shimmering at our ankles, then tear through fluorescent ferns to get to the sandy part of the Warren. A nettle nips my shin. I remember that you’re not supposed to scratch the sting.

I was slighted by the Warren on one of these walks as a child, when my blue Tamagotchi fell out of my rucksack. Swallowed, never to be retrieved. That’s when I realised that the Warren signified something greater than myself. The tall wire fence, cordoning it off from the base, still lends it a spooky undertone.

‘There are nuclear weapons under there,’ Mum mentions as we survey the vast airfield, coated in tarmac and dotted with hangars. Indeed, it chills me that deadly US military operations in Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq have all started life in my childhood hometown.

After school, I’d jump into my American classmates’ SUVs - many of which had a puzzling combination of a left steering wheel and a UK licence plate - and tag along to the base. Admitted on their parents’ IDs, we’d go rollerskating, eat bubblegum ice cream and see movies not yet officially released in the UK.

These friendships were fun, but fleeting; usually they return to the US after a year. First there’d be tears, but finally a stoicism in the way that only children know how. How was their impression of my country shaped, from within the incongruous Lakenheath bubble?

The airbase’s history may be palpable, but there is still something primordial in the air in Lakenheath.

The craters giving the Warren its Martian look were Ice Age periglacial ponds – pingos – linked to sediments of the Bytham River found there. This is thought to have been the main route into Britain by its earliest settlers.

In 1997, the skeletons of the 6th-century Lakenheath Warrior and his horse were excavated, heralding the discovery of some 400 further graves. This archaeological breakthrough put Suffolk on the map again, 58 years after the discovery of a gargantuan ship burial at Sutton Hoo, on my grandparents’ side of the county.

It all refutes the aphoristic belief that villages are stagnant, that the only thing that changes is their residents, who faithfully live out their days until the next generation receives the baton.

The six years of Lakenheath that I can call my own – the window in which I existed and grew, shadowed by centuries and millennia – saw a village with a cosmopolitan edge. That window closed when we moved away. A fortnight later, there was one more, most unforeseeable change.

The past is a foreign country, they say. Lakenheath now straddled not only the Fenland and the Breckland, but pre- and post-9/11.

Not long afterwards, we were travelling via Lakenheath. The entrance to the base was bricked up, lines of cars backed up, fences even barricaded the residential area. It was now a fortress. No visitors. No after-school ice cream. All vehicles subject to inspection.

America no longer existed just at the end of my street. The world had been flung into an inscrutable, grown-up turmoil.

We have seen what we came for today, yet melancholy will follow us home. We indulge in a minute or two of stalling outside our old house. The garden fence has been pulled down, solar panels inserted into the roof. My childhood bedroom window is now frosted, suggesting it has been merged with the bathroom: no cell of me remains in there, not even in the rough white carpet.

Rosamund Mather is a Berlin-based writer, editor and translator. She tweets at @spookytofu and blogs at roseailleurs.net