Sailors’ Reading Room
East Cliff Southwold IP18 6EL
Southwold's most peaceful, unchanged haven is without doubt the Sailors’ Reading Room, built in memory of a local Captain and redolent of a time before the town was discovered by second-homers and weekenders up from London. It is, er, a reading room basically, where you can browse the morning papers and the various shipping magazines that are left on the tables, but it also doubles as a small maritime museum, with models of old ships, painted figureheads and photos of the various local salts who helped to fund and build the place. The author WG Sebald came here often and wrote about it in his book The Rings of Saturn, which describes a historic ramble around the footpaths of East Anglia; he reckoned the Reading Room “better than anywhere else for reading, writing letters, following one’s thoughts, or in the long winter months simply looking out at the stormy sea as it crashes on the promenade.”
