Things to do in Essex

Dedham in the Stour Valley of Essex is the principal village of Constable Country, the landscape of the lower Stour that the painter John Constable used as the subject of some of the most celebrated paintings in the history of British art. The combination of the handsome main street of Tudor and Georgian buildings, the great Perpendicular church of St Mary, the Stour water meadows accessible from the village and the direct visual connection to the landscape that Constable painted makes Dedham one of the most rewarding literary and artistic heritage destinations in East Anglia. Constable was born at East Bergholt across the Stour in Suffolk and the paintings he made of this valley, including The Hay Wain whose composition is centred on Flatford Mill a short walk from Dedham, created images that defined the English pastoral landscape for subsequent generations both in Britain and internationally. The water meadows, the river, the mills and the great cloud-filled East Anglian skies that Constable recorded in his large exhibition paintings remain recognisable in the actual landscape today, a continuity quite remarkable for scenes painted two centuries ago. The Munnings Art Museum in the house of the painter Sir Alfred Munnings provides a further artistic dimension, and the boat hire from the Dedham boathouse for rowing on the Stour provides the most direct experiential engagement with the landscape that Constable made famous.

Flatford Mill on the River Stour in the Dedham Vale on the Suffolk-Essex border is the most celebrated site in British landscape painting, the water mill and the surrounding riverside landscape that John Constable painted repeatedly in the great exhibition paintings of the 1820s that established his reputation and defined the English pastoral ideal for subsequent generations both in Britain and internationally. The Hay Wain, perhaps the most famous landscape painting in British art, is centred on the mill pond and the Willy Lott's Cottage visible across it from the towpath. The mill and the surrounding buildings are managed by the National Trust and the Field Studies Council uses the buildings as an educational facility, but the exterior of Willy Lott's Cottage, the mill pond and the towpath along the Stour are freely accessible and the experience of recognising the actual landscape that appears in The Hay Wain and numerous other Constable paintings provides one of the most direct and most satisfying art heritage encounters available anywhere in England. The landscape around Flatford has changed less than most comparable sites because the lack of river navigation above Flatford prevented the industrial development that transformed so many comparable river valleys in the nineteenth century. The result is a landscape of meadows, willows and the slow river that preserves the essential character of Constable's paintings in a way that allows the paintings and the landscape to illuminate each other directly.

Lavenham in Suffolk is the finest and most completely preserved medieval wool town in England, a village of over three hundred timber-framed buildings whose market place, guildhall and main streets create a streetscape of medieval England at its most complete and most architecturally rich that has been used as the location for numerous period film and television productions. The combination of the extraordinary density of medieval buildings, the guildhall, the church and the market cross creates a heritage experience unlike any other available in East Anglia. The prosperity that produced Lavenham's medieval buildings came from the wool trade, the town being one of the principal centres of Suffolk broadcloth production in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries whose wealthy clothiers financed the buildings that survive today. The Church of St Peter and St Paul, built with the wealth of the wool trade in the Perpendicular Gothic style in the late fifteenth century, is one of the grandest parish churches in England, its tower rising 44 metres above the town in a display of merchant ambition and civic pride that reflects the extraordinary wealth of Lavenham at its commercial peak. The Guildhall of the seventeenth-century Corpus Christi Guild, managed by the National Trust, provides the finest single building for exploring the history of the town and the medieval guilds that organised its commercial and social life. The combination of the guildhall, the church and the surrounding streets of timber-framed buildings creates the complete medieval townscape experience.