Felixstowe Beach
Felixstowe on the Suffolk coast is the most complete and best-preserved Edwardian seaside resort in East Anglia, a town whose long Victorian and Edwardian seafront of hotels, gardens and beach huts retains the character of a traditional English seaside resort in a form that has been largely preserved by the town's relative distance from London compared with the Brighton and Bournemouth resorts that developed more heavily in the twentieth century. The combination of the long shingle and sand beach, the Edwardian architecture and the dramatic presence of the largest container port in Britain just beyond the town centre creates an unusual juxtaposition of traditional seaside and modern industrial scale.
The seafront gardens extending the length of the promenade are among the finest in East Anglia, their formal plantings of bedding plants and the Victorian bandstand providing the kind of maintained public landscape that was the pride of Edwardian seaside resorts and which has been preserved at Felixstowe with more care than at most comparable resorts. The beach huts along the seafront are among the most popular in Suffolk, their coloured timber frontages providing the characteristic image of the traditional English seaside.
The view from the seafront across the Orwell and Stour estuaries to Harwich on the far shore, with the container vessels of the port moving along the shipping channels in both directions, provides an industrial maritime spectacle of considerable scale that is entirely unique among English seaside resorts.