‘The peace of this place […] is like a breath of heaven after London,’ wrote actor Dirk Bogarde, visiting Waldringfield soon after the end of WW2. He loved ‘the damp smells of mud and October mist’, the sky ‘raked by hundreds of empty masts’, the heron ‘wading his solitary way across the marshes’.

Waldringfield is not always so calm. The anchorage can be a mass of racing sails and the foreshore thronged with holiday makers. It has been a place for yacht designers and boat builders to display their art and the starting point for innumerable sailing adventures. In the weeks before D-Day Waldringfield contributed to the Operation Quicksilver deception. In the previous century, it was a minor industrial centre supporting a waterborne trade in coprolite and ‘London muck’ – together with an environmentally unfriendly cement works.

Assiduous research by the Waldringfield History Group and their friends tells the village story through family recollections and hundreds of photographs. These range from pioneering glass slides to the latest in drone technology. Meet the boats and people, businesses and pleasures, innovations and escapes of this unique Suffolk community beside the River Deben.

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