Great British Road Journeys - Suffolk - Lowestoft to Ipswich Ep.4 

Your dedication to referring to it as “The Small Disagreement of 1939-1945” is one of my favorite things about this channel. Never change, Jon. 😂

Hello Jon, how the devil are you, have you had a good week?

Thank you for acknowledging the absurd juxtaposition of nuclear power stations and eroding coastlines.

loving my mum getting mentioned in guide books as ever

5:24 - Auto Shenanigans - covering the railway bits Geoff Marshall and Jago Hazard don't get to

“Gratuitous Railway Content” That would be a great name for a second channel.

Over 50 years ago my family had a caravan holiday at Leiston - we learned that the correct pronunciation is Lay-stun. We swam in the sea on the beach just a few hundred yards from Sizewell A nuclear power station. We were really glowing after our day on the beach!

A couple of other interesting things on the route. At Blythburgh the ghost dog, Black Shuck, was said to have entered the church and left scorch marks on the door, which are still there. The dog was also featured in a song by the Darkness, who of course hailed from Lowestoft. Near RAF Woodbridge is the sister base, RAF Bentwaters, where there's a cold war museum housed in a bunker. It's officially been out of use since the USAF moved out but aircraft were sometimes allowed to use it. I actually landed a C172 there.

I love the way you sound so sarcastic all the time, the frequent moments of actual sarcasm almost slip by unnoticed. Keep it up.

I must admit my favourite RU-vid channels are those with completely boring content made extremely interesting. You are the best at it.

Leiston pronounced 'Lay-stun', and for more railway things there's the old Leiston Works Railway and Long Shop Museum which is a rather good place to visit. And as for the concerns about the new Sizewell C reactor falling into the sea; yes the locals share those concerns. In fact the area N of Sizewell B where Sizewell C is due to be built is believed by local historians to be a dried up river bed. Geotechnical surveys of the area have revealed the ground to be less solid than previously thought, needing to go much deeper to reach the bedrock than with Sizewell B or A. Furthermore, the beaches in Suffolk are known to shift north up the coast over time, so there's a good chance the dunes at Sizewell will disappear in the next century; just take a look at the Kessingland sea wall which was built to stop erosion but is now protected by 200m of dunes.

We're surprisingly knowledgeable about this area. Never been. Soon as Kessingland was mentioned, my mum said "I have [heard of it]. There's a caravan park there". She was right. Soon as I saw the church I thought "That's the one that's about to fall into the sea." I'm liking suddenly being knowledgeable about something for once.

Hi Jon. Glad you refrained from being sarcastic this week. 😂

It was always amusing to see people shuffling back from the platform at Ipswich as the flask trains went through. Like it would make a blind bit of difference.

Hello fellow Jon, I used to live in Saxmundham. You summed it up perfectly, by mentioning its existence and little else.

6:38 there's a little bit of abandoned road to the right of the screen at this time, where the original A12 was replaced with dual carriageway. Some of the original road was made into the northbound entry slip at this point. The abandoned road is set back from the road, with privacy afforded by a hedge, and makes a great venue for losing one's virginity in the back of a Mk 1 Fiat Punto (with squeaky suspension for added comedy value) 🎉😂 (it was a 1.1 "Fire" engine, 55s trim, red, three door, no power steering, rusty wings, broken stereo. 144k miles which is impressive. purple and grey interior. Fitted with slightly wider wheels and tyres from the 1.2 version. N677 CBA. Oh, and the girl's name was Lucy. )

I'm surprised you didn't pop into Woodbridge town; quite a pleasant little tourist town with a nice riverside walk. Just outside on a road called Sandy Lane (between Woodbridge and Martlesham, which may have been the old horse and cart route before they decided they needed a proper road) is a barn where four young lads from my school (which was off the A1214 in Kesgrave, now a posh hotel) started a fire in October 1989 and caused £250K of damage. Sadly I don't know which farm the barn was on. There was another big fire in a barn along the same road in 2003 which actually made the newspapers but the local paper archives from 1989 aren't online.

There's a combination of words I've never heard put together before this channel: "Exciting Great British Road Journey."

Thanks Jon, your videos are the highlight of my Sundays!

A little off the A12 is Southwold. A very picturesque little town , home of many celebrities, Adnams brewery and a lovely pier with some rather interesting amusements inside. Worth a look.

Eastern most point in the UK and closer to the Netherlands than London. Only you would come up with that factoid! Love it.

Excellent as always - the wide runways at Woodbridge mimic/replicate the massively wide "first-bit-of-dry-land" emergency landing ground in Kent at Manston. As you say, if the radio set was shot up, having a "don't call us, just get on the deck" seems a good arrangement for what Terry Wogan used to describe as the "last great unpleasantness". Great video - as always.

I've driven the Magnox Scammell FLM718C that used to transport the nuclear waste to that rail yard!

Brilliant, as usual. It's not just your acerbic commentary and humour, the information you tell is wonderful and the set-up shots and drone footage are also fantastic. Fab all round.

Yay! My house in the background of a video on RU-vid 😅 More importantly I'm glad you didn't get caught up in the recent Orwell Bridge closure!

Thanks for the stop over at RAF Woodbridge! My Dad used to fly F4s out of there in the 70s.

As a Felixstowe local (since 1987, before that I was born and bred in Wales) you missed a couple of interesting details. The A12 used to go straight through the runway at Martlesham (now the BT Research Centre). In WW2 it was quite common for the police to stop traffic whilst the various fighter aircraft were departing and arriving to intercept inbound aircraft over the North Sea. Also, Ancient House has carvings denoting the 4 Continents of the world, since America was yet to be discovered and Antarctica was just too cold to be worth noting. Thanks for visiting, hopefully my adopted home town of Felixstowe will appear in another episode?

If you're in the area, there are some amazing historic sights, such as the Doom Painting in Wenhaston Church, covered up for around 350 years by whitewash before its accidental discovery, the round tower church at Bramfield, and the lost city of Dunwich (now a tiny village with a museum, a good pub and a chippie)

Hi, Leiston is pronounced LAYston and on the railway note you missed the Leiston Works Railway. If you had let us know you were coming to Leiston I'd have offered you a cuppa.

Love a good old mum joke 😂😂

If you're starting in Lowestoft, there's a couple of decent things to visit there. There's the David Silva Honda Collection, which is a bunch of classic Honda motorbikes, and there's the Transport Museum just outside of Lowestoft where you can ride all sorts of old-timey public transport machines.

1:37 he's pissed down his left leg again

Are you calling my mother a ho? I bet she would have found that hilarious. Great video though and a window into a place in the UK ive never been.

During that ‘small disagreement’ you mentioned Jon, my grandfather owned a haulage firm and they were requisitioned along with many others to build the airfield. I might have mis-remembered this next bit but I seem to recall my father being at the airfield when it went into lockdown and suddenly from the woods many gliders were hauled out for D-day. He wasn’t allowed to leave the airfield until the next day when the gliders by this time were already in Normandy.

Woodbridge and Bentwaters are definitely eerie places to visit. Rendlesham forest surrounds both of them and I’ve camped there. Love the peace and tranquillity of the forest but there’s definitely a sinister overtone to the area. Keep up the good work fella!

8.00 The name is pronounced Martle-sham Heath.😀

Lowestoft is ace. You should have visited Orford Ness. Some fantastic military history there.

Ah my home town of Ipswich! It’s nice to see it get some publicity! Great video 👍🏻

Great as usual. You could call this channel 'A Trip Down Memory Lane', as it involves both travel and history. Just love the very British way of putting things. Such a welcome break to the unfortunate Americanisation of everything. PS, we are definitely British, both haling from the West Midlands.

love the jazz interludes / filler john, nice

Nice Harvester in Lowestoft

That was really interesting. Thanks for the tour and cheers from Missouri, USA

These new videos of travelling along original road routes are interesting. So much to see along the way such as inns where horse drawn carriage travellers had to stay overnight, etc. Gives an insight as to how slow travel was when reliant on short range horses, and how things might become if everyone is forced into short range battery cars!

Lovely beach at Kessingland. Used to have a few holidays there in the 1970s.

Glad you are also having a look at airfields along the way - great!

The Eastern Coach Works range of bus and coach bodies was made in Lowestoft.

1:23 That's a power stance and a half

I grew up in a little village on the A12 just north of Wickham Market. The railway was only half a mile from my house, and sometimes late at night you could hear the nuclear waste trains going down the line.

Sometimes I speed up the video, because....well I can...but having just found this channels, I actually slowed this one down! I didn't want to miss an ounce of that sumptuous sarcasm. Excellent. Subscribed.

Lowestoft is a decent place to visit especially in the summer. What about Felixstowe where the A14 ends and starts which was once the A45. The A12 between Ipswich and Lowestoft is due to be upgraded to dual carriage and with a new bypass to be built to avoid several villages.

LOL. Literally, informative and funny.

A second point at Sizewell halt is that it is no longer used for sending used fuel to Sellafield, It was only used for sending used fuel from (the now currently being decommissioned) Sizewell A power station, as all the fuel has left site, the line is idle, as Sizewell B's fuel cannot be reprocessed at Sellafield and is kept in dry storage until a way of reprocessing can be found.

“See Chernobyl for reference”…great line. The animal “pounds” you referred to are quite common across the country and are often known as “folds” or reference the animals commonly put there hence “Sheepfolds” etc

I was born in Ipswich. Only spent the first year of my life there, so don't remember anything, but have been back to Ipswich a couple of times. It's not such a bad place. Really. If you go along the south bank of the Orwell you come to Pin Mill which is very picturesque. The Butt and Oyster is a great pub.

Gratuitous railway content, you've given me a sleeper in my pants! 😂👍👊

can’t believe the Yoxford ´Yoxman’ didn’t get a mention

The inside of the Orwell bridge spans are hollow. You can walk the entire length. 😮 Martlesham like arrgghh I'm a pirate. Leiston like lays tonne. Should have popped in for a coffee. You were within two miles of your supporter! 😂

Worth visiting is Sutton Hoo (that's "Hoo") Viking Museum ( _about_ the Vikings, not owned or run by them) with unearthed long-boat and its amazing bling.

I met and married the current Mrs Wells in Lowestoft and we lived in Wrentham. Wonderful chippy as I remember. The Orwell bridge was built, on the massive scale that it is, in order to permit container shipping traffic up to Ipswich. Felixstowe sort made it an expensive white elephant…but quite beautiful. 😂

Used to have our summer holidays near Saxmundham from the mid 60s to early 80s. Swimming at the beach next to Sizewell was interesting as every so often you would get a spell of warm water come in which had come from the nuclear reactor 😱, so far no after effects 😂

John, with this great British road trips series, you’ve really struck a chord. The roads you’ve covered thus far are all so familiar to me. Keep up the good work 👍

I love the fact that you pronounced "Leiston" every way except the way the locals say it - "Layston". I'm sure that was on purpose.

6:30 don't forget the Fukushima Daiichi Accident in japan back in 2011

I really enjoyed this. I am sure a lot of research has gone on beforehand.

The “your mother” bomb made me properly LOL.

In this new series, this is my favourite episode so far!

*me pointing at the calendar every time Jon asks if I've had a good week... on a Sunday*

You're right. The A12 feels like it goes on and on and on and on forever. I have had birthdays and funerals on that that road. I think there is a gibbet somewhere along that road just in case you can't handle the boredom.

My home town of Lowestoft. Funny that you couldn’t wait to leave…lol. Ohh we have a new bridge open soon. The anticipation is huge.. Only taken 50 years to get it finally constructed 😂

Oooh - tidal flow!

Brilliant 😅 One of your best!! 👍

the Orwell bridge outro was rather nice

I told my family we were taking a trip to the Far East. They were disappointed to find out it was Ness Point 😂

Yay! Ipswich and the Orwell Bridge! I had thought that you might skip it, no shame if you had really, Ipswich is a little bit like Stevenage but nearer the sea! 😂

Loved the video Jon. What an eclectic mix of topics. Really appreciate the loco shenanigans and the aero shenanigans and especially the humour. 😂

As a Lowestoft resident, great video! The A12 has been straightened out a few times, along with e abandoned road just south of Kessingland, Wangford just south of Wrentham is a nice example you may have noticed but didn't cover, worth street viewing on Google

thanks Jon for another brilliant video, nearly choked on my lunch at the ancient ho joke, your wit and sarcasm are spot on as usual , keep up the good work

Great video, many interesting things along that route. One vignette for you, RAF Woodbridge was also a standby landing site for the Space Shuttle in the event of emergency or shocking navigation. What kind of impression would that have made on a young Ed Sheeran? Nice that you glossed over the links with Douglas Bader who famously refused to permit his 'servant' to escape from Colditz. Shame you missed the elegant BT building at Martlesham.

Always enjoyable, thanks Jon!

Jon, you seem to be spending an awful lot of time on Lay-by’s recently, have you been flashing your headlights? 😉

09:05 Classy as always!

I love this series. keep it up

Auto shenanigans has become an important part of my Sundays, very interesting and enjoyable, thank you, 👍👊.

Another great video Jon

Brilliant Jon thank you

very intresting. Well done and thanks

Excellent, thanks...

Thank you so much for the video❤

You're funny ;) Long sentences, fast presentation and standing legs apart as wide as possible :D Excellent maps and satellite photography, btw! 👍

Absolutely loving this series

Another great video

I like your tone of voice. It seems appropriate for the self confessing unremarkable scenery you are describing. The fact that you don't know the local pronunciation of many place-names in Suffolk suggests that Suff-folk aren't that bovved either.😅 (Alarming that they cart nuclear waste from Sizewell right up to the far more remarkable Cumbria for disposal 😮😢..).

Very entertaining video Jon, thank you very much. Am I wrong by running a bingo session on how wide your stance can be 3.15 is a winner so far. Your combination of detailed research and honed presentation along with top amusing sarcastic comment is an absolute winner. Your best comment this time is either the road ‘it looks that looks like a drainage channel’ or the ‘two-year council conversation’ to sort something out. Or is it the leaky nuclear plant built on the eroding coastline?

Thanks for the insightful information about the runway at Woodbridge, I found that fascinating! Thanks for taking us along with you, safe journeys Jon.

I can't even tell you how much my partner who loves this channel is that you went ANYWHERE near Southwold, where he hails from.

Another great, and interesting, video Jon 👍

Awesome Video

Being that you are doing Norfolk, you might want to look into the wooden road signs in the badlands, they were all altered to point at the wrong place to confuse the Germans in ww2 and have never been returned to pointing the right way. The ones around Hempnall are particularly annoying for the uninitiated (esp on foot) traveller.

You might have noticed that Ipswich has one of the most 'challenging' of road networks of anywhere in Britain. Every road marking is worn away, every road sign points to Colchester, Bury St Edmunds and Felixstowe. Unless covered by trees or dirt. Bomb craters still lay everywhere possibly from WW2?

I'm quite convinced that you gave every pronunciation of Leiston except the correct one on purpose (it's LAYston btw as in "I lay down")