The sun reaches Lowestoft before it touches anywhere else in Britain. Stand at Ness Point in the cold blue minutes before dawn and you are the first person in the United Kingdom to see the new day arrive. A compass rose called the Euroscope sits in the pavement at your feet, arrows pointing across the North Sea to cities you will never see from here. Behind you, a 126-metre wind turbine named Gulliver turns slowly in the offshore breeze. Lowestoft has always known it was the edge.
For most of the twentieth century, Lowestoft smelled of fish. The Smokehouses cured herring caught in the silver shoals that once swarmed the North Sea, and a fleet of sidewinder trawlers crowded the harbour mouth. By the 1980s a hundred boats still worked these waters. Today only a handful remain, and the fish market has dwindled to three traders facing redevelopment. The Mincarlo, last surviving sidewinder of the Lowestoft fleet, sits at the harbour as a museum ship - a reminder that an industry can die in a single lifetime. The town's fisheries science centre, CEFAS, continues the work the boats no longer can, studying the sea that no longer feeds Lowestoft as it once did.
When Britain mobilised in August 1939, the Royal Naval Patrol Service made its central depot here, on a site called Sparrow's Nest in Belle Vue Park. The Patrol Service took on the unglamorous, deadly work of minesweeping the coastal waters and escorting convoys through them. The memorial in the park bears 2,385 names - the men of the service who did not come back from the Second World War. They sailed out of this easternmost port, into seas mined and bombed and torpedoed, and many made their last journey from a town that has never quite stopped being a frontier.
The old town slopes hard down to the sea, and narrow lanes called scores cut straight through it, lined with worn steps. Fishermen used them to carry catches up from the beach. Smugglers used them to carry other things up at night. They run so steeply that locals still race them once a year for charity. At the top stands St Margaret's, the Grade I listed parish church where Admiral Sir John Ashby is buried - the man who commanded a ship at the Battles of Barfleur and La Hogue in 1692. In the town centre is Our Lady Star of the Sea, an Arts and Crafts church that holds the distinction of being the most easterly Catholic church in the British Isles. Lowestoft collects superlatives the way other towns collect monuments.
Lowestoft Lighthouse, built in 1874, throws its beam 23 nautical miles into the North Sea from 37 metres above the waves. It is the easternmost lighthouse in the United Kingdom, and it was preceded by the very first lighthouses Trinity House ever built - candlelit towers raised here in 1609 to warn ships off the murderous sandbanks that ring this coast. The sea has been encroaching ever since. The Low Light had to be moved in 1730 to follow a shifting channel, and discontinued altogether in 1923. South of town, Pakefield Lighthouse stands decommissioned since 1864, watched over now by volunteer coastwatchers. The lights mark a coastline always in the process of disappearing.
Lowestoft is among Suffolk's most deprived areas, and Kirkley its most deprived ward. The herring are gone, the Shell base scaled back, the Sanyo plant closed. But the town has staked its future on the same wind that has always blown in off the North Sea. The harbour is now the operations centre for the Greater Gabbard wind farm, fifteen miles offshore. The Outer Harbour services the turbines. Local engineers test tidal and wave generators. The town that fished a vanishing herring shoal now harvests a wind that will not stop. Standing at Ness Point at sunrise, watching Gulliver's blades turn against a brightening sky, you can see what Lowestoft has decided to become.
Lowestoft sits at 52.48 N, 1.75 E on the Suffolk coast, the easternmost point of mainland Britain. The 126-metre Gulliver wind turbine at Ness Point and Lowestoft Lighthouse at the north edge of town are the clearest visual landmarks; the outer harbour and bascule bridge over Lake Lothing are obvious from the air. Norwich Airport (EGSH) is roughly 30 nm northwest, with London Stansted (EGSS) about 80 nm southwest. Approach from the North Sea at 2,000-3,000 feet for the best view of the coastline and the offshore wind farms beyond.