Snape Maltings

Out east for the Aldeburgh Festival for the first time. I was quite taken with Snape Maltings, the main concert hall created by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears in the late 60's. The complex is set in the middle of a vast area of marshland, and has wonderful sculpture dotted around it, most famously Barbara Hepworth's Family of Man. The words on these steps are:

I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland
by zinc-gray breakers that always marched on
in twos. Hence all rhymes, hence that wan flat voice
that ripples between them like hair still moist,
if it ripples at all. Propped on a pallid elbow,
the helix picks out of them no sea rumble
but a clap of canvas, of shutters, of hands, a kettle
on the burner, boiling-lastly, the seagull's metal
cry. What keeps hearts from falseness in this flat region
is that there is nowhere to hide and plenty of room for vision.
Only sound needs echo and dreads its lack.
A glance is accustomed to no glance back.

Joseph Brodsky