The week before Christmas 2024 finally brought a clear night to the Suffolk coast, with the moon not due up until around nine, so I headed out early to make the most of the darkness while it lasted. My destination was Aldeburgh, a pretty seaside town that draws its share of nightscape photographers, though that night, mercifully, I had the shingle entirely to myself.

The main subject was Scallop, Maggi Hambling’s steel sculpture that’s stood on the beach since 2003, two broken shell halves rising out of the stones as a tribute to Benjamin Britten, the composer who spent much of his life here and walked this same stretch of coast most afternoons. Cut into the upright half is a line from his opera Peter Grimes: “I hear those voices that will not be drowned.” It’s a sculpture that’s divided opinion since the day it went up, loved and loathed in roughly equal measure, but under a night sky, with nobody else around to argue about it, it takes on a quieter kind of presence entirely its own.

I worked the beach around it for a while, finding a few compositions at different focal lengths around the sculpture before also finding a few fishing boats hauled up on the shingle.  I then made my way south to the Martello tower that stands sentinel further along the coast, a relic of a different age of coastal defence, built to watch for a Napoleonic invasion that never came this way. The wind that night had real teeth to it, cutting straight through clothing that turned out to be nowhere near warm enough, and the cold made itself felt in a way few nights out do. But there’s something about standing on an empty beach under a properly dark sky, stars overhead and nothing but the wind and the sea for company, that makes the discomfort feel entirely worth it.