A Countryman’s East Anglia: The Writing of Adrian Bell

With Richard Hawking

Saturday, 11 March 2023, 1030-1300

Booking is essential for this event, book here

Join The Bury Society for a free talk on writer and farmer Adrian Bell, set within the context of his writing on Bury St Edmunds and the surrounding countryside.

Adrian Bell was farming and writing during a period when the English countryside underwent its most significant transformation for hundreds of years. His work, spanning sixty years from 1920 to 1980, documents this agricultural revolution in East Anglia. His writing, writing that his son Martin Bell (ex-BBC war reporter and independent MP) describes as “history as much as Literature”, is rooted in the landscape, villages and towns of his beloved Suffolk.

Richard Hawking, author of At the Field’s Edge: Adrian Bell and the English Countryside and Chairman of the Adrian Bell Society, will examine Bell’s writing about Bury St Edmunds and its surrounding countryside to explore the changing relationships between the town and countryside, and the transformation of agriculture in the second half of the 20th Century.

After the talk, there will be light refreshments, and an opportunity to learn more about both The Bury Society and Adrian Bell.