Where the deer cry at dawn, and Damien Hirst glowers from the wall, North Norfolk wears its eccentricities like epaulettes. UEA alumnus, Douglas Blyde, returns for a stranger kind of pilgrimage: to two pubs where venison is fire-kissed, neon flickers like stained glass, and the usual rules of hospitality no longer apply…
‘I took my grandma there, who saw in the risqué art things she hadn’t seen in decades,’ quipped the drinks buyer from Snape Maltings whom I encountered en route – a throwaway remark which perfectly encapsulates The Gunton Arms: startling and saucy.
At this intriguing outpost, the day begins not with a bang but with a bray – the rutting bark of a red deer in the half-light of a Norfolk dawn. It is the sort of place where Britain still wears its old clothes: mud on wellies, and the intoxicating smell of woodsmoke. But if you think you’re heading for some heritage hovel with liver and onions and a fruit machine in the corner, then you haven’t met Ivor Braka. Or his deer. Or his Hirst.
The Gunton Estate is not so much a country pile as a masterclass in cultural subversion, played out across a thousand acres of managed wilderness. Its custodian, Braka – art dealer, aesthete, and patron of the improbable – has turned the idea of the British pub into something gorgeously, and provocatively, unhinged. The Gunton Arms is his flagship: a Georgian steward’s house with the soul of Francis Bacon and the manners of a Highland ghillie.
Since opening in 2011, The Gunton Arms has become one of the UK’s most celebrated foodie retreats – combining ephemeral British menus, a deer park, and a remarkable private art collection. Braka has filled the former country house hotel with works worthy of the Tate or National Gallery, while interiors by Robert Kime lend an inviting, lived-in elegance. The walls and panelling carry the patinated touch of decorative artist, Shaun Lovering, who made what had been a warren of rooms feel as if they’d existed, in perfect imperfection, for centuries.
It is a place where Emin rubs shoulders with Freud, Glenn Brown with Landseer’s knowingly kitsch Monarch of the Glen, Jenny Holzer’s bureaucratic plaque about mucous membranes with Harland Miller’s Penguin-spoof covers, and Paula Rego’s lithographs of alcoholic mothers with a giant Irish elk skull over ten millennia old. There is an anatomical dissection, a crab draped in lace, dinosaurs caught mid-coupling, and taxidermy with better cheekbones than most gallery-goers. The light in dining rooms and corridors is soft and deliberate, not hotel downlighters, but something forgiving, as if bounced off a Rembrandt.
The TV-free bedrooms, opened with a key fixed to a found antler, are quiet in the way only old houses can be – thick-walled, drowsy with age. Carrara bathrooms gleam, their marble quarried from the death-rattle of Alexandria. You sleep on a Four Seasons-grade mattress, surrounded by art. An old-fashioned radio hums softly, salted caramel chocolates vanish without regard for the hour, and the bathwater – scented with ‘unisex’ toiletries and drawn from the estate’s own well – runs to a heat which could see you arrested in Belgium. Above the freestanding bath hangs an intervention work by Brazilian artist Antonio Manuel, a newspaper redacted with blocks of colour, both censor and celebration.
You eat in the Elk Room, a kind of culinary chapel warmed by a fire so grand it could immolate a medium-sized horse. At this hearth the team of Stuart Tattersall (late of Hix) cooks Blickling beef, South Creake pork, and, from October, venison still warm from the view, over a tonne of pine logs per week. The potatoes are cooked in goose fat, while salad leaves, barely dressed, come from the walled garden.
The wine list is short, sharp, and full of things which drink like they’ve been mislabelled cheap, while local ales like Wherry nudge below a fiver. You play pool or darts surrounded by priceless art and people who pretend not to notice it, while your reverse seared sirloin hisses on the fire and someone explains why Paula Rego was always more dangerous than she looked.
Morning arrives with mist and the muffled plod of hooves on wet grass, and indoors, above the counter, a sign declares, with unarguable truth, the biblical-sounding words: ALL THINGS PASS. You walk – because to be here and not walk is to miss the point – through an England which, by some stubborn grace, has survived, under skies vast enough to hold grudges – or fighter jets from RAF Lakenheath. You pass Sol LeWitt’s five-metre ziggurat and step into the parkland air, the path drawing you, as it must, to The Suffield Arms – forty minutes on foot, or, if you must, an indecently swift five in the car.
Where The Gunton Arms is all English gothic and art-world testosterone, The Suffield is Mediterranean exile – Gaudí goes on the game near Norwich. Built in 1886 by Lord Suffield for estate workers, later relocated opposite the station he had commissioned a decade earlier, its reincarnation under Braka is as much about preservation as reinvention: 19th-century pamment tiles, William Morris curtains from the 1870s, and a ceiling of Anaglypta, aged and patinated to look like it has been smoking cigars since Gladstone was in office.
Braka, with his usual restraint, has filled this once-somnolent pub with Marcus Bracey neons, Glenn Brown etchings, Afghan horse blankets, the taxidermy head of a goat (an echo of the Stones’ Goat’s Head Soup), and a ceiling mural by Caragh Thuring listing every principal artist of the Norwich School – the self-taught, Dutch-influenced landscape movement whose watercolours anticipated Impressionism but never found Constable’s, nor Turner’s, fame.
There’s a bullfighting poster from Robin Birley, a tarantula near a Damien Hirst made of thousands of dead flies, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s prehistoric Permian Land, and Nick Knight’s roses. Upstairs, the Zebra Room wears its 1930s New York wallpaper with a mix of Bowie, Beaton, McCullin, Kitaj, and von Gloeden, whose Sicilian boys once scandalised Mussolini’s police.
The menu, Mediterranean at heart, is built around a Josper Grill: Tomahawk steak with chimichurri, as well as octopus with capers, aubergine fritters with feta, sliced Lomo Doblado, a standout saffron scented seafood paella, and bottles of Ibizan olive oil. You eat like you’ve been kidnapped by a sun-drenched cult. The kitchen is open, proudly, beyond a swish counter – and the service is as polished as the cutlery.
The saloon bar serves cocktails such as the local Bullards gin and limoncello-pepped Fleur De Lis, in a setting full of theatrical brio – convex and concave mirrors nodding to alchemy, Hogarth prints, Matthew Smith’s Rubenesque nudes admired by Bacon, and a photographic series from a Pennsylvania brothel, possibly the earliest of its kind in America. There is a view over the tracks, should you wish to contemplate escape or railway poetry. The loos are tiled with the precision of a chapel, wallpapered with Warhol, and hung with Mapplethorpe, Newton, Minter, Deller, and Testino. In the distance, a giant chair resides ‘where drunk people once got stuck’, according to the waitress.
Whether you’ve come as saint or sinner, both pubs nourish the soul as much as the stomach and do so without the faintest whiff of pretension. They are shrines to something Britain has almost forgotten: places where you are urged to look, to feel, to order another glass and argue, with conviction, about Glenn Brown’s brushwork, or football, or the line-up for the Suffield Summer Fiesta, including Bob Log III and Wreckless Eric. But leave without having formed an opinion on Lucian Freud’s fingernails, and you’ve no business claiming the pudding.
This isn’t a country pub crawl so much as a pilgrimage through the British subconscious – a journey powered by venison, neon scripts, and the art of making you feel entirely, dangerously, alive…
The Gunton Arms, Cromer Road, Thorpe Market, NR11 8TZ. The Gunton Arms features in the Top 50 Gastropubs in the UK. For more information, including details of its art, please visit www.theguntonarms.co.uk.
The Suffield Arms, Station Road, Thorpe Market, NR11 8UE. For more information, visit www.suffieldarms.com.