Alice Spawls

At Southwold harbour the other weekend the fishermen were doing a busy trade, selling lobsters to visitors who had come for the sunshine and the sea, though the sea was still cold and grey, turning murky brown as the tide swelled with silt and pebbles. The crag that makes up much of the Suffolk coast is the softest and youngest rock in the UK, and especially vulnerable to erosion. Southwold is very nearly an island, cut off by the River Blyth to the south-west and Buss Creek to the north. Since the Environment Agency announced plans to stop maintaining the estuary in 2007, local groups have been repairing breaches, preserving the freshwater marshes and maintaining the 400-year-old clay walls along the Blyth (known as ‘slubbing the banks’).

I wonder if the Bank of England knew what they were letting themselves in for when they agreed to put Jane Austen on the £10 note. Janeites have been arguing over the authenticity of portraits for decades. The most settled on is the watercolour sketch held by the National Portrait Gallery and attributed to Austen’s sister, Cassandra. It was offered to James Edward Austen-Leigh (their nephew) by one of their great-nieces for inclusion in his 1869 Memoir.

Kurt Schwitters was 53 when he arrived in Britain in 1940. The Nazis had labeled him an ‘Entarteter Künstler’ (degenerate artist); in Britain he was an enemy alien, locked up in Hutchinson Internment Camp on the Isle of Man: brown walls, grey tiles, grey Irish Sea. The first room of Schwitters in Britain (at Tate Britain until 12 May) gives a glimpse of his life before exile. Schwitters hovered butterfly-like on the fringes of the major European isms of the 1920s: a bit of Dada here, a bit of De Stijl there. The geometry of Ja-was? Bild, with its strips of corrugated cardboard like sign posts in a blast of blue-green abstraction, makes dramatic use of a Suprematist grammar.

Small pictures, especially works on paper, sit more comfortably in the intimate proportions of a house than in a lofty gallery hangar, and the exhibition of watercolours and etchings by Giorgio Morandi at the Estorick Collection (until 7 April) is a well-turned example of what can be done with such an arrangement: the pictures are allowed to speak for themselves.