The Vinegar Mother’s Opera is a pickling factory set within the picturesque eastern coastline of Aldeburgh, Suffolk. It is an opportunity to bring residents and the distant empty nesters together in a timeless practice, preserving the close-knit community of these ever-diversifying coastal towns.

The Golden Galleon, a nationally famous fish and chip shop, operates the building to produce pickled goods and host a weekly parliamentary table opera. This momentarily settles Aldeburgh’s small village syndrome as depicted in Benjamin Britten’s opera ‘Peter Grimes’, which draws parallels between the misunderstood outsider protagonist and the modern-day Londoners.

Operating as an opera, the market takes on an instrumental architecture, and becomes a bustling orchestral pit of preserved goods trade. Alongside are more private spaces for pedestrians to pickle their produce and thereby reducing food waste.

At the heart of the building sit the Vinegar Mothers. Like maternal figures, they feed and bring to life the building’s activity while permeating the architecture; corroding, cleaning, or ‘pickling’ the façade.