How well do you know our Suffolk town’s twins in Europe?
PUBLISHED: 18:44 18 September 2017 | UPDATED: 08:09 19 September 2017
Test your knowledge of Suffolk and European towns that are twinned together in our quiz.
Our county of Suffolk is home to some beautiful towns and villages, most of which are twinned with European locations.
Twinning between towns, cities, counties, and more, is a formal agreement between two communities to promote cultural and commercial ties.
The modern act of town twinning that began after the Second World War in 1947, was introduced to sustain peace, build friendship and an understanding between different cultures and places that were likely foes.
One example in Suffolk is Beccles and the town of Petit-Couronne in the Normandy region of France, which became twinned towns in 1978.
After questioning why Beccles did not already have a twin town in the Beccles and Bungay Journal, word spread that the market town was looking to be twinned.
Petit-Couronne was already a twin of Ahlem, Germany, but it was also looking for a British twin, and when Mayor M Gerard Letailleur heard of Beccles, visits between the two towns began.
Since then, the people of the two towns have competed against each other at table tennis, basketball, and other sports, and the French town even has a red telephone box, red letter box, and a copy of the Beccles town sign.