text: The town's churches include the pre-Reformation Anglican parish church of St Peter and St Paul and the Catholic Church of Our Lady and St Peter.
  Governance
  Aldeburgh has a town council and lies within the East Suffolk non-metropolitan district. Aldeburgh ward, including Thorpeness and other communities, had a population of 3225 in the 2011 census, when the mean age of the inhabitants was 55 and the median age 61.
  It is within the Suffolk Coastal parliamentary constituency represented by Therese Coffey, having had John Gummer as the MP from 1979 to 2010. It is seen as a safe seat for the Conservatives.
  Aldeburgh was a parliamentary borough from 1571 and returned two Members of Parliament (MPs), the right to vote being vested in the town's freemen. By the mid-18th century it was classed as a rotten borough, as the votes were controlled by a City of London merchant, Thomas Fonnereau: and memorably described it as "a venal little borough in Suffolk". It lost its representation under the Great Reform Act of 1832.
  In 1908 Aldeburgh became the first British town to elect a female mayor: Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, whose father, Newson Garrett, had been mayor in 1889. In 2006, Sam Wright became Aldeburgh's town crier and mace bearer at 15, and so the youngest in the world.