The first half of this 1935 video from Pathe shows an interesting way for the quarry workers to get back home after the end of their working day. I think it’s Graig Ddu quarry in North Wales and the devices the workers have built themselves are known as ‘car gwyllt’.
Author: admin
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Streets of Norwich – Cathedral Street
Part of my Streets of Norwich project….
Cathedral Street leads from Prince of Wales Road to St. Faith’s Road and Horse Fair. It hasn’t changed much since the 1880s map, just the building of some houses which cover the empty space at the top-left side of the street.
But, all of this development was relatively new at that time, as in this 1830s map it’s evident that Prince of Wales Road and Cathedral Street didn’t even exist. Prince of Wales Road was constructed to be a sweeping boulevard to the new railway station and Cathedral Street was laid out at the same time.
Looking down from the Prince of Wales Road end, towards one of the entrances to the Cathedral Close. The buildings on the left-hand side are numbers 4, 6 and 8 Cathedral Street and by the 1930s they had been merged and turned into a hotel. In 1939, the hotel owners were Frederick Bryant and his wife, Kate Bryant. They’re all still one unit and have been jointly converted into flats with a substantial rear building added onto them.
This has been, for at least twenty years, a Chinese restaurant, but it was previously the Duke of Connaught public house. The pub opened in the 1860s and it closed in around the 1970s, when it was converted into a restaurant.
The properties at 4, 6 and 8 Cathedral Street mentioned above are on the left-hand side of this photo, then there’s a dentist at 10 Cathedral Street and an archway leading to the rear of the properties.
Looking back towards Prince of Wales Road.
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Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day Fifty-Three
The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the Coronavirus crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…..
Bundling
There’s quite a long definition for this in the dictionary, which is:
“A man and woman sleeping in the same bed, he with his small clothes, and she with her petticoats on; an expedient practised in America on a scarcity of beds, where, on such an occasion, husbands and parents frequently permitted travellers to bundle with their wives and daughters. This custom is now abolished. See Duke of Rochefoucalt’s Travels in America”.
Theodore Zeldin wrote about this in An Intimate History Of Humanity, noting that it was actually a more common practice than the dictionary suggested, as it was practised in England, Wales, the Netherlands (where it was known as kweesten) and even Afghanistan. There’s a Wikipedia page on the subject, and a book entitled Little Known Facts about Bundling in the New World was published in the United States.
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Streets of Norwich – St. Faith’s Lane (Horse Fair to Prince of Wales Road)
Part of my Streets of Norwich project….
St. Faith’s Lane is a long road (and has historically been much longer), so this is just the section from Horse Fair to Prince of Wales Road. In the above 1880s map, there isn’t really much on this section, an orchard and a few buildings on the left-hand side and just a couple of buildings on the right-hand side, which is now Stuart Gardens.
These houses overlook Horse Fair and were built somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century. The house with the black door is 32 St. Faith’s Lane and in 1939 it was lived in by:
Percy Smith (born in 1891, worked as a traffic foreman for the omnibus company)
Mary Smith (born in 1896, a housewife)
Philip Smith (born in 1923, a trade apprentice at Laurence & Scott)
The Regent Theatre sign is still visible on the substantial building on the right-hand side. The black doors on the right of the photo are numbers 22 and 24 St. Faith’s Lane. Having a little look at the 1939 register, these were lived in by the Thurston and Lake families respectively.
John Lake, listed as the head of the household at number 24 St. Faith’s Lane (the black door to the furthest right of the photo) worked as a cinema electrician, which was handy if it was the cinema behind that he worked in. He was also an ARP warden, but the register marked him as an untrained warden, so I assume he had just signed up to help the war effort.
This is the rear of what was the Regent Theatre, which became the ABC cinema (there’s an interesting video of that at http://www.eafa.org.uk/catalogue/213377) and later Mercy nightclub, which then closed. But more on this when I get to the Prince of Wales Road post, which this building fronts on to.
More of the former Regent Theatre on the right and the entrance to Stuart Gardens is visible on the left. Ahead is Prince of Wales Road and in older maps, St. Faith’s Road went much further, but the next stretch is now known as Eastbourne Place.
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Norwich – Horse Fair
I’ve never paid much attention to Horse Fair (or Horsefair) which is located along St. Faith’s Lane. It’s visible in the above map from the 1880s in two separate chunks, but somewhere around the 1950s this was shrunk down in size to what remains today.
And this is what remains, a squashed oval shape (I’m sure there’s a better mathematical word for that) of greenery.
People can go inside it if they want some grass, although I’d suggest that there are better nearby locations.
The entrance has cut iron railings, I assume taken for the war effort.
Norwich School now occupies the offices that overlook the area, suitably named Horsefair House.
The nearby plaque is getting hard to read now, but it says:
“The site of the Horse Fairs during the reign of King Edward I (1272-1307) and King Edward II (1307-1327). It was moved to the Castle Ditches by order of King Henry VII in 1500.”
And, as something else I found out about later, there’s also a bridge under the road by Horse Fair.
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Streets of Norwich – Stuart Gardens
Part of my Streets of Norwich project….
The location of Stuart Gardens was in 1880 a load of trees in the gardens behind St. Faith’s House. That property has long since been demolished (there is still a building with that name, but it’s on Mountergate), although at least a few trees remain because of the James Stuart Gardens that can be accessed from Recorder Road.
Not a great deal to note here, although the residents are unfortunate that this back street is right near to the central beating heart of Prince of Wales Road and its nightlife (which is limited as of May 2020, but I’m sure it’ll return). So, it doesn’t take much imagination to know what has been recorded around this street.
The street is named after James Stuart, who I had mentioned on my Recorder Road post, a rather fitting name given its location. It’s just a small cul-de-sac, which is reached from St. Faith’s Lane.
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Norwich – Metal Relief Sculpture of St. Benedict
Located at the end of Wellington Lane where it meets St. Benedict’s Street is this metal sculpture of St. Benedict, which I had mistaken for a modern installation. It transpires that the metal relief sculpture itself is from a branch of the National Provincial Bank on St. Benedict’s Street which opened on 27 October 1957. It was installed in this format in 2012 and there’s more information at http://www.racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=147.
On the reverse is the name of the road that it is next to, Grapes Hill.
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Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day Fifty-Two
The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the Coronavirus crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…..
Bull Beggar or Bully Beggar
This is defined by the dictionary as “an imaginary being with which children are threatened by servants and nurses, like raw head and bloody bones”. Being a child in the late eighteenth century does sound a little bit of a nightmare….. The phrase is still in occasional use today and there’s a pub in North Carolina called the “Bull and Beggar”. It dates all the way back to at least the fifteenth century and it might derive from Wales and the old Welsh word ‘bwbach’ which is a scarecrow or goblin.
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Streets of Norwich – St Lawrence Little Steps
Part of my Streets of Norwich project….
This short lane connects Westwick Street and St. Benedict’s Street, taking its name from St. Lawrence’s Church.
The steps at the bottom, leading onto Westwick Street.
The churchyard is to the left.
Looking back down to Westwick Street, with an entrance to the fifteenth-century St. Lawrence’s church on the right-hand side.
And another set of steps up to St. Benedict’s Street.
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Streets of Norwich – Wellington Lane
Part of my Streets of Norwich project….
Wellington Lane today is a strange little affair, running parallel to the inner ring-road street (I say street, more like a minor motorway) of Grapes Hill. Back in 1900, Wellington Lane is visible, but it now also covers what was Duck Lane. Grapes Hill was widened after the Second World War, so there is now no housing between Wellington Lane and Grapes Hill, it’s a soulless area of the city where the car triumphed.
This metal relief sculpture is located where St. Benedict’s Street and Wellington Lane meet, but more about that sculpture here.
Starting from the Duck Lane end, the city wall is on the right-hand side and these sections were previously embedded into housing.
A relatively long section of wall which has been mauled about over the centuries, but at least something has survived.
A gap between the wall, which starts to peter out at this point.
Looking back towards the Duck Lane end, the line of the wall has been retained.
The line of the wall goes shooting off into the bushes, with Grapes Hill on the right. There was an intriguing square tower here, but it was pulled down as part of the road expansion plans.
This is now getting towards the end of what was Duck Lane, and now into what was always known as Wellington Lane. Somewhere around where that tree is at the front, that was once the Wellington pub, which is how the street got its name. That pub, built in the mid-seventeenth century as a residential property, traded between 1822 and 1930, part of the Youngs & Co estate in the later part of its period of operation.
The bushes on the right are the former stretch of residential properties along Wellington Street and the city wall existed in this section. However, the whole lot went as part of the Grapes Hill road widening, although some of the properties in this area had already been lost or damaged during the Second World War.
The road starts to end here, connecting in with St. Giles Street on the left.
And looking back down Wellington Street, a heavily changed road over the last century. The houses on the left have gone as part of the Grapes Hill construction, and although some efforts have been made with landscaping, it’s not the most glamorous of areas. The road is so busy that it can’t be easily crossed, but there is a pedestrian bridge now so that people can get over to the Earlham Road area.
