Walking. Gossip. Travel.

Category: Norfolk

  • Great Yarmouth – Row 86

    There’s going to be a few posts about the Rows of Great Yarmouth (row as in a row of cottages, not as in an argument leading to a violent fight) since I’m leading a heritage walk there this weekend. I like the effort that the town has put in to placing signs up with the name of each row, with the old painted numbering system also still visible.

    Very delightful I’m sure everyone would agree. Anyway, this is Fisher’s Row, number 86, which has also been named Fielding’s Row after the surgeon Benjamin Fielding who lived here. The current name is from John Fisher, an eighteenth century merchant from the town and I think it’s the same person who was Mayor of Great Yarmouth in 1767.

  • Great Yarmouth – Sand Sculpture

    The sand sculpture at Great Yarmouth railway station of the new Stadler trains which are being introduced onto the company’s network of routes. It was created by Richard Spence and Jamie Wardley and I’m partly surprised no local ‘wit’ has fiddled with the sand sculpture.

    The leaping hare, which is the new brand image of Greater Anglia. I thought the whole thing was a nice little innovation, something a little different in the railway station. Hopefully the innovation next year will be a nice Greggs opening up.

  • Streets of Norwich – King Street (191-197 King Street)

    Part of my Streets of Norwich project, although I’ve had to break King Street up since it’s so long….

    The site of what was once 193 to 197 King Street, sadly demolished in the mid-twentieth century. The building which stands is the former Ferry Boat Inn, at 191 King Street.

    There was once a yard at 193 King Street, known as Wickham’s Yard, which went down to the river, but this went when the properties at 193 to 197 were demolished. Five properties along this yard, which was pretty much all of it, came up for sale en masse in 1908 with the purchase including the yard itself and river access.

    There was an archaeological dig here a few years ago when a building project was planned, but there hasn’t been much progress recently. But the armchair remains….

    The Ferry Boat Inn, which closed in 2006 and unfortunately is unlikely to ever reopen now. This is particularly sad as it’s one of the few pubs which was left along the King Street from the many which once stood along here. The building has been used as a pub since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century, and was likely a private residence before then dating back to the seventeenth century.

    The pub was formerly known as the Steam Barge and the Steam Packet, taking its current name as this was the location for the boatmen who carried people and goods across the River Wensum. The pub is Grade II listed, so it should remain standing as a residential property even when the rest of the site is converted into housing. For a short while in 1987 the pub’s landlord was Steve Wright, later convicted as a serial killer who killed five women in Ipswich.

  • Streets of Norwich – Blackfriars Street

    Part of my Streets of Norwich project….

    Blackfriars Street, which connects Fishergate with St. Saviour’s Lane.

    This is a new street, which follows the same route as the southern half of Peacock Street, but it got split up when the Inner Ring Road was constructed. George Plunkett’s web-site has some photos of the amazing properties which were once located down this street. Some of his photos of this street from the 1930s make it look quite magical and I’m sure that it would have been seen today as very on-trend and probably had locations selling craft beer down it.

    Council housing on the left, a new building complex of flats and houses behind them at the rear on the left, with Smurfit Kappa (formerly NCB) on the right. Very many years ago I thought that that this was the National Coal Board, but it was Norwich Corrugated Board. Shame it isn’t Norwich Craft Beer, but that’s a different matter.

    Before this street was known as Peacock Street, it had the rather more exciting name of Rotten Row, likely because it was once a water course or ditch which had got a bit, er, damp and mouldy.

    And, onto the name of this street, Blackfriars Street. This would be a wonderful name for a street where perhaps the Blackfriars once had a monastery, or perhaps a barn or some other connection. But, no, the Blackfriars had their religious house elsewhere in the city, which is today used for the Norwich Beer Festival amongst other things.

    So, it seems that someone named the street Blackfriars Street since it is near to, well, Whitefriars. Which it has nothing to do with. The northern half of Peacock Street is still untouched and retains its name, but perhaps the council could have a little look at renaming this street as Rotten Row, because I like that name, it’s atmospheric and historic.

  • Streets of Norwich – Clarence Road

    Part of my little Streets of Norwich project…

    This street was likely once much more peaceful in terms of passing traffic, but it has become the main route into the city centre from Yarmouth and is now the A1242.

    These properties would have been mostly occupied by the middle classes, and there have been several adverts from different houses over the years for domestic staff. In 1902, the owner of 10 Clarence Road was advertising for a housekeeper, noting that they must be middle aged and female. In 1889, the owner of 6 Clarence Road was also busy advertising, they wanted a “good general servant”, as opposed, I assume, to a bad general servant. Pretty much the whole street was advertising at this period though and in 1901 the owners at 7 Clarence Road wanted “a young girl” as their domestic help.

    By the time of the 1939 register, there was quite a variety of different occupations represented along the street, including a railway motor driver, a drapery buyer, a master butcher, an armature winding foreman, a barmaid, an electrical fitter, a gun maker, a typist, a radiographer, a law clerk and a retired leather agent amongst many others.

  • Streets of Norwich – Paradise Place

    This road cuts through from Rouen Road to Thorn Lane, but there’s not much evidence of history left here, because it was all rebuilt following the Second World War.

    The name of Paradise Place isn’t though modern and it dates back much further, with it likely being a garden area, as ‘paradise’ is an old English word for park. When the site was being redeveloped it was decided to reuse the old name for the new road within the housing development.

    I took the above photo standing in what was once Scoles Green (long ago Scholars’ Green), and I would have been able to see the Globe and Anchor pubs from there. Unfortunately, as the road layout has changed, there’s absolutely nothing left here from that period, not even the street line. There is today a development called Scoles Green located opposite on the other side of Rouen Road, which is at least some legacy from the name.

    There was a case in November 1890 which was an early claim of negligence, when Robert Clarke of 13 Paradise Place took legal action against the Prison Commissioners for England following an injury on scaffolding at Norwich prison at Mousehold Heath. The court dismissed Clarke’s pleas, saying that the Employers’ Liability Act didn’t cover the situation and the judge added:

    “These cases must be looked at very narrowly and very carefully, otherwise a burden would be put upon employers which would make the carrying on of a great work intolerable”.

    The Prison Commissioners were though gracious and they suggested that if Clarke didn’t pursue his claim further then they wouldn’t seek an order of costs. Mr. Clarke was unfortunate, as the Workmen’s Compensation Act 1897 would have likely have been a sufficient change in the law to mean that he would have won his case.

  • Streets of Norwich – Broadsman Close

    Part of my Streets of Norwich project…..

    There’s not much to Broadsman Close, although since I’ve decided to visit every road in the city, this had to be included. Unfortunately, there’s not a great deal that can be written about this short stretch of road.

    This is pretty much the limit of the road, an access to the railway sidings and also to a couple of retail outlets. There isn’t much history to this area either as this was once just railway land between one end of the coal yard and the the shunting area for freight trains. Before it was owned by the railways, it was just fields.

    And another view to the entrance of the close. The road was created during the whole Riverside development complex, so somewhere around 2001.

    The Broadsman was a passenger train operated by British Rail which ran from London Liverpool Street to Sheringham between 1950 and 1962. On this point, I’d quite like for services to be named in this manner again, in a similar way to the way that American train services are. The Sheringham Zephyr has a certain ring to it….

  • Streets of Norwich – Stracey Road

    Part of my Streets of Norwich project….

    This is Stracey Road, located off of Thorpe Road and connecting to Lower Clarence Road.

    There’s not really much change to the layout of this area over the last 125 years, with the church behind the properties off Stracey Road still there.

    This building at the end of the road and in the photo above is Marlborough House, which was turned from a private residence into a guest house in 1969. It was also though a dwelling house in the past, as is in March 1909 a William Coxall broke into the property and stole an overcoat, gloves and half a cake. No point going hungry if you plan to go burgling I suppose…..

    These were quite decent houses at the beginning of the twentieth century (I’m sure they are now as well) and there’s a reminder of this as many of them employed servants and maids. The residence at number 10 was looking for a “mother’s help” in December 1902 and they promised that the accommodation for the applicant wouldn’t be in the cellar or attic.

    I had better not upload every single one of the 1939 registers as part of this project, as that might be seen as too much of an infringement of copyright. But, in 1939, there was an inspector of taxes, a surgeon, a children’s nurse, a retired LNER inspector, a railway clerk, a warehouse goods clerk and an inspector for the LNER who all lived on the street.

    On the issue of the street name, I don’t know why it took the name Stracey Road, although the Stracey baronetcy is a local title and the family were important figures in Norwich during the nineteenth century.

  • Streets of Norwich…..

    I was reading recently about Matt Green, who has a project to walk every single street in New York. All told, and including walking some other pedestrian routes in the city, he thinks that this will total around 12,000 kilometres of walking. I’d looked at this project a few years ago, but I was reminded about it by a film which was recently released about Green, entitled “I’m just walkin’”.

    Green writes about his project:

    “In many ways, this is an exhaustive approach to getting to know a place. By the time I’m finished, I’ll have seen as much of New York as anyone ever has. And yet, the sum total of my experiences over these thousands of miles will be just a tiny speck, imperceptible against the immensity of this city.

    What kind of truth can I hope to find? Every step I take will be deeply colored by many transient factors — the weather, the time of day, my mood, the people around me. I could go back to any given spot the next day and have an entirely different experience. Who knows how many fascinating things I’ll totally overlook? Maybe I’ll be facing the other way as I pass by, or maybe the fascination lies in some story or context that I won’t be aware of. There are countless indoor spaces that I’ll never see. My walking experience will be largely confined to street level, even though much of what makes New York New York exists above the first floor.

    If you try to make this quest into a conquest — an attempt to subjugate the bewildering vastness of this metropolis beneath the well-worn heels of my boots — then perhaps it seems dispiriting to contemplate how little of the city I’ll have actually seen and experienced after my extensive journey. But why would you ever want to know a place completely? The excitement of New York, and the whole world for that matter, is that there’s always something else to see, and something else to learn, no matter how long you’ve been around. To me it is profoundly encouraging to think how many secrets will still lie undiscovered after I’ve walked every last one of these goddamned streets. At its core, my walk is an oxymoron: an exhaustive journey through an inexhaustible city.”

    And, I like this as a project, the always seeing something new. So, not wanting to miss out on this transcendental experience, I’ve decided to do the same for Norwich. Not the being followed by a film crew bit, since I can’t imagine even the media giants of Look East would want to follow this rubbish, but simply completing a walking project which aims to enable me to see as much of Norwich as anyone else has.

    Most historians of Norfolk will be aware of the photographs by George Plunkett, an amazing archive of photos that he took over many decades. This has meant that I have an additional angle to look at my meanderings from, as he has photographed many of the locations where I’ll eventually be walking.

    By my estimation, starting as I am in August 2019, I’ll either finish this little project by the end of 2020 or I’ll have got bored of it and so there will be an incomplete set of streets listed. I’ll be surprised though if I don’t find out a lot more about Norwich and it history, which can only be an exciting thing…..

  • Norwich – Ice Cream

    How lovely – a free ice cream from Tesco and Vodafone…… I’m easily pleased.