Category: UK

And a new little project that Jonathan and I are undertaking because this lockdown is clearly here for at least a few more weeks. It’s a bit niche (our project I mean, not the lockdown), I’ll accept that, but there we go. Effectively, it’s walking around Norwich, ancient parish by ancient parish and seeing what is there now compared to a map from the 1880s (the map above is from 1789, but the one from the 1880s is more detailed, which is why we used that). There’s a PDF of these boundaries to provide some extra background to this whole project.

St. Peter Hungate is the fourth parish we’ve done this for and although it’s relatively small in size, it has got some considerable heritage packed into it. There’s substantially more history than I can mention in this post, a reminder of just how much heritage remains in Norwich.

The parish boundaries map.

And a map of the area from the 1880s.

The parish boundary goes right through the middle of this building, better today known as the Halls and it’s where Norwich Beer Festival is held. It’s actually though two buildings, St. Andrew’s Hall on the left and the building off to the right is Blackfriars’ Hall. We ignored the former today, as it’s in a different parish, just looking at Blackfriars’ Hall which is named after the Dominican Order which took over here in 1307. There’s imagery of inside of Blackfriars’ Hall on their official web-site.

The area next to Blackfriars’ Hall, which isn’t accessible to the public, but the parish boundary runs through the middle of it, along the line of the concrete wall.

This keyboard mould was pushed into the concrete in around 2000 by Molly Sole, a local art student, and there was a wave of public interest about it in 2020.

Formerly one residential property, this house has now been divided into two and in the nineteenth century a corner shop was opened. It’s been used for numerous purposes since then, including as a cafe.

At the top of Elm Hill, a pair of eighteenth century residential houses, with a plaque noting that the Friars de Sacco settled in a property on this site which was given to them by William de Gissing in around 1250.

The rear of Blackfriars’ Hall, this is the most complete friary complex remaining in the country. Volunteering at Norwich Beer Festival has numerous exciting benefits, including free beer and food (and meeting people and all that stuff), but also being able to explore this wonderful building.

The entrance to Monastery Yard.

This area is now a car park (I think the city council have a plan for Norwich to become the European City of Car Parks), but there were residential properties which were on the left-hand side here. On the right-hand side is a monastery chapel which was built by Father Ignatius (more on him later), but which was forced to close in 1876.

The rear wall of Monastery Street and there used to be residential properties which backed onto it.

It’s now possible to walk by the River Wensum, but there were once buildings all along here which went down to the riverside. The situation here was that in the medieval period there were some grand properties owned by wealthy merchants on Elm Hill and they would have gone down to the river. Over time, these rear areas were filled with often poor quality residential properties and industrial buildings accessed by courts and yards, most of which were pulled down during slum clearances.

This was once Crown Court Yard and its entrance remains, but the buildings have gone and it’s just a car park now. This really isn’t a great use for a site such as this in a prime part of the city.

This is the remains of Towler’s Court which connects from the river to Elm Hill, with the buildings here being demolished as part of the 1920s slum clearances.

And these are the parish boundary markers on Elm Hill, with the boundary of St. Simon and St. Jude on the left from 1842, and St. Peter Hungate on the right from 1814 and 1834. The parish boundaries are rarely logical, twisting and turning through buildings, so these iron markers really were essential.

And the same parish boundary markers on the other side of the road, a real legacy of this system of dividing up the city.

37 Elm Hill, with an entrance to Norris Court Gardens.

Elm Hill is one of the more historic streets in Norwich and there are numerous Tudor buildings and undercrofts along here. So, what did the city council want to do in the 1920s? They proposed demolishing the properties along here so that they could build a swimming pool. Fortunately, local opposition and the intervention of the Norwich Society saw off these misguided plans and fortunately this marvellous area survived.

Some on the council were entirely blindsided by the local opposition, with Mr Manning saying in a council meeting in 1926:

“The city would be purer and better if the site was cleared. It is one of the festering sores in the city and the council would be well advised if they cleared the whole of the street away and made a public restplace”.

Just weeks later, the city said that it was reversing its decision and the City Engineer was drawing up plans to restore the frontage of the buildings along Elm Hill, working with William Weir, the architect to the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings.

As an aside, there was a meeting in early 1926 held by the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society and the chairman said that he was hopeful that there were some members of the Labour Party present. The chair said that he was aware that it wasn’t everyone in the Labour Party who wanted old buildings pulled down as “some members in the Labour Party were now very cultured and fond of anything artistic and antique”.

I mentioned Crown Court Yard earlier in this post, and this is the sign visible from Elm Hill.

And the entrance to Crown Court Yard from Elm Hill, not that there’s much of a yard to go through to.

Looking back down Elm Hill.

There’s a parish pump and an elm tree, although both are modern replacements.

An old doorway with a plaque commemorating the life of Father Ignatius (1837-1908) who was an Anglican Benedictine monk who wanted to bring back the monastery system. He purchased this house on Elm Hill, definitely suitably located given he could see Blackfriars’ Hall from his window, which must have been a constant inspiration. George Plunkett has a photo from 1935 of this doorway.

Briton’s Arms is currently closed and is for sale, after being run by sisters Sue Skipper and Gilly Mixer for 45 years. The building likely dates to the middle of the fourteenth century and was a beguinage, or a house for religious women. It was the only house in the street to survive the fire in 1507 and for the next couple of centuries it was used by barbour surgeons and individuals involved in the wool trade. Timothy Gridley, a woolcomber, was perhaps the first landlord here when he was listed as a licensee in 1760. The pub was initially known as the Kings Arms, being changed to the Briton’s Arms in the early part of the nineteenth century. It remained in use as a pub until 1945, when it became a restaurant and cafe.

Looking back down Elm Hill.

A drawing, from around the same spot as the above photo, drawn in the 1920s as part of the plan to restore the street.

The porchway of St. Peter Hungate, the first church in the country to be repurposed when it was declared redundant in 1936. It housed a museum of church art, an inspired and forward-thinking idea, but sadly it closed in 1995. Now under the management of the Norwich Historic Churches Trust, the church is now home to Hungate Medieval Art, a charity which promotes the city’s medieval history.

Inside the porch, which can’t be accessed and I took this photo through the gate…. I will at some point hopefully find my photos of when I visited this church during the Flintspiration weekend in 2017. There are some photos of how the church looked on the web-site of Hungate Medieval Art.

There may have been a church on this since the Anglo-Saxon period, although most of the current building dates to the fifteenth century. Much of the cost of this was paid for by John Paston and Margaret Paston, best known perhaps for the Paston Letters. The chancel and tower had been built in 1431 under the supervision of Thomas Ingham, although the chancel had to be rebuilt in 1604 when it fell down, which wasn’t entirely ideal. The church tower was shortened at the beginning of the twentieth century and the belfry was also knocked down, a period when the building was in generally a poor state of repair.

The chancel end of the church with the graveyard behind, which is currently inaccessible to the general public.

This building is on Prince’s Street and it used to be a shop, visible in this 1936 photo from George Plunkett. We went to stand by the entrance to where the shop was, but there’s no trace of it left at all, although the grate is in the same place.

Two more parish markers, St. George Tombland 1777 and St. Peter Hungate from 1834. George Plunkett has a photo of these from 1934, and unfortunately one has gone missing, as his photo showed a St. George Tombland 1828 marker as well.

Located on a new building on the other side of Princes Street is this parish boundary marker from 1834, a real survivor since this had to be taken off an older building and placed onto its replacement.

And that was the end of our little tour, which was quite a moist expedition given the amount of rain. There are 16 listed buildings in this one parish and the streetlines haven’t really changed in this parish for over 500 years, so it’s an area of the city that is worth meandering to.

And a new little project that Jonathan and I are undertaking because this lockdown is clearly here for at least a few more weeks. It’s a bit niche (our project I mean, not the lockdown), I’ll accept that, but there we go. Effectively, it’s walking around Norwich, ancient parish by ancient parish and seeing what is there now compared to a map from the 1880s (the map above is from 1789, but the one from the 1880s is more detailed, which is why we used that). There’s a PDF of these boundaries to provide some extra background to this whole project.

St. Edmund is the third parish we’ve done this for and it’s been the most challenging in terms of trying to compare it to the past, since there’s nearly nothing left with the exception of the medieval church itself.

On the above map from the 1880s, the street of Fish Gate is at the base (now known as Fishergate), Peacock Street is at the left hand side (now known as Blackfriars) and Cowgate Street is on the right hand side (now known as Whitefriars). All of the buildings inside of that have gone, demolished as part of slum clearances, property redevelopment and road building. This entire site is now taken over by Smurfit Kappa, or the building perhaps still better known by most as the Norwich Corrugated Board, or NCB building.

The premises of Smurfit Kappa, who produce various types of packaging. Once on this site there were schools, shops and residential buildings, including the courtyards known as Staff of Life yard and Fleece Yard.

This is the side of the factory and this rather resolved a query we’d had the previous week. The factory wasn’t built in the 1980s as I had thought, it had been refronted in the 1980s and this older part of the building shows the original element of the structure.

Rather helpfully, a staff member from the company came out at this point, as I don’t think they get many tourists taking photos of their building. It’s lovely, but I suspect more people take photos of Norwich Cathedral and Norwich Castle. What the helpful staff member did provide us with were photos of what the building used to look like, and there’s a walkway here over the road that I didn’t know about.

This is another photo provided, showing the factory after it had been refronted, with the walkway now removed. The factory building which that walkway led to has now been demolished and has recently been replaced by residential properties. It was also nice for the two long-standing staff members to help us in this quest, they’d worked there for a considerable period of time and added lots of context to how the area had developed. I also very much appreciated their sending me the photos of the site, the one above shows just how much this area has changed, along with the roundabout to the top of the photo which was built for the inner ringroad.

This is what was formerly known as Peacock Street, which I’ve written about before. These properties are standing on the site of the former Tiger Inn, demolished for road widening in 1936. George Plunkett’s photo of the building shows just what impressive buildings the council has pulled down in its quest to satisfy car drivers.

Over the road is Hansard Lane, which I’ve written about before.

This is the the church of St Edmund, from which the parish takes its name. The church has a small footprint with nearly no graveyard, although it perhaps had one in the medieval period. The church became redundant in the late nineteenth century, one of the early casualties of the sheer volume of churches that Norwich had. There has been a church here since the Anglo-Saxon period, but the current structure is from the fifteenth century onwards. The Anglo-Saxon origins are pretty certain, as the church is dedicated to Edmund the Martyr, the Saxon King of the East Angles. Inside the building, there’s a single nave and chancel, with the porch visible in the left of the above photo dating from the nineteenth century.

Although the building is Grade I listed, it wasn’t far from being demolished in the early 1970s, following a Church of England which seemed to have forgotten that it was the protector of historic churches. Fortunately, the community took an interest into what the church was planning with its disposal of buildings, and it was saved. It’s currently used as a Christian house of worship once again, although has been used for storage and also as the Norwich Pregnancy Crisis centre.

A shed at the rear of the church which is of no historic interest, I just liked the icicles…. I’m so easily pleased.

The church was once surrounded on three sides by a factory building which is visible from the overhead photo earlier on. Today these are riverside residential properties and it’s impossible to walk along the river here as it’s gated off.

It’s possible to reach the river as there’s a car park behind the GP’s surgery.

The view of the River Wensum.

Back on the other side of Fishergate, this is the area behind what was Thompson’s Yard, all now council housing which seems to date from around the 1970s. It’s all sadly devoid of history.

I quite like little stumps of former buildings, a reminder of what was once here. George Plunkett is of help here (yet again), the rest of the building is in one of his photos from 1936. The now demolished building was once the Rampant Horse pub, which had been a licensed premises since the early nineteenth century and was closed in 1912, another pub lost in the wave of forced pub closures.

The building still standing next to this stump of wall was also a pub, the Duke of Marlborough, at 29 Fishergate and George Plunkett excels himself again by providing a photo of the landlord and customers in the pub in March 1939. This pub had started to serve customers from 1708 and traded until its closure in 1952.

It’s hard to establish where the parish boundaries were, but I’ve decided that some of Thoroughfare Yard was probably in the parish of St Edmund. The Church of England don’t supply boundaries of this particular parish, which is likely as the church isn’t in their use any more, and the definitive map doesn’t have them on, so they must have shifted at some stage.

It’s George Plunkett who once again helps me here, as he has a photo from 1936 which has the parish plates visible, and one of them marks the parish boundary of St Edmund.

Thoroughfare Yard goes through to Magdalen Street, but I feel I need to investigate it further on a future expedition to ascertain whether those parish plates are still visible (likely not, as the buildings have gone), or where these parish boundaries were. For the moment, here’s another photo from 1936 that George Plunkett took of how the yard once looked.

So, this wasn’t the most historic of areas that we’ve covered so far, but there were elements that remain from the past. Thanks again to the staff of Smurfit Kappa for their assistance, much appreciated! And, after this walk we went to get chips, just in case anyone wondered.

And a new little project that Jonathan and I are undertaking because this lockdown is clearly here for at least a few more weeks. It’s a bit niche (our project I mean, not the lockdown), I’ll accept that, but there we go. Effectively, it’s walking around Norwich, ancient parish by ancient parish and seeing what is there now compared to a map from the 1880s (the map above is from 1789, but the one from the 1880s is more detailed, which is why we used that). There’s a PDF of these boundaries to provide some extra background to this whole project. Our first parish was St. Helen’s and this is the neighbouring parish of St. Martin at Palace.

The precise ward boundaries are in the PDF above, but this is the area of Norwich that we had a little meander around.

This is an area that neither Jonathan or I were aware of, despite my having walked by it hundreds of times. It’s located in front of the courts complex in Norwich and it’s the former site of the Tabernacle. This church, which held 1,000 people, was opened in 1753 and there’s plenty of information about the history of the building at https://ukwells.org/wells/the-tabernacle-norwich.

The 200th anniversary of the building wasn’t the most fortunate, as it was entirely demolished in 1953 as it had fallen into a state of disrepair. The demolition was perhaps a mistake, this would have remained an interesting and quirky building if it had been allowed to stand. George Plunkett has a photo of what it looked like in 1941 and to give an idea of where it stood, that kerb on the bottom right hand side of the photo is where the Adam and Eve pub is located today.

Nearly nothing remains of the Tabernacle, but this now quite damaged tablet is visible in the area where the house next to the tabernacle stood.

Jonathan noticed a giant rat just before I decided I needed to have a look at this grave, but I braved the area anyway. There is very little I won’t brave for the sake of historical investigation. Well, not snakes though, I wouldn’t have gone in here if it had been ridden with snakes.

This whole area of land is now used by the courts, but 100 years ago this was the site of a large gas works. The road in the foreground is modern, but at this end it follows the route of the old World’s End Lane. The area to the left is now just left empty, but this is where it fronts onto Bishopgate today, although the buildings that George Plunkett took a photo of in 1936 have been demolished. I’m really not sure that the courts need such a large car park, there’s definitely space for a Greggs or something here.

This might not be much to look at, but underneath here is the Norman House (https://www.norwich360.com/normanhouse.html). I visited here on a Heritage Open Day, it’s well worth going to see for those who can, and I’ll put photos up in due course from when I went. Upstairs in the court area there’s also the Arminghall Arch.

This is the Bishop’s Gate (and is where the street Bishopgate gets its name, although I think most people would guess that) which is Grade I listed and was constructed in around 1436. Just behind it is the new Bishop’s Palace, but this was also the entrance to the old Bishop’s Palace, today part of Norwich School.

And I have managed never to notice this sizeable building which is attached to the Bishop’s Gate. This is a medieval barn and granary, although it was much changed in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is now offices. This also leads to the area where St Matthew the Apostle’s church once stood, long since demolished. The former churchyard, which was formerly left as a park, has now been built on by the council.

St. Martin’s Vicarage, serving the church that this parish takes its name from and is located opposite, St. Martin’s at Palace Plain. The building dates to the middle of the nineteenth century, although there was another building here before that.

St. Martin’s at Palace Plain church, which ceased to be used for services in 1971 and was later converted to be used by the Probation Service. It’s now used by the Norwich Historic Churches Trust as their base, and access is encouraged (well, not at the moment, but it will be again when normality resumes). There’s a George Plunkett photo of the interior from 1938, it’s quite a charming and well-ordered church.

When the building was being converted to better suit its new office usage, which as an aside was done quite sensitively, there was an archaeological dig underneath the floor. This discovered that there were once two Saxon wooden churches on this site, with the foundations of the current church dating from the eleventh century. Most of the current structure dates to the fifteenth century, although following a little incident in the 1840s when the nave and chancel fell down (which wasn’t ideal), with a Victorian restoration of the structure. The slum clearances of the 1930s swept away much of the church’s congregation, so it did well to manage to survive as a working parish church until the beginning of the 1970s.

The chancel wall, with the graves having been removed from their original place and shoved up against the church.

A garage type arrangement, visible on the left of the photo, has been inserted under the churchyard. This road is now private access to the courts, but it was once the end of World’s End Lane, so effectively the church site was in the middle of a traffic island.

The parish boundary takes in territory across the River Wensum, requiring a walk over Whitefriars Bridge. I’m not sure why it does this, I assume it was some medieval way of trying to balance out the population sizes between churches.

All that remains of the Anchorite House, part of the Whitefriars Monastery, which stood here between 1256 and 1538.

When younger, I thought that this was the National Coal Board building, which isn’t perhaps a bad guess. It’s actually the premises of Norwich Corrugated Board (well, Smurfit Kappa now, which goes to show that putting a company name on a building in brick isn’t perhaps ideal when the ownership changes) in what is an unusually large manufacturing building still in the centre of the city. More about this in the parish we visited the week after….

The corner area here now has a modern building on it, but this was the site of a shoe factory a century ago. The street here is now known as Whitefriars, although it has historically been known as Cowgate. When the council smashed through the area with their new road, it split Cowgate into two, hence why this section has now been given the new Whitefriars name.

This is Whitefriars Bridge, which has also historically been known as St. Martin’s Bridge. It was first constructed in around 1110, but this story is best told by the formidable George Plunkett (and he has a photo of the bridge from 1933):

“Whitefriars Bridge is one of several in Norwich rebuilt during the 20c. Formerly known as St Martin’s bridge, it is first mentioned in a grant made by King Henry I to Bishop Herbert de Losinga shortly after 1100. In 1290 it was washed away by a great flood, and there are records of it having to be rebuilt at different times throughout the centuries. The earlier ones would have been wooden constructions; during Kett’s rebellion in 1549, we are told, the bridge was deliberately demolished with the dual purpose of impeding the rebels and using its timbers to strengthen the nearby city gates. In 1591 a more permanent edifice was built of stone, with a single pointed arch. This survived until replaced by the present bridge designed by Arthur E.Collins, City Engineer, and built by unemployed labour under a skilled foreman. It is of concrete reinforced by 1.5 inch steel bars and faced with mica quartz and white cement. The first half was opened to traffic on 19th February 1925. Its span of about 80 feet is some 50 feet wider than that of its predecessor.

It was said at the time that the stones of the old bridge would be marked in order that it could be re-erected on a different site, but this was never done. Several suggestions have been put forward as to their fate, one of the least plausible being “that they happened to fall into a wherry as it passed under the bridge” and were conveyed by water to Wroxham and Horning to be used as foundations for riverside bungalows. It sees more likely that some at least were taken from the bridge to the Corporation Depot at Infirmary Square (now Starling Rd), and were later moved to another store at St Martin at Oak Wall Lane, finally ending up as foundations for roadworks on Aylsham Rd.”

Now known as Quayside, this row of houses facing the river are around 100 years old. Although it wouldn’t have been possible at the time, there’s a path now along the river for those want to walk along it, a project which must have showed considerable foresight to establish.

Pyes Yard, which has also been known as Fyes Yard and Pyes Court. In 1938, there was a slum clearance of the 17 houses down here, so everything of historic interest down to the river is lost. George Plunkett took a photo shortly before the area was condemned, which might have today made for some rather beautiful townhouses with a little (well, quite a lot) of modernisation.

The old signage to the yard.

The buildings facing Palace Plain have survived, even if the yards behind them have now been taken down. The white building on the left is 1 and 2 Palace Plain, originally built in the seventeenth century, then used as a shop before more recently being incorporated into an office building. The white building in the centre of the photo is what is historically known as the White Lion pub which has been a licensed premises from the mid eighteenth century and which was originally built in the sixteenth century as a residential property. When the courts were opened in 1985, the pub name was changed to the Wig and Pen, perhaps to tempt the wealthy lawyers and judges over. The red brick building on the right of the photo is Cotman House, originally built in the eighteenth century as a residential property.

Cotman House is so named as John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) lived at the property. He was one of the artists who was part of the Norwich School of Painters, one of the first local art movements in the UK. The group was originally led by John Chrome, before Cotman took over to keep the informal movement going, although it fell apart a bit when he moved to London.

The back of what was Busseys, the Ford car dealership, whose city centre land no doubt just became worth far more for building than it did for selling cars. The street that runs behind the back of these buildings, connecting Bedding Lane to Pigg Lane, is Joseph Lancaster Way.

I’m not entirely confident that I know why this modern street has been given this name, so I’ll have to make a guess. The area behind Busseys was once a school and there is a Joseph Lancaster who was important in the nineteenth century for the establishment of more modern educational methods. He’s known for the phrase “a place for everything and everything in its place”, which makes him sound rather organised…. Anyway, I’ll probably find out that it’s been named after some local councillor, but that’s the best reasoning I’ve got as to the naming of the street.

The building in the centre is 17 Palace Street, which dates from the eighteenth century, although the range stretching back a little at the rear is from the seventeenth century. The building next to it is modern and is where the entrance to Busseys once was, and George Plunkett has a photo of that from 1987.

That concluded the day’s historical activities, we then went to try Ron’s Chips.