Street furniture: palimpsests

15 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

Tags

architectural palimpsests, street furniture, streetscape, victorian ironwork

I’m fascinated by the idea of the city as a palimpsest – a parchment scraped down to be used again with signs of previous lives grinning through.

On the 1000-year-old Archimedes Palimpsest, previously unknown works by the Greek mathematician were poorly erased then overwritten with religious texts (http://www.pbs.org/)

Old street furniture illustrates this perfectly: usually it will be discarded if it doesn’t fit the current style guide but where it is allowed to remain it can tell us much about the layering of time.

Gybson’s Conduit on the boundary wall of Bullards Anchor Quay Brewery in Westwick Street once faced the road but when the brewing hall was converted into apartments in the 1980s the pump was restored [1] and re-sited to face into the development. This early Renaissance monument was built by Norwich Sheriff and brewer, Robert Gybson. It appears to be a philanthropic gesture (‘for the ease of the common people’) but it was actually a condition of buying the site on which St Lawrence’s Well had stood since at least the time of Edward the Confessor [2, 3]. Gybson seems to have been an angry man and for ‘failing to be buxom to the mayor‘ he was deprived of the freedom of the city and condemned ‘forever henceforth to be a foreigner‘ [2]. Coo!

In 1860, John Henry Gurney erected this drinking fountain and obelisk to mark the site of an earlier wellhead (ca 1700-1850) that had raised water to be stored for the higher parts of the city [3].

The Gurney Drinking Fountain and Obelisk (1860) in Tombland

Sewell Park – the triangle of land between Constitution Hill and St. Clement’s Hill –was given to the city in 1908 by the Sewell family. Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty when she lived about a mile away at Old Catton. The triangular horse trough – now a flower bed – that guards the park entrance is doubly appropriate.

Black Beauty was published by local printing firm Jarrolds and Anna Sewell’s name is commemorated on one of the shields decorating the first floor of Jarrolds department store in London Street.

The trough on Castle Meadow, commemorating the popular Dr Darrell, was moved from outside his practice at All Saints Green [4]. It is reminiscent of a time when water troughs were placed along the road between the railway station and the old cattle market, beneath which Castle Mall now stands.

Following John Snow’s pioneering example of epidemiology in 1854, when he mapped an outbreak of cholera to a particular pump in London’s Soho [5], the importance of clean public water was foremost in the Victorian mind. Erected in 1860, this Portland Stone fountain outside St George Colegate was for public consumption: the marble basin for people and the troughs beneath for dogs.

Presented by Mr JC Barnham, designed by architects Messrs Benest and Newton, and sculpted by Mr. Joseph Stanley of Norwich

Bearing in mind John Snow’s findings about the source of water, this parish pump – patented by Shalder of nearby Redwell Street – is worryingly situated next to the raised burying ground of St John Maddermarket. The water was once described as ‘pure essence of churchyard’ [2].

At a time when potable water was only just being piped into some homes, the need for fresh drinking water for the poor was often met by philanthropic commissions. Charles Pierre Melly had already provided many drinking fountains in Liverpool and in 1859 he presented Norwich with this fountain situated at the east end of the Guildhall [6].

FH fire hydrant signs are everyday parts of the streetscene but this FP sign in Unthank Road refers to an earlier ‘fire plug’. The small stretch of railings to which it is attached only survived because of the fire hydrant sign – most other railings and gates having been removed in WWII in a morale-boosting bid to make guns. However, the inferior quality of the metal was such that it was likely used for other purposes, if not dumped in the Thames [7].

Near Bay Cottage, 14 Unthank Road

… and to round off the water theme, what is thought to be the earliest example of a concrete pissoir is now closed [2].

St Crispins Road near Barn Road roundabout

Due to that programme of scrappage in WWII there are precious few examples of locally-sourced ironwork on our streets. These curvaceous Art Nouveau-like railings around St Giles on the Hill reflect the flowing tracery of the beautiful east window from the Curvilinear Decorated period of the early C14 [8]

Some domestic gates have survived; Mill Hill Road has several examples, some refurbished. The gate below, with inverted curve, is a common pattern still copied when gates are replaced.

From a time, pre-Ocado, when tradesmen brought your orders to your (back) door …

Mount Pleasant

Clarendon Road has some of the best examples of Victorian ironwork.

Clarendon Road

Again on Clarendon Road, these cast-iron railings and gates separate two fine Victorian houses from the roadway. But further examples of street furniture can just be glimpsed in the side alley: a bollard and a puzzling pipe.

Another fine set of cast-iron railings on Clarendon Road. Just creeping into shot is a bollard (bottom left) and a curious pipe (top left).

First, the bollards. The Norwich City Council’s Streetscape Manual (2006) [10] mentions two designs: a plain octagonal post – generally painted dark green – used in the city centre, and a more ornate cast-iron bollard that was photographed by George Plunkett in 1931 and is probably Victorian [11]. Here, just outside the city walls, in the Heigham Grove Conservation Area, two of these latter bollards guard the alleyway between Clarendon Road and Neville Street. Two years ago I wrote about the bollards when local residents campaigned against the council’s plan to remove them to allow access for a mechanical street sweeper [11].

It’s worth repeating the message that vestiges of a previous age are a vital part of the feel, the texture, of the streetscape. This design of bollard is entirely appropriate to one of the city’s finest late Victorian streets – as recognised in the council’s own planning appraisal:

“Several surviving cast iron railings along Clarendon Road are particularly fine and rare examples of once common Victorian ironwork found in Norwich cast by local firms such as Barnard, Bishop and Barnard(s)” [9].

This more ornate version can be found around churchyards, such as St Peter Mancroft and St Gregory’s but it can also be found at secular locations like Bishop Bridge (below) and the steps to the Castle at Davey Place.

: A convocation of traditional cast-iron bollards on Bishop Bridge. (Note the electric ‘gas’ lamp).

The historic Norwich Lanes [12] have been delineated by painting the modern octagonal bollards red instead of the more usual green. This references the colour of the plant dye, madder, that was so important to the city’s once-thriving cloth industry. Twenty-one of these bollards are crowned with bronze sculptures designed by Oliver Creed [13].

Oliver Creed’s bronze capitals to red bollards in Lobster Lane (L) and Swan Lane (R).

Within the jurisdiction of Norwich Cathedral, distinctive canon-style, cast-iron bollards are used. Since the partnership of Norwich ironfounders, John Francis & Thomas Blyth, was dissolved in 1840 the bollards must be at least 178 years old [14].

cathedral duo.jpg

Back in the alleyway on Clarendon Road we glimpsed what was a tall, cast-iron stench pipe. If we think of such pipes at all we probably think of vent pipes that extend above the eaves. However, the pipe belonging to Anglia Water is part of the public sewerage system, its function being to regulate the pressure in the sewer when waste passes through.

Stench or stink pipe in the alleyway between Clarendon Road and Neville Street. The cast iron pipe bears the city’s coat of arms and was made by Barnards Ltd, who superseded Barnard Bishop and Barnards Norwich Ironworks in 1907.

I did wonder whether a column at the junction of Newmarket and Christchurch Roads might have been left over from the electric tramways or electric lighting of the early C20 but it is identical to the Clarendon Road example and the wire balloon on top confirms it to be another stench pipe.

Newmarket Road at Christchurch Road

Another such pipe, by another of the city’s famous foundries – Boulton and Paul, is on Waverley Road. Listing stench pipes may sound train-spotterish except these are living reminders of our industrial history that should not be airbrushed from view in search of a uniform modern look. Only a year ago, the Cambridge News reported that residents on Hills Road/Queen Edith’s Way, Cambridge were – in their words, not mine – ‘kicking up a stink’ about plans to remove a tall, cast iron, Victorian stench pipe [15]. And last September the Eastern Daily Press reported that a tram standard had been removed for ‘safety reasons’ (Pah!) from the junction of West Pottergate and Heigham Road [16]. This matters because it was the very last post belonging to the Norwich Electric Tramways that had replaced horse-drawn omnibuses in 1900. The post that once carried its electricity was sturdy enough a century later when George Plunkett photographed it reincarnated as an electric lamp post. Now that link is lost.

Heigham Rd former tram standard [7787] 2000-11-24.jpg

The last relic of the Norwich Electric Tramways 1900-1935 ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

On Bank Plain is a fine cast iron lamp post base ca 1900, updated with an electric lamp.

Lampost trio.jpg

In the early C19 the city was lit by oil lamps but the fuel was replaced by coal gas from about 1825-30. Although a few electric lamps had begun to appear at the end of the C19 it wasn’t until 1910-13 that the gas lamps were converted to electricity, except for a few in unadopted streets. This may explain the survival of the old gas lamp in St Giles Terrace, photographed by George Plunkett in 1955 [2]. It has been converted to electricity but retains its original lantern.

St Giles Terrace off Bethel Street

Walking the streets of Georgian or Victorian Norwich would undoubtedly leave mud on your boots and before entering the house this had to be removed with a boot scraper. The French are more direct in naming their scrapers decrottoirs, acknowledging that excrement (crotte) is a major component of ‘mud’ from streets populated by horses and dogs. A walk past the rich merchants’ houses in St Giles Street reveals several examples of cast-iron scrapers, either free-standing or (usually paired) set into the walls.

boot scraper.jpg

Now that most of us carry a mobile phone we can only wonder when phone boxes will become obsolete. The iconic model below, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, went into production in 1936 although modern ‘heritage’ versions are still made in the official colour, currant red [17].

At the corner of St Saviour’s churchyard in Magdalen Street

There are several styles of red post box in the city. Left, is a Victorian ‘Penfold’ with an acanthus bud on top, designed by architect John Penfold. I remember a Penfold post box at the bottom of Guildhall Hill; the present one outside the City Hall is probably a replica made in the 1980s [17]. The modern post box derives from the version made in the reign of Victoria’s son, Edward VII (centre); the advantage was that the post slot was integral to the door so that no letters could skulk in the top of the box [17]. The current Elizabethan ERII box is virtually identical.

(L) Penfold-type, St Peter’s Street/City Hall. (C) Edward VII, Opie Street. (R) Elizabeth II, Unthank Road.

A personal favourite is the original Victorian wall box in Upper St Giles. This now fronts The Post Room antiques and interiors shop but I first encountered it when it belonged to the Upper St Giles sub-post office. Remember post offices?

Bonus track

Villagers of Mellis, Suffolk, converted this £1 postbox to a colour therapy room

Sources

Thanks to: Lesley Kant-Cunneen for information about ironwork in Clarendon Road and Alan Theobald for discussions about street furniture.

Clocks

15 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

clocks, Public art

Imagine a time before clocks, when the working day was divided according to the passage of the sun: the sun comes up, the sun goes down and somewhere in the middle is a ploughman’s lunch.

The Creation of Light. C15 roof boss Norwich Cathedral

The Babylonians marked the passage of the sun by following the shadow of a stick known as the gnomon – ‘one who knows’. On Norwich’s ‘parish church’, St Peter Mancroft, there is no clock tower but there is, on the south transept, a sundial whose gnomon is in the shape of crossed keys: Saint Peter’s keys to the kingdom of heaven.

On St Andrew’s Church the X-shaped cross – the psaltire on which the saint was crucified – provides the gnomon.

St Andrew’s was re-built in Perpendicular style 1499-1518 on the site of a previous church, making it one of the last (late) medieval churches in Norwich. This large hall church, squeezed between two alleyways, is second only in size to St Peter Mancroft.

St Andrews possesses a clock as well as a sundial. The first mechanical clocks, driven by a weight whose fall was regulated by an escapement movement, appeared in the 1200s. The world’s oldest working clock (1386) in Salisbury Cathedral has no face since it was designed solely for striking the hour, as once required for the monastic Liturgy of the Hours – the daily routine of communal prayer at seven set hours of the day [1]. The striking of a bell to mark the hours was therefore originally religious: either private (in churches and monasteries) or public (the call to worship).

Once, Norwich Cathedral had an astronomical clock (1321-5), built by Roger de Stoke [2], that preceded Salisbury’s but was probably destroyed in the C16. The heavy weight in such clocks could also drive accompanying automata of which Norwich had 59, “including a procession of choir monks and figures representing the days of the month, lunar and solar models, and an astronomical dial” [3]. Imagine.

The Jacobean clock-jacks, or Jacks o’ the clock, were made to ring bells c1620; the clock above them is Victorian. South transept Norwich Cathedral [2].

Probably the most famous clock-jack in East Anglia is in St Edmund’s Southwold, which provided the logo for Adnams Brewery.

Left: St Edmund’s Southwold; right, © Adnams Brewery

As we recently saw in the Paston Treasure, displayed in the Castle Museum [4], the steady ticking of a clock offers an easy metaphor for the span of human life. In this vanity painting the hourglass, the guttering candle and the clock, all remind us of the fleeting nature of time and the worthlessness of human goods: “Vanity of vanities. All is vanity”.

The Paston Treasure (1660s). Courtesy of Norfolk Museums Collection NWHCM: 1947.170

In measuring the passing of time, clocks confront us with our own mortality. From their town hall clock, the city fathers of Manchester exhorted their citizens with: ‘Teach us to number our days’. Similar mottos include: ‘Time and tide wait for no man‘ or ‘Tempus fugit’. [Pathetically, I can no longer read tempus fugit without thinking of, ‘Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana‘, which Wikipedia [5] offers as an example of antanaclasis (me neither)].

‘Tempus fugit’, designed by CFA Voysey (1903) ©Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Norwich does possess the ‘Forget me not‘ clock on the tower of St Michael-at-Plea. The previous ‘useless’ mechanism was replaced in 1889 by William Redgrave Bullen who, according to the Norwich Mercury, had the dial plate repainted ‘a deep chocolate’ [2].

The date of 1827 suggests that an earlier dial was retained. There was once a sundial on the porch but this was replaced in 1887 by the statue above the door [6].

Bullen is an alternative spelling of Boleyn and clock-restorer WR Bullen is said to be a descendant of Queen Anne Boleyn [7] who was born at Blickling. In the C17, Sir Henry Hobart built Blickling Hall on the ruins of the Boleyn’s manor house; the heraldic bulls on the Hobart crest [8] seem to be a punning allusion to the previous occupants.

Bulls and the Hobart crest above the doorway to the Jacobean Blickling Hall. Courtesy of racns.co.uk

WR Bullen’s business in London Street recently celebrated its 130th anniversary.

Other jewellers are available …

Aleks, London Street; Dipples, Swan Lane; H Samuel, The Walk

Clocks also remind us of the mortality of others, as in this tribute to the employees of Laurence, Scott & Co who died in the First World War.

Laurence, Scott & Co, founded in 1883, provided Norwich with its first electric lighting then grew their business by producing variations of the electric motor. The factory can be found in the hinterland behind the Canaries’ football stadium at Carrow Road. This clock, plus a plaque listing the fallen, commemorates those who died in WW1.

The clock on the tower of St Clement’s Colegate was restored in 2004 in memory of those who died in the Second World War.

St Clement’s Church at the junction of Colegate and Fye Bridge Street

As a military building, Britannia Barracks on Mousehold Heath is unusual in that it was built in the Queen Anne Revival style of the Arts and Crafts Movement, or as Pevsner and Wilson have it, ‘the Norman Shaw style’ [6]. It was built in 1886-7; the army moved out in 1959 to be replaced by prisoners in the 1970s. There are clock faces on all sides of the clock tower although the dials facing into the prison probably carry the extra layer of meaning of time as punishment: ‘serving time’ or ‘doing time’.

When time was estimated by sundial, different towns often kept different times, each based on local noon. As the Earth rotates relative to the sun, a town one degree longitude west of another will experience solar noon four minutes later [9]. The prime meridian of 0 degrees longitude is at Greenwich, UK (although the stainless steel strip marking 0° has been shown by GPS to be 102 metres east of this). On the day this post was published, solar noon in Norwich was at 12.03:34 Greenwich Mean Time while on the other side of the UK, in Aberystwyth, it was 12.25:05. When travelling across the country, stage coaches had to allow a generous leeway to accommodate different local mean times [9,10]. With the coming of trains and the complexity of making timetables something had to be done to standardise time so in 1847 the Railway Clearing House recommended that every rail company adopt Greenwich Mean Time as the standard ‘railway time’.

Of the city’s three stations Norwich Thorpe is the only one remaining. It was opened by the Yarmouth and Norwich Railway in 1844 [11]

Until pocket watches stopped being luxury items – probably around the early C19 – the public depended on the church clock to tell time. From Guildhall Hill, at the top of the marketplace, you only had to look down St Giles Street to read the time from the ten-foot-diameter dial of St Giles Church whose single clock face was directed straight down the street. To increase visibility the hour-hand was supplemented in 1865-6 by a six and a half foot/two-metre-long minute hand [2].

But in the C19 – in what has been called the democratisation of time – clocks started to appear more frequently on secular buildings [10]. Just before the restoration of St Giles, Norwich Guildhall received a clock and clock turret, presented in 1850 by the mayor, Henry Woodcock [2].

The Victorian clock turret was added to the east end of the Guildhall by the mayor on the understanding that the ceiling of the council chamber would be taken down to expose the original ornate ceiling [2].

The clock on the tall tower of City Hall has superseded the Guildhall clock, presently stuck at noon.

Who could fail to feel a glow of civic pride on reading that, ‘The City Hall … must go down in history as the foremost English public building of between the wars‘ [6]? Norwich had missed the campaign of Victorian civic building seen in our northern cities and this allowed its City Hall (1938) to be built in a fresh, modern style. Architects, James & Pierce, therefore used a pared-down Scandinavian style with an interior that showed the influence of Art Deco. Consistent with this, the mace-like hour hand on the clock tower (top left) is surrounded by symbols instead of the Roman numerals that usually marked the hours on public clocks. The pattern is repeated in the Council Chamber (top right) and the Mancroft Room (bottom left). However, editorial control was not exerted over the clock above the lift (bottom right), which seems out of place in this Art Deco palace.

The City Hall and St Giles Church clocks feature in the mural on the side of the Virgin Money Lounge on Castle Street.

Mural by Derek Jackson for Norwich Business Improvement District (BID)

Throughout the C19, commercial enterprises like banks and insurance companies increasingly displayed public clocks. While advertising their sense of public duty (and their name) it also allowed them to borrow prestige and respectability from the church and civic authorities who had previously been the guardians of time.

Advertising Norwich Union outside Bignold House No 9 Surrey Street, once the home of Norwich Union Fire Office

Opposite this clock at No 8 Surrey Street is the Norwich Union (now Aviva) building designed by George Skipper in 1904-5, looking as solid and durable as any bank. Inside, is the famous Marble Hall made from stone surplus to requirements at London’s Westminster Cathedral [6].

Norwich Union’s Marble Hall

A century later, large public buildings maintain the tradition of displaying clocks to the public.

intu Chapelfield shopping mall, opened 2005

The earlier Castle Mall (1993) has a clock tower, shown here on the right.

The clock on the left, in the Back of the Inns, is a relic from an ironmongery business that disappeared from the city some time ago. The company’s internet-unfriendly name appears on the other side.

One-time sellers of door furniture

Thanks to those of you who bought the book. I’m delighted to say it is in its third print run since Christmas.

Also available from Waterstones

Bonus track

About an hour after posting this article, reader Jeremy Whigham mentioned the clock on West Acre All Saints, Norfolk, that had the letters of ‘Watch and Pray’ instead of numerals. Too good to miss.

From, http://bystargooseandhanglands.blogspot.co.uk/

Sources

https://www.salisburycathedral.org.uk/visit-what-see/medieval-clock
Houseago, J. and Houseago, A. (1996). Clockmaking in Norfolk. Part I: Up to 1900. In, Norfolk and Norwich Clocks and Clockmakers, Eds C. and Y. Bird. Pub: Phillimore.
Pruitt, E.R. (2016). Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. Pub: Phillimore. University of Pennsylvania Press.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/12/15/the-pastons-in-norwich/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow;_fruit_flies_like_a_banana
Pevsner, N. and Wilson, W. (2002). The Buildings of England. Norfolk 1. Pub: Yale University Press.
https://www.bullensjewellers.co.uk/about
http://racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=27
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_meridian_(Greenwich)
Peters, Rosemary A. (2013). Stealing Things: Theft and the Author in Nineteenth-Century France. Pub: Lexington Books
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwich_railway_station

Thanks. I am grateful to Sarah Cocke of www.racns.co.uk/ for supplying the Blickling image.

Faces

13 Tuesday Feb 2018

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

George Skipper, norwich cathedral, Norwich City Hall, Public art, roof bosses, Stained Glass

The face is the most important part of one’s identity. It conveys a visible expression of personality and can used in art to evoke a range of emotions. But at a time when faces were not universally recognised other symbols could be used to underline identity.

“The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.” (Cicero)

I was reminded of this by the painted rood screen from St Mary’s North Elmham. Despite having their faces scratched in the reign (probably) of Edward VI the rather mournful saints, Barbara, Cecilia and Dorothy (Babs, Cissy and Dot) can still be recognised to be portraits of the same woman. But likeness to long-departed saints is hardly the point here; instead, beauteous Barbara is identified by the tower in which she was hidden from the world, Cecilia’s virginity is signified by her wreath of lilies, and Dorothy (patron of gardeners, amongst others) holds a bunch of flowers. The face is incidental to the virtue signified.

Rood screen, St Mary’s North Elmham, Norfolk (ca 1474) saved from destruction by being used as floorboards. SS Barbara, Cecilia and Dorothy

In the late medieval period Norwich was a major centre for glass painting and the often stereotypical faces of saints and angel can be recognised throughout East Anglia [2, 3]. The same faces appear in various guises suggesting they were drawn from the same cartoon. For example, the angel from the Toppes-sponsored windows in St Peter Mancroft can be overlaid pretty faithfully upon the saint from the ‘Toppes’ window in Norwich Guildhall. Both were painted ca 1450 by the workshop of John Wighton, in which his wife and son also worked [4].

Left, St Peter Mancroft; right, Guildhall; centre, overlay

A wonderful sequence of images from the late C15 is to be found in the chantry chapel of St Helen’s in the Great Hospital, Norwich. These roof bosses may have escaped desecration because Henry VIII’s zealously Protestant and iconoclastic son, Edward VI, handed over control of the chapel to the mayor, sheriff and citizens of Norwich [1].

Two faces are reputed to be of Queen Anne of Bohemia and her husband King Richard II, but the evidence is slender. The woman does wear a hard-to-see crown: the man does not, but then he was usurped [1].

Reputedly, Queen Anne of Bohemia and King Richard II

Queen Anne and her husband visited Norwich in 1383 but by the time Bishop Goldwell (rebus, a golden well) …

… had this vaulted ceiling built (ca 1472-1499) the couple had been dead a century. In the glorious Wilton Diptych, Richard II kneels clean-shaven before the Virgin. So if the boss of the hirsute man is meant to represent Richard then it may not be a likeness but a representation of deposed majesty, wearing a headband instead of a crown.

The Wilton Diptych 1395-9. National Gallery

Norwich Cathedral has over 1000 bosses carved into the keystones of its roof vaults – more than any other religious building in the world. In the cloisters are several of the Green Man – a pagan figure representing, perhaps, the rebirth of nature. However … just as the term ‘ploughman’s lunch’ seems to have been a fiction concocted by The Cheese Bureau (surely a Philadelphia soul group?) as recently as the 1950s, so – it is claimed – the term ‘Green Man’ as applied to church roof bosses can only be traced back to an article by Lady Raglan in 1939 [quoted in 5]. Can this be right? Anyway, the faces can be classified as: a ‘leaf mask’ made from a single leaf; a ‘foliate face’ made from several leaves; ‘disgorgers’, with leaves or vines exiting mouth, ears, nose; this one seems to be a ‘peeper’ or ‘watcher’.

A face peeps out behind the leaves in the cloisters of Norwich Cathedral (1316-19)

Roof bosses also decorate the vaulting inside St Ethelbert’s Gate to the Cathedral. The present gate was built ca 1316 (restored in 1815 and 1964), incorporating the remains of the Norman gate burnt in the riots of 1272 [6]. The conflict centred on a jousting target (quintain) in Tombland at which two priory men were detained. The prior replied by bringing in armed men from Yarmouth who went on the rampage; the citizens, in turn, attacked the priory, set fire to St Ethelbert’s Gate and parts of the cathedral itself were set ablaze. Thirteen of the prior’s men were killed but King Henry III, who came from Bury St Edmunds to restore order, put 35 citizens to death: by dragging some behind a cart; by hanging, drawing and quartering others; and by burning alive a woman who set fire to the gate. To compensate the priory the citizens were required to fund the rebuilding of the gate. The naturalistic head on the boss looks down with distaste.

The Despenser Retable survived the Reformation by being inverted as a table top. Now, this altarpiece can be seen in St Luke’s Chapel in Norwich Cathedral. One intriguing hypothesis is that this late medieval treasure was commissioned by Henry le Despenser, the ‘Fighting Bishop’ (1370-1406), to mark the suppression of the Peasant’s Revolt by Richard II and perhaps his own part in the East Anglian skirmishes [7]. Incidentally, the rich red colour in the painting was known as ‘Norwich Red’ and was later used in the city’s famous C18 shawls [7].

The Despenser Retable, Norwich Cathedral

The first panel depicts the Scourging of Jesus. Pilate’s representative handles Jesus’ hair while the face of the man holding the scourge is “contorted with the effort” [7] of delivering the punishment (out of shot, both his feet spring off the ground).

On Agricultural Hall Plain, between the Hall (‘Anglia TV’) and Shirehall, is George Wade’s memorial. Unveiled in 1904, ‘Peace’ records the 300 Norfolk men who served in the Boer War. The mood, subdued rather than victorious, is conveyed by the angel’s neutral expression as she sheathes her sword [8].

‘Peace’, George Wade’s Boer War memorial on Agricultural Hall Plain (1904)

In St Martin-at-Palace Plain, next to the Wig and Pen pub, is Cotman House. One of the city’s favourite sons, the painter John Sell Cotman, lived here from 1823 to 1834. If he had been born in London rather than the provinces an artist of Cotman’s stature would surely have been commemorated in Westminster Abbey.

JS Cotman by Hubert Miller 1914 [8]

Cotman House, where John Sell Cotman opened his ‘School for Drawing and Painting in Water-colours’ [9]

Magdalen Street and nearby Colegate have a good number of late medieval and Georgian doorways [see 10, 11]. Pevsner and Wilson judged No. 44 to be the climax of Magdalen Street, with “one of the most ornate Georgian façades in Norwich.” [12]. George Plunkett wondered if the doorway might have been constructed to designs by Thomas Ivory, architect of The Assembly Rooms and the Octagon Chapel [13]. The keystone on the arch is decorated with a classically-influenced head.

The closed eyes of the head suggest a death mask: the ostrich feathers in the figure’s hair signify a woman of fashion [14].

At the beginning of the C20, Norwich architect George Skipper played with a variety of influences, including Art Nouveau [15], but for the city’s banks and insurance companies he used a Neo-Classical Palladian style, adding seriousness with borrowed classical motifs. Above the door of the London and Provincial Bank in London Street (shortly to be vacated by GAP) is a female head [8]. The mild erosion makes it difficult to confirm whether she wears a garland, synonymous with Flora the Roman goddess of flowers and Spring. However, the swags of fruit at the putti’s feet convey the required air of prosperity.

The same year (1906), Skipper commissioned similar stone sculpture for the Norwich and London Accident Assurance in St Giles Street (currently St Giles Hotel). Once more, a sense of prosperity is conveyed by the swags of fruit and flowers.

Although the androgynous head bears a laurel wreath, rather than flowers, the festoons of fruit and flowers again are indicative of Flora.For the later (1928-30) Lloyds Bank on Gentleman’s Walk by HM Cautley, a similar head was used, decorated with a mini-swag of finely carved flowers. Richard Cocke suggests this is a direct tribute to Skipper’s London and Provincial Bank around the corner [8].

Nearby, on Red Lion Street is another Skipper building, Commercial Chambers built in 1903 [15]. The facade is almost riotously decorated in buff terracotta (probably Doulton). The first floor cornice is supported by two boys and a girl, almost certainly sculpted from life, making a change from the usual putti.

Fig Trio.jpg

Crowning the building is a cowled figure making entries into a ledger with a quill. This might reasonably be thought to represent the owner, the accountant Charles Larking; but as we saw previously it is clearly modelled on the architect himself [15].

At about the time that Skipper was designing these buildings, his pupil J. Owen Bond – who was responsible for some of the few Modernist buildings in the city – designed the Burlington Buildings in Orford Place (1904). Instead of female heads, the building was decorated with three pairs of full-length, reclining women: one of each pair reading a book, the other holding a cornucopia.

‘Burlington Buildings’ was built for offices rather than for a bank or insurance company. Unfortunately, this fine Renaissance-style building is hard to appreciate, being rather hemmed in at the back of Debenhams.

The Horn of Plenty is not especially associated with Flora and could just as well refer to Concordia (goddess of Peace and Harmony), Abundantia (Abundance personified) and Fortuna (Luck and Fortune). In architecture it seems that the symbolism of plenty may be more important than adherence to any particular goddess.

This can be seen on the bases that James Woodford sculpted for the flagpoles in the memorial gardens outside the City Hall [16]. Each base shows an Assyrian-influenced priestess holding an overflowing basket. Woodford’s references to the two-dimensional paintings and reliefs from the Assyrian and Ancient Egyptian empires are entirely fitting outside a City Hall that shunned Gothic and Classical motifs in favour of Modernism. As in Egyptian art, the figure presents a combination of frontal and profile views. With the head in profile it is difficult to express emotion; it is the associated animals and plants that bear the symbolic load, celebrating the region’s agricultural abundance.

A celebration of Agriculture by James Woodford (1938), who also sculpted the 18 roundels celebrating Industry on the City Hall’s bronze doors [8].

cheeky face.jpg

Sources

Rose, Martial. (2006). A Crowning Glory: the vaulted bosses in the chantry of St Helen’s, the Great Hospital, Norwich. Pub: Lark’s Press, Dereham.
Woodforde, C. (1950) The Norwich School of Glass-Painting in the Fifteenth Century. Pub, Oxford University Press
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2015/12/19/norfolks-stained-glass-angels/
King, D. J. (2006) The Stained Glass of St Peter Mancroft, Norwich, CVMA (GB), V, Oxford.
https://thecompanyofthegreenman.wordpress.com
Meeres, Frank (2011). The Story of Norwich. Pub: Phillimore and Co Ltd. (A highly readable account of the city’s history).
McFadyen, Phillip (2015). Norwich Cathedral Despenser Retable. Pub: Medieval Media, Cromer.
Cocke, Richard (with photography by Sarah Cocke) (2013). Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk. Pub; Liverpool University Press. (An essential source for anyone interested in East Anglian sculpture).
Kent, Arnold and Stephenson, Andrew (1949). Norwich Inheritance. Pub: Jarrold and Sons Ltd
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/06/16/entrances-and-exits-doors-ii/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/05/26/early-doors-tudor-to-georgian/
Pevsner, Nikloaus and Wilson, Bill (1997). The Buildings of England. Norfolk I, Norwich and North-East. Pub: Yale University Press.
http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/mag.htm
https://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/regency-fashion-how-a-lady-accommodated-her-head-feathers-at-the-end-of-the-18th-century/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/02/15/the-flamboyant-mr-skipper/
http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=msib2_1208277486

Thanks. Chris Walton writes the very informative Company of the Green Man website [5] and I am grateful to him for information on foliate faces. I thank Revd Dr Peter Doll, Canon Librarian of Norwich Cathedral for permission to photograph the Despenser Retable and Dr Roland Harris, Cathedral Archaeologist for information on the cathedral bosses and the Ethelbert Gate.

Bonus track

Nelson with his favourite alpenhorn

Unfortunately, the surface on this statue of Admiral Lord Nelson by Thomas Milnes (1852) – which is situated in the Upper Cathedral Close – is now quite worn and has lost much of its detail [8]. This, combined with its north-facing aspect, doesn’t favour photography but I couldn’t omit Norfolk’s most famous son, albeit ‘below the line’.

The Norwich coat of arms

15 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Norwich City Hall, Norwich coat of arms, Norwich Guildhall, Stained Glass

Coats of arms designed to identify groups of soldiers in the heat of battle were also used by towns and cities to identify themselves and the source of their authority.

Both symbols on the Norwich coat of arms are martial and point to a long relationship with the crown that conferred certain privileges upon the city. This civic coat of arms is described as: “Gules, a castle triple-towered and domed argent; in base a lion passant guardant Or”. Simply put: red shield, silver castle, gold lion. There are, however, many stylistic variations: as often as not the triple-towered castle isn’t domed.

Undomed or domed. The Norwich City coat of arm in the City Hall (1938). Left, on the Bethel Street door to the Treasurer’s Department and right, inside the ‘Rates Hall’.

The castle, of course, is Norman but it was about a century after the Conquest that the city’s lion appeared during the reign of the Plantagenets. The association between the lion and the English crown seems to have begun during the reign of King John but it was John’s older brother, Richard the Lionheart, who is particularly associated with the lion passant guardant [1]; that is, walking with forepaw raised (passant) and head turned to the left, full face (guardant). This is the version of the animal that figures on all of the city’s heraldic devices. Except … guarding the entrance to the City Hall, Alfred Hardiman’s Assyrian-influenced bronze lions are two of our finest civic sculptures but they are at odds with other Norwich lions in not looking left. This may be because the architects saw a lion exhibited at the British Empire Exhibition of 1936 before they commissioned its twin [2].

Staring straight ahead, one of Alfred Hardiman’s lions (1938) outside the City Hall [3]

The connection with Richard I relates to the charter of 1194 in which he allowed citizens to elect their own Reeve – equivalent to the ‘president’ of the borough [4]. The foundation of self-government is usually dated to Richard’s charter even though there may have been a degree of municipal independence before this [5].

The Guildhall, which is the largest medieval civic building outside London, was built 1407-1412 in order to administer the self-governing powers conferred upon the city by Henry IV. The king’s charter of 1404 granted county status to the city and, like London, allowed the citizens to elect a mayor [6]. Documents issued by the council were authenticated with the city’s coat of arms in the form of a wax seal applied either directly or pendent.

Left and right: early C15 wax seals from Colman’s Collection Norfolk Record Office COL5/1. Centre: “The Common, or City Seal, now in use” Blomefield 1806 [6]

The city’s proud status as ‘civitas‘, a form of city state, is acknowledged in Cuningham’s 1558 map of Norwich, which is probably the earliest surviving printed map of any English town or city.

Map of Norwich by citizen William Cuningham, ‘Doctor in Physicke’ 1558 (British Library)

In the top right corner we can see the castle and lion augmented by two supporters who, as we will see, appear in various guises through the city’s history.

Map of Norwich Small.jpg A century prior to this, around 1450, the alderman John Wighton – whose stained glass workshop made the great east window of St Peter Mancroft – glazed the window of the council chamber in the Guildhall. He did this for the mayor and wealthy wool merchant Robert Toppes who ran his business from Dragon Hall in King Street [see 7 for a fuller account of the Norwich School painted glass].

Toppes window.jpg

Between the two angels is Toppes’ own coat of arms, dwarfing the city coat of arms beneath each angel.

City coat of arms mid C15, from the Toppes window in the Guildhall

Opposite the rear entrance to Cinema City, the city arms can be seen amongst a series of 13 shields carved at the east end of St Andrew’s church and dated to the rebuilding of the church 1500-1506.

Norwich arms on St Andrew’ Church ca 1505. Note the simplified castle, the contrary lion and its severed tail

A fine C16 example of the city coat of arms can be seen in Surrey House, the early C20 building designed for Norwich Union by George Skipper. The stained glass is a relic from the Earl of Surrey’s house that previously stood on this site in what is now Surrey Street.

From the Earl of Surrey’s C16 house in Surrey Street, Norwich

The Earl of Surrey, Henry Howard, son of the Duke of Norfolk, was called “the most foolish proud boy that is in England” and it was pride that led to his downfall. Surrey was brought up in Windsor Castle with Henry VIII’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy. The king came to believe that Surrey – a staunch anti-Protestant – was planning to usurp Henry VIII’s legitimate son, Edward VI, when he inherited the crown. The trigger, though, appeared to be when Surrey flaunted his descent from English royalty by attaching (quartering) the arms of Edward the Confessor to his own. He was executed for treason in his thirtieth year but his father, who was to have shared that fate, was saved when Henry VIII died the day before the planned execution [8].

Against this background of excessive pride associated with coats of arms, the other armorial glass in the Ante Room of Surrey House [9] takes on an extra layer of meaning.

surrey arms.jpg

Around 1900, three marble mosaics of the city arms were installed in the entrances to civic buildings: the Guildhall, Norwich Castle and the Technical Institute (now Norwich University of the Arts). But I can find no record of the Italian craftsmen living around Ber Street who were reported to have made them.

three coats of arms.jpg

On the south side of the Guildhall is the Bassingham Gateway, originally from the London Street house of John Bassingham, a goldsmith in the reign of Henry VIII. When London Street was widened in 1855-7 the gateway was bought by William Wilde for £10 and inserted in the Magistrate’s Entrance of the Guildhall [10].

By comparing this with George Plunkett’s 1934 photograph of the doorway [10], the crisp carving would appear to be part of a postwar renovation. The lion is now decidedly oriental.

Although there are minor variations in the way they are depicted, the castle and the lion are constants in the city’s arms. More variable are the supporters – the flanking figures that appear on some versions of the arms. In Cuningham’s map of 1558 (above) they appeared as cherubs.

In 1511 the roof of the mayor’s chamber in the Guildhall collapsed and in the rebuilding of 1535-7 the chequerboard of the eastern façade received coats of arms; the city arms of castle and lion were protected by armed angels and an indeterminate shape hovering over the shield [3].

The city arms; one of three coats of arms on the east end of the Guildhall. (The central arms [not shown] were those of Henry VIII but are no longer legible)

Above this coat of arms on the east wall is a clock turret dated 1850, dedicated to mayor Henry Woodcock. Flanking the clock face are two unarmed angels, each clasping the city arms.

Curiously, the gilded inscription at the lower edge of the clock gives the motto of the Dukes of Norfolk (Sola Virtus Invicta, Only Virtue is Invincible) who, for a long time, had had no connection with the city or county [3]

An illustration in Blomefield’s authoritative book on the history of Norwich [6] also has two angels as supporters, this time armed, but the object above the shield is difficult to read in this form.

The Arms of the City of Norwich. From Blomefield [7] 1806

Hudson and Tingey’s 1906 book on Norwich history [4] also shows the shield flanked by two guardian angels and in this case the object above the arms resolves as a hat. One source describes this as a warden yeoman’s hat (yeoman warder’s?) [2], another as a fur cap [12]. (After posting this article, former Sheriff Beryl Blower told me this may be the mayor’s ceremonial Cap of Maintenance).

The Norwich City Arms embossed on the cover of Hudson and Tingey, 1906 [4]

The hat also appears on the blue lamp on the police station, which is attached to the west side of the City Hall, but no guardian angels.

Police Station, Bethel Street 1938

The City Hall itself is Coat-of-Arms Central; there were even plans for the tower to be topped with an angel before it was cut for reasons of cost [3]. The city arms appears above the entrance to the City Treasurer’s Department in Bethel Street with all its accoutrements: the hat and Art Deco angels flanking a traditional coat of arms.

By Eric Aumonier who also designed Art Deco sculpture for the London Underground

Examples of the ‘full set’ can also be seen on the engraved glass window above the stairs leading up from the ground floor of the City Hall…

Designed by Eric Clarke and painted by James Michie [13]

… above the mayor’s chair in the council chamber…

… and on Lutyens’ war memorial, facing the City Hall on St Peter’s Street.

The additional elements (hat and angels) that appeared some time after the original granting of the lion-and-castle arms do complicate what was once a simple and effective design. The College of Arms does not recognise the the flanking angels; by dispensing with the supporters the cartoon-like arms on these two mid-C20 projects marked a return to simplicity (although the question of whether or not to dome the castle is still not solved).

Domed or undomed. Left, Hewitt School; right, Alderson Place, Finkelgate. These two civic projects were supervised by City Architect David Percival ca 1958

Colonel Unthank Ad jpeg.jpg

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_(heraldry)
Nobbs, G. Norwich City Hall (a booklet from the City Hall, private imprint and undated but published for the 50th anniversary of the 1938 opening).
Cocke, R. (2013). Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk (photography by Sarah Cocke). Pub: Liverpool University Press.
Hudson, W. and Tingey, J.C. (1906). The Records of the City of Norwich vol 1. Pub: Jarrolds.
Meeres, F. (2011). The Story of Norwich. Pub: Phillimore & Co Ltd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwich_Guildhall
Blomefield, F. (1806). An essay towards a topographical history of the County of Norfolk. Vol III Containing the History of Norwich. Pub: W Miller, London.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2015/12/19/norfolks-stained-glass-angels/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Howard,_Earl_of_Surrey
http://www.norfolkstainedglass.co.uk/Norwich_Union/ante_room.shtm
http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/guildhall.htm
http://www.ngw.nl/heraldrywiki/index.php?title=Norwich
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1210484

Thanks to Clive Cheesman, Richmond Herald of the College of Arms for information about the Norwich coat of arms.

Reggie through the underpass

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Anglia Square, Norwich shoe industry, Norwich-over-the-Water, psychogeography

Previously [1] … I spent so much time exploring Norwich’s medieval St Augustine’s that I never made it to the marketplace. Unless you fancy playing chicken on the inner ring road there is only one way to continue directly to the city centre and that is to walk beneath the flyover as it struggles to clear poor old Magdalen Street. So I escape to the former industrial area via St Crispin’s underpass.

On the other side everything is sweetness and light. We are still in Norwich-over-the-Water but at least we are away from the lowering presence of the Anglia Square development, modern buildings are in scale, the old street pattern has largely survived and there is a better class of graffiti.

The more sympathetic renovation of the former industrial quarter may be part of what Pevsner and Wilson [2] have called the “welcome softening of approach since the late 1980s“. Around the corner on St Georges Street is a pair of houses that were renovated rather than demolished – the one on the right bearing a plaque dating it to “1670 renewed in 1986“. The larger building used to be the King’s Head pub and gained two dormers/lucams in the restoration [3]. The postmodern office block forming a backcloth is Cavell House.

C17 house with Cavell House in the background. Note its different window styles

As a postmodern building Cavell House kicks against the uniformity of modernism by including a variety of references, some of them playful. For instance, the horizontal run of windows on the upper floor resembles the long ‘throughlight’ windows once common in the heart of the Norwich weaving industry.

Nos 3-5 Calvert Street 1936, destroyed by enemy firebombs in 1942. Note the weaver’s window in the upper floor. Courtesy http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

The brick arches above the lower windows in Cavell House are borrowed from the next building along St Georges Street, Sherwyn House.

Window arches on Cavell House (above) and Sherwyn House (below)

The style of Sherwyn House is reminiscent of Edward Boardman’s 1876 shoe factory for Haldinstein’s in Queen Street and his design for Howlett & White’s ‘Norvic’ shoe factory a few hundred metres away in Colegate [4]. However, the 1885 map of Norwich clearly shows a ‘brush manufactory’ on this site, not a shoe factory [5] and Kelly’s Directory for 1883 confirms the owner to have been Henry Mullett.

St Georges St, derelict brush factory 1983 built 1867. Courtesy http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

By 1983 the brush factory was derelict and became part of the 1992 Calvergate development by Feilden and Mawson [6].

Sherwyn House, St George’s Street, now retirement apartments

Just beyond Sherwyn House, a U-turn up Cross Lane then a right into Golden Dog Lane brought me to a building I had previously seen from the other side of the flyover.

The defiant Tudor-style chimneys and crow-step gable belong to Doughty’s Hospital, an alms house founded in 1687 by William Doughty for 24 poor men and eight poor women. By the mid C19 only a sparse outline of the original building remained and it was rebuilt in 1869 [7]. Now it provides 57 sheltered flats for the elderly.

On a wall are two parish plates. In the Georgian era, in the absence of detailed maps, such plates were the way of defining the boundaries of the parish and its social and legal responsibilities [8]. The letters S stand for C14/15 Saint Saviour’s Magdalen Street – the church with the truncated tower now literally overshadowed by the flyover. The insignia between these letters represents the stone cross that stood at the former junction of Magdalen and St Botolph’s Streets [9].

Retracing my steps into Cross Lane I looked down Calvert Street towards Colegate and the castle beyond. On the left side are two fine rows of red brick Victorian houses: one recording ‘GH 1896′ in Guntons’ tiles, the other with a stone inscribed ‘Thompson’s Buildings 1859’. A resident told me these were once council houses, sold under the Right-to-Buy scheme.

Calvert:Gunton.001.jpeg

Across the cobbled street is a grander prospect – a reminder of the area’s former prosperity.

20 and 22 Calvert Street. Above the doorway to No20 a plaque reads ‘Snaylgate House 1802’

The street was named for a former Sheriff of Norwich John Calvert (1741) who owned a house here. Before Calvert the street was Snaylgate and before that Snackegate [10]. The linguist Peter Trudgill says that ‘snek’ is an old Dutch dialect word for snail [11], underlining the historical connection between this weaving city and the immigrants from the Low Countries. ‘Gate’ comes from the old Danish word for street and is encountered in towns, like York and Norwich, once part of the Danelaw. This link is celebrated in a ‘Viking Norwich’ wall plaque stating that the street runs along an Anglo-Scandinavian defensive bank and ditch.

Retracing my steps down Cross Lane I enter Muspole Street via Alms Lane. It is from here that I see the St George’s Works building site with Howlett and White’s Norvic-Kiltie shoe factory (1926) in the background. This was an adjunct to their huge Norvic shoe factory on St Georges Street and whose roof can just be glimpsed to the left. In 1909 the firm employed 1200 workers [12].

To the right, there is an interesting parade of resurrected industrial buildings along Muspole Street; I am particularly taken with a building faced with mathematical tiles. The Crittall windows on the jettied first floor, with eyebrows made from ridge and pantiles, suggest the house was renovated between the wars.

Walking straight over Duke Street I enter one of the city’s 15 open spaces – St Mary’s Plain. Where other cities have squares Norwich has plains [13]. ‘Plein’ is another borrowing from the C16 Dutch and Flemish Protestant refugees who, fleeing Spanish Catholic persecution, settled here and reinvigorated our weaving trade. Next to Zoar Strict and Particular Baptist Chapel, is the former home of Thomas Pykerell, cloth merchant, sheriff and three times Mayor of Norwich in the C15. Pykerell’s House is one of only a handful of thatched buildings in the city. It was gutted by incendiary bombs in the 1940s and we are fortunate to have it in its restored state.

The square is dominated by another former shoe factory, now being redeveloped as part of St Mary’s Works. The name of Sexton Son and Everard Ltd, which is over-painted, sits on top of the building – the blacked-out lettering an unwitting reminder of the damage inflicted in the Blitz. The business that started in 1876 folded in 1976.

This aerial photo of the factory in 1946 gives an idea of the extent to which Norwich-over-the-Water was dominated by industry.

Now for Duke Street, widened in 1972 to become the main feeder for the inner ring road. Duke St is named for the Duke of Norfolk’s C16 palace that once stood roughly on the site of present-day St Andrews Street car park [14]. I have previously mentioned the 1888 Norwich Board School on Duke St that is now part of the Norwich University of the Arts [4] but I can’t pass it without showing one of my favourite architectural folderols: this roof lantern with its lead cockade.

I exit Norwich-over-the-Water via the Duke Street bridge. The original Duke’s Palace Bridge of 1822, made entirely out of cast iron, was moved as part of the 1972 road widening scheme and re-erected over the entrance to the Castle Mall car park [2].

A riverside gangway to the left of the present bridge provides a vantage point over the river, across to the site of Howlett and White’s factory on St George’s Plain and the last remaining chimney stack in an area that once bristled with them.

IMG_6744 2.JPG

To the right of the bridge the mostly derelict complex, between river and Charing Cross, was once devoted to the generation of electricity.

In 1892 Boardman and Son designed the conversion of the old Duke’s Palace Ironworks for the Norwich Electric Light Company who supplied the city’s street lamps. But by the 1920s this was superseded by the power station at Thorpe and the Duke Street site was converted to offices [4].

The city coat of arms on the former offices of the Norwich Electric Light Company, Duke Street [4].

Left into St Andrews Street then right into one of the very few post-medieval streets in the city: Exchange Street. Originally called Museum Street then Post Office Street it was renamed once more after the opening of the Corn Exchange (1828). In 1832 Exchange Street finally connected through to St Andrews Street, allowing traffic to flow over the recently opened Duke Street Bridge then to points north via St Augustine’s Gate [2, 15].

In 1861 the original corn exchange was replaced by a larger one that functioned well into the C20.

The ‘new’ Corn Exchange in 1960. © Copyright Historic England Archive ref: AA98/12867

But a century later (1963) this larger corn exchange (seen below) was in turn demolished to make way for the extension to Jarrolds Department Store at the corner of Exchange and Bedford Streets.

Exchange St Corn Exchange west side [2513] 1938-06-26.jpg

The 1861 Corn Exchange seen in 1938 from the market end. http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

At last, the marketplace. The Anglo-Saxon market was based in Tombland but the entire axis of the city changed when the Normans built the castle in the late C11 and installed a market in its present position, outside the motte in the Mancroft district [16]. Over recent years there had been too many unoccupied stalls in the 900+ year–old market but there seems to be a revival of its fortunes due the city council’s introduction of a ‘Global Market’ – pop-ups selling street food from around the world. Hybrid vigour comes to the rescue, as it has done throughout the long history of this city [17].

©OpenStreetMapscontributors

Thanks to Frances Holmes, Martin Shaw and John Fuller for their assistance. I am also grateful to the www.georgeplunkett.co.uk website run by Jonathan Plunkett.

References

https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/10/15/gildencroft-and-psychogeography/ ‎
Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson (2002). The Buildings of England. Norfolk I, Norwich and North-East. Pub: Yale University Press.
http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/stc.htm#Stgeo
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/07/28/norwichs-pre-loved-buildings/ ‎
http://www.norwich-yards.co.uk/norwich_map_1885/norwich_map_15600.asp?ID=2210
http://www.mbp-uk.com/projects/fscalvergate.html
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1187193
David A Berwick (2007). Beating the Bounds in Georgian Norwich. Pub: davidaberwick@gmail.com.
http://www.heritage.norfolk.gov.uk/record-details?MNF597-St-Saviour%27s-Church-Magdalen-Street-Norwich&Index=593&RecordCount=56542&SessionID=6df6bab1-16b0-4b3f-9ba9-746ca0e3740d
www.georgeplunkett.co.uk Calvert St 20 to 22 [2676] 1938-08-03
http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/how-snailgate-became-calvert-street-1-4805457
Frances and Michael Holmes (2013). The Story of the Norwich Boot and Shoe Trade. Pub: Norwich Heritage Projects (www.norwich-heritage.co.uk).
Richard Lane (1999). The Plains of Norwich. Pub: The Larks Press.
http://www.eveningnews24.co.uk/news/politics/dig-could-reveal-secrets-of-norwich-s-lost-16th-century-palace-1-4015633
http://www.racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=915
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwich_Market
http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/street-food-and-pop-up-stalls-give-norwich-market-remarkable-boost-1-5166418

Gildencroft and Psychogeography

15 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Anglia Square, Gildencroft, Lucams, Magdalen Street flyover, Norwich Strangers, Norwich Yards or Courts, psychogeography, St Augustine's Street Norwich

On the map it was meant to be a straight enough radial walk from a city gate into the city centre but I’m easily distracted. I got lost around Gildencroft where – as the psychogeographers among you will know – an historic area clings on among the after effects of postwar modernisation.

Henry Ninham’s 1861 engraving, based on John Kirkpatrick’s 1720 drawing. Norfolk Museums Service. NWHCM : 1953.31.FAP33

There was a time you were free to imagine yourself a nineteenth century flâneur like Baudelaire, strolling along the boulevards without a care [1]. But midcentury psychogeographers like Guy Debord, with their socio-political ideas about the effects of environment on the pedestrian’s psyche, put a stop to that, making a new wave of urban explorers more conscious about the impact of urban development [2]. In Psychogeography [3], Will Self wrote about walking to Manhattan from his house in south London (not over the watery bit, obvs) in order to regain “the Empty Quarters“: the hinterlands around airports.

Psychogeography ©Will Self (words) and Ralph Steadman (artist). Bloomsbury Publishing 2007

And in his ‘alternative cartography’ around the M25 London Orbital, Iain Sinclair famously wrote about walking through urban no-man’s land. Other twenty-first century urban walkers (the new psychogeographers) suggest taking a playful approach to the exploration of the built environment, employing a variety of tricks to nudge the pedestrian off the beaten path to make them more aware of the urban landscape. Rob Macfarlane recommends following the path drawn on a map by an upturned tumbler; others throw dice at each intersection or perform ‘ambulant signmaking’ by following a letter traced on a map; and one urban runner even used the GPS in his running shoe to geotrack the shape of his privy member on the map. Hmm. This may be why Lauren Elkin (“walking is mapping with your feet”) [4] writes about the need for female flâneuses to reclaim the streets. There’s a lot of hoo-ha around psychogeography but, at heart, it’s about the way that urban development affects our lives.

The Gildencroft area of St Augustine’s parish is over the A147 inner ring road. St Augustine’s Gate (lost in the C18) is marked very approximately with the blue bar. ©OpenStreetMapcontributors

I started my walk, not at the old city gate, but by taking a closer look at a building I’d glimpsed from my car. So at the outset I travelled contrariwise. This was on Starling Road, just off Magpie Road (red star), which runs parallel to the old city wall. The building is a relic of the once thriving Norwich shoe industry that, like much of the city’s trade, took place here in Norwich-over-the-water (Ultra Aquam). The concrete lettering on the parapet reads: The British United Shoe Machinery Co Ltd 1925 [5].

Once, this Leicester firm made equipment for the Norwich shoemakers but collapsed in 2000. Now the building is occupied by Gallpen who – in a nice example of nominative determinism – are printers (ink used to be made by adding iron salts to tannic acid extracted from oak galls). In a 1910 trade book the founder, Charles Gaunt Gallpen (b 1859), advertised himself as a printer with the unintentionally ominous slogan: “Call on me or I will call on you” [6].

From [6]

Crossing busy Magpie Road, I passed a segment of the city wall and part of a tower revealed by the demolition of Magpie Printers in 2013.

The medieval city wall would have continued beyond the houses to the right, passing across St Augustine’s Street to emerge ona tract of land between Bakers Road to the right and St Martin’s at Oak Wall Lane to the left.

What we are looking at is the external ditch and on the inner side of the wall was a tract of land once known as the Jousting Acre [7]. Here, men-at-arms practiced jousting with lances and – as was compulsory in the medieval period – young men would have performed their archery practice with bows or crossbows. The antiquary Francis Blomefield mentions that King Edward III came to a tournament that local historian Stuart McLaren suggests is likely to have been held at this Jousting Acre [7].

In the 15th year of his reign, the King appointed a turnament to be held at Norwich … this exercise was much in use in ancient times, and is otherwise called jousting or tilting; the knights that used this martial sport were armed, and so encountered one another on horseback, with spears or lances, by which they made themselves fit for war, according to the manner of that age, which made use of such weapons … this turnament began in February 1340, and the King … was at Norwich on Wednesday February 14, being St. Valentine’s day. (Francis Blomefield 1806 [8])

Sussex Street is one of the most attractive streets in this part of the city, containing rows of Georgian terraced housing dated mainly to 1821-1824 [9].

14 & 16 Sussex Street (south side)

These were probably houses for the respectable working/lower middle class; Number 22 (below) is more genteel.

22 Sussex Street. Doorway with Greek Doric columns and segmental arch with fanlight

There is a similar doorcase on No 21 on the opposite side of the street. This house forms part of a terrace of three-storeyed houses. To the left can just be seen part of the 1971 conversion to flats by Edward Skipper and Associates. As we know, George Skipper [10] built the architectural fireworks of late Victorian Norwich and laid out much of the Golden Triangle in the early C20. The family name lives on in St Augustines.

Behind, and to the left, is the modern development, Quintain Mews – the name commemorating medieval jousting.

The quintain was a revolving target that would, when struck with lance or sword, swing around to sandbag the combatant.

Wikimedia Commons

On the opposite side of Sussex Street is the entry to 42 modern, split-level dwellings – The Lathes – owned by Broadland Housing Association. This development was built in 1976 by the architects Teather and Walls, described as ‘Associate for Edward Skipper and Associates” [11].

The word ‘lathes’ is dialect for a grain barn [7], commemorating the farm that once stood in this area. According to Blomefield [8] the farm belonged at various times to Sir John Paston, and two Shakespearean heroes: Sir John Fastolff of Caister (Falstaff is mentioned in five plays) and “brave Sir Thomas Erpingham” (Henry V) whose statue is above the Erpingham Gate of Norwich Cathedral. One suggestion is that Erpingham installed this pious statue to assert his religious orthodoxy at a time when the Lollards were asserting themselves [12]

Sir Thomas kneels in a niche above the Erpingham Gate

Historically and architecturally St Augustine’s is a fascinating street but the temptation to flit from one side of the road to the other is inhibited by the volume of traffic flowing out of the city. Still, this hasn’t put off the young artists who are adopting the street.

On the west side of the street a ghost sign was recently uncovered when No. 22 became Easton Pottery [13]. I can pick out ‘Easton’, ‘Florists’ and perhaps ‘Newsagents’. Trade directories show that from the 1930s to the 1960s a Miss E Easton ran a florist’s shop here. Before that she, and her father before her, ran a greengrocer’s. But the current owner, the potter Rachel Kurdynowska, found that T Easton traded here in 1873 as an earthenware dealer and it is in honour of this serendipitous connection that Rachel named her business.

Ghost sign for the Easton family businesses, now Easton Pottery #22 St Augustine’s Street

The oversized roof gables known locally as lucams are a prominent feature of the east side of the street. ‘Lucam’ may be a corruption of ‘lucarne’, a French word for skylight donated by immigrant ‘Strangers’ – C16-17 Dutch and French-speaking Walloons who could have used the term for the windows at which they reinvigorated the city’s weaving trade [14]. The owner of No 33 (left), who is just coming into view, told me that he had recently repaired his lucam.

Lucams at 33 and 31 St Augustine’s Street

Nunn’s Yard, a fine range of five upper gables on 23-25 St Augustine’s Street

The recently renovated numbers 23 and 25 announce themselves as ‘Nunn’s Yard’, which is actually further up the road between numbers 31 and 33. Instead, Nunn’s Yard Gallery is now the name of an enterprise whose two other contemporary exhibition spaces are doing much to enliven this street: Yallop’s and Thirteen A [15].

Yallop’s and Thirteen a.

The entry to Hinde’s Yard can be seen to the left of Thirteen A and the cast-iron signs for other yards are encountered along the street.

Yard four.jpg

The influx of Strangers in the Elizabethan era created a demand for housing within the confines of the city walls; this was met by squeezing poorly-built, insanitary ‘yards’ or ‘courts’ into the courtyards of larger properties fronting the streets [16]. Before WWII there were 70 houses in Rose Yard. The only source of water for 50 of them was the public pump in St Augustine’s churchyard. An 1851 report mentions, “at the bottom is a large pool of nightsoil 15 feet by 25 feet from about 40 houses”[16]. Most of the city’s several hundred yards were cleared as slums in the 1950s. All that remains of Rose Yard is the entrance and a few houses. (See Nick Stone’s brilliant rephotography of this area [17]).

Rose Yard #7 St Augustine’s Street

This entrance to Rose Yard can be seen (below) to the left of The Rose Inn as it was in 1938. An inn is known to have been on this site since the C14 when it refreshed those attending the jousting tournaments in Gildencroft.

The Rose Inn in 1938, with the entrance to Rose Yard on the left [www.georgeplunkett.co.uk]

Opposite Rose Yard is St Augustine’s Church whose parishioners are known as Red Steeplers on account of the only (late 1600s) red brick tower in the city [18].

St Augustine’s. In the background, a medieval terrace and a looming presence.

In the churchyard is the tomb of Thomas Clabburn (d.1858) who employed upwards of six hundred Norwich weavers [19].

The Clabburn family tomb. Inside the church is a tablet commemorating Thomas’s ‘many virtues as an employer and a kind, good man’

In the background (above) is Church Alley (1580), believed to be the longest row of Tudor houses in England [7]. It leads to the wonderfully named street, Gildencroft, which commemorates an area that once roughly overlapped St Augustine’s parish [20].

Gildencroft is also the name of a small park I circumnavigated as I tried to find the Quaker Burial Ground. I passed a small building, now a nursery, that was built by the Society of Friends at the end of the C17 then rebuilt after the original was destroyed in the 1942 Baedeker air raids. Nearby are the gates to the burial ground, which were open when I visited it this spring in search of Amelia Opie’s grave [20], but are now sadly locked. Reasons for closure include drink, drugs and dog poo (wasn’t that an album by The Pogues?).

The Quaker Burial Ground, Spring 2017

I completed my anticlockwise stroll around Gildencroft by walking through St Crispin’s Car Park and hopping up a bank to St Crispin’s Road (aka the ring road) with its busy roundabout. Due to the volume of traffic I had to trek back up Pitt Street (commemorating not Prime Minister Pitt but a rubbish pit [7]) to find a safe crossing. And it was here, now facing towards Sovereign House, that I was confronted by the source of my irritation – Anglia Square and all it stands for: postwar dereliction, the ring road, the Magadalen Street flyover, disregard of the pedestrian, insensitivity to the past … [22].

The derelict Sovereign House (formerly Her Majesty’s Stationery Office), part of the 1960s/70s Anglia Square development

In the decades after the war it must have seemed a good thing to replace a bomb-damaged area of insanitary medieval housing with Brutalist modernity. But modernity barely survived 50 years in the case of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, and the shopping centre fails to thrive. This can’t be blamed on a dislike of Brutalism in the provinces: see how well concrete works in Lasdun’s greenfield site at UEA. More likely the problem stemmed from the imposition of an out-of-scale development on an historic site. Now, in a frightening example of history repeating itself, it is proposed to replace Anglia Square with a tower block 25 storeys high [23].

The isolation of St Augustine’s from the city centre by the river had already established its marginal identity but then, in the 1960s and 70s, the severing of old routes by the inner ring road released this area into an even more distant orbit: Norwich-over-the-ring-road (Ultra Via Anulum). [See 24 for a critical view of ‘The Norwich Magdalen Street Massacre’].

I tried to get back to the city centre by walking under the flyover that goes on to blight the next radial road – medieval Magdalen Street – but found my way blocked by a private trailer depot …

… so I doubled back and left via the only route available to pedestrians going up or down Duke Street – an underpass. Flâneurs and flâneuses wanting to enter an historic area are unlikely to find a less welcoming entrance but do it, explore St Augustine’s and help reconnect it to the city centre.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography
Will Self and Ralph Steadman (2007). Psychogeography Pub: Bloomsbury.
Laura Elkin (2017). Flâneuse. Pub: Vintage
Frances Holmes and Michael Holmes (2013). The Story of the Norwich Boot and Shoe Trade. Pub: Norwich Heritage Projects
Citizens of no Mean City (1910). A trade book published by Jarrold and Sons.
http://www.staugustinesnorwich.org.uk/history_-_the_gildencroft.html. Do read this excellent account of the history of this area By S J McLaren. The website (http://www.staugustinesnorwich.org.uk/index.html) describes a proud community working hard to maintain its identity.
Francis Blomefield, ‘The City of Norwich, chapter 15: Of the city in Edward III’s time’, in An Essay Towards A Topographical History of the County of Norfolk: Volume 3, the History of the City and County of Norwich, Part I (London, 1806), pp. 79-101. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/topographical-hist-norfolk/vol3/pp79-101#p27
Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson (2002). The Buildings of England. Norfolk I, Norwich and North-East. Pub: Yale University Press.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/02/15/the-flamboyant-mr-skipper/
http://www.twa.co.uk/projects/the_lathes_norwich
http://users.trytel.com/tristan/towns/florilegium/popdth04.html
https://www.eastonpottery.com/about
Peter Trudgill (2003). The Norfolk dialect. Pub: Poppyland, Cromer.
http://www.nunnsyard.co.uk/exhibitions.html
Frances Holmes and MichaelHolmes (2015). The Old Courts and Yards of Norwich. Pub: Norwich Heritage Projects. (The definitive book on the Norwich yards).
http://www.invisibleworks.co.uk/lost-city-ghosts-st-augustines-the-rose-tavern/
Mortlock, D.P. and Roberts, C.V. (1985). The Popular Guide to Norfolk Churches. No2 Norwich, Central and South Norfolk. Pub: Acorn Editions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Augustine%27s_Church,_Norwich
Personal communication, Stuart McLaren
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/03/15/three-norwich-women/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglia_Square_Shopping_Centre,_Norwich
http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/environment/25-storey-tower-block-planned-in-new-anglia-square-development-for-up-to-1-350-homes-1-4929377
http://nr23.net/govt/unfinished_mag_st.htm

Thanks. I am indebted to: local historian Stuart McLaren for sharing his deep knowledge of the area; to Rachel Kurdynowska for information about Easton Pottery; to The Bookhive (http://www.thebookhive.co.uk/) for suggesting Lauren Elkins’ Flâneuse; and Jonathan Plunkett for access to the website based on his father’s largely pre-war photographs (www.georgeplunkett.co.uk). I thank my daughter Susie for the many conversations about psychogeography and urban walking .

The Norwich Society helps people enjoy and appreciate the history and character of Norwich. Visit: www.thenorwichsociety.org.uk

Bullards’ Brewery

15 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Bullards' Brewery, Norwich pubs

In the previous post on churches [1] I mentioned the saying that Norwich had ‘a church for every Sunday‘, tactfully stopping short of saying, ‘and a pub for every day of the year‘. But, as we saw for churches, not every pub managed to stay open for they were subject to the same Darwinian struggle we see in the history of Bullards’ Brewery.

Bullards’ Fat Man logo by Alfred Munnings 1909

Calculating the number of Norwich’s pubs is not an exact science since the definition of a pub varies. In 1681 a Dean of Norwich Cathedral complained that “the town swarms with alehouses” at a time when there were about 250 [2]. By the early C19 there was indeed a pub for every day of the year, with about 378, plus 30 to 40 beer-houses that were licensed to brew beer. By 1878 Ratcliffe’s Drink Map listed 655 licensed houses (including refreshment houses and beer houses) but, with various licensing acts designed to curb drunkenness, the number continued to decline throughout the C20. The 1892 Drink Map by the Norwich and Norfolk Gospel Temperance Union gives an idea of the density of licensed premises at its peak.

1892 Drink Map of Norwich. Courtesy of Picture Norfolk (www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk)

Matching the decline in the number of pubs was the reduction in the number of breweries, from 27 in the early 1800s to just four in the 1920s: Stewart and Patteson; Bullards; Morgans; and Youngs Crawshay and Youngs [2].

4 breweries.jpg

In 1837 Richard Bullard and James Watt entered a short-lasting partnership to start the Anchor Brewery at St Miles Bridge in Coslany – forming a major part of industrial Norwich. It was just over the water from Barnard Bishop and Barnards’ Norfolk Iron Works.

Bullards’ Brewery. OS 6 inch map 1888-1913. ©Ordnance Survey. Reproduced with permission of the National Library of Scotland. maps.nls.uk

[Incidentally, this is the same lettering that Panks Engineering used on their Victorian cast-iron showroom in Rose Lane and now in Heigham Street].

Bullards’ chimney, with its conspicuous lettering, was an inescapable feature of the city’s industrial landscape.

Courtesy of Picture Norfolk http://www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk

The brewery was well-situated, drawing high quality water from a deep artesian well and receiving grain and hops by wherry along the River Wensum. The large fermentation hall survives as Anchor Quay apartments.

Coslany St Bullard's fermentation hall [5342] 1973-01-05.jpg

Bullards’ fermentation hall in 1973, at the junction of Westwick and Coslany Streets. http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

However, proximity to the river meant that the brewery did not escape the 1912 floods.

The Anchor Brewery in the 1912 floods. Courtesy of Picture Norfolk (www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk)

The company was to employ several hundred workers to supply the company’s ca 500 pubs [3]. The Unthank Arms in Bury Street, near the Heigham home of the Unthank family [4], was one of Bullards’ pubs …

The Unthank Arms. Courtesy of Picture Norfolk (www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk)

… as was The Barn Tavern at the foot of Grapes’Hill, built for Bullards’ by RG Carter [see 5 for Arts and Crafts pubs].

The Barn at St Benedict’s Gates, from a 1958 trade calendar by the builders RG Carter (Courtesy RG Carter Archive)

Bullards’ tipsy anchor in the gable end of The Barn Tavern

I make no apologies for revisiting The Arcade Stores, which was originally a Bullards’ pub selling beer, wines and spirits [6]. It was at the left-hand entrance (castle end) of George Skipper’s Royal Arcade, with which it was integrated by WJ Neatby’s magnificent Doulton tiles. Art Nouveau buildings in this country are scarce: Nikolaus Pevsner only reckoned Norwich’s Royal Arcade and Edward Everard’s printing works in Bristol. The Arcade is therefore of national importance so it is hard to comprehend why the ground floor of the pub, with its Doulton tiles, was allowed to be remodelled in the 1960s to make way for a plate-glass-fronted butcher’s shop.

Norwich’s lost art nouveau pub, from [7]

The Arcade Stores 1956 © RIBA

Red Lion Street – a fine post-1900 development with designs by Edward Boardman and George Skipper – contains the Anchor Building …

… which at one time contained Bullards’ Orford Arms, now occupied by Nando’s. Beneath the pub was the Orford Cellar where Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie played in the 1960s.

“For Strength and Quality”. Bullards’ Orford Arms and Anchor Buildings ca 1960s, Red Lion Street, Norwich. Courtesy of Picture Norfolk (www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk)

Two of the pediments on Anchor Buildings contain the initials BS for Bullard and Sons; the central pediment contains the brewery’s tilting anchor emblem. This strangely prescient version of ‘anchor on the rocks’ was a variation of the Bullards’ emblem used from 1869 [8]. The later version from The Barn (above) is simpler, has no rocks and tilts in the opposite direction.

Bullards3 clipped.jpg

Although not far from the Anchor Brewery, the upright anchor below seems to have nothing to do with Bullards’. Instead, architect Edward Boardman appears to have placed this cartouche over Water Lane that passed through Howlett and White’s shoe factory (later Norvic) on Colegate, down to the River Wensum. The lane did, however, go down to a staithe opposite the Anchor Brewery.

Carved brick insignia above Water Lane, Colegate. Similar leaf-work was carved by James Minns for Guntons of Costessey [9]

After Richard Bullard died in 1864 the brewery was renamed Bullard and Sons, continuing under the management of Richard’s sons Harry, Charley and Fred. Harry was a well-known figure in the city; he was sheriff, justice of the peace, three times mayor and knighted by Queen Victoria in 1886 [10].

Sir Harry Bullard 1895. Courtesy Wikipedia [11]

The amalgamation of the remaining Norwich breweries began in the 1950s when Bullards took over Youngs Crawshay and Youngs in King Street. In 1961, competitors Morgans went into voluntary liquidation and the chairmen of Bullards and Steward & Pattesons – not wanting the brewery itself – reportedly drew cards to decide who would take which of the 400-plus tied houses [12]. Morgans’ Brewery was sold to Watney Mann on the understanding that Watney’s keg beers would be sold in Bullards’ and Steward & Patteson’s pubs. This was when the Bullards’ enterprise finally hit the rocks for Watney’s filtered, pasteurised and carbonated keg beers were soon outselling the traditional beers drawn on long-handled pumps [13].

red barrel.jpg

In 1982, Bullards’ chimney – so long a landmark of the city’s industrial quarter – was demolished.

Courtesy of Picture Norfolk (www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk)

Postscript The name ‘Bullards’ is undergoing a revival, for cask beers bearing their name are being produced in collaboration with local brewers Redwell [14]. In addition, Bullards’ Gin, which is now being distilled in The Ten Bells on St Benedict’s Street, has been voted Best London Dry Gin in the World [15]. On your behalf I bought some and tasted it. It was good and, as promised by Kingsley Amis’ slogan, ‘Makes You Drunk’.

Sources

For a really fascinating account of Norwich pubs and breweries see Frances and Michael Holmes’ Norwich Pubs and Breweries: Past and Present (2011) http://www.norfolkpubs.co.uk/publications/books6.htm

Thanks to Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk for permission to reproduce images from this wonderful archive. I am grateful to the archivist of RG Carter for her assistance.

Post-medieval Norwich churches

15 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Edward Boardman, Geoffrey Camp, Norwich churches, Norwich nonconformist chapels, The Norwich Panorama

Once, the walled city of Norwich had 58 churches within its confines. After the break from Rome these Anglican churches were supplemented by new kinds of building to accommodate the varying shades of non-conformism.

The term nonconformist can be traced to the licensing of clergy who – during the reign of Elizabethan I – subscribed to the Act of Uniformity and were therefore ‘conformable’ to the rules of the established Protestant church [1]. But, as we know, Norwich citizens have always taken pride in their nonconformability [2] and this was expressed in the Dissenting or Nonconformist chapels built from the C17 onwards.

By 1580 nearly half of Norwich’s population were Protestant ‘Strangers’ from the Low Countries who had come seeking religious tolerance not granted by their Spanish overlords. These separatists from the Catholic church worshipped in ‘eglises libres‘ and The Old Meeting House off Colegate (1693) is an important architectural example of this Free Church Movement [3]. This square-plan building shows Classical rather than Gothic influences and we will see the four large brick pilasters capped by Corinthian capitals, used again. The sash windows are thought to be the first in the city.

The invention of sash windows is uncertainly attributed to Robert Hooke who helped Christopher Wren survey and rebuild the City of London after the Great Fire (1666). The ability to set back sash windows helps prevent the spread of fire and they were specified in subsequent building acts.

The Old Meeting House Congregationalist Church

By the C19, Norwich was not a healthy place for the city’s poor living in the crowded and unsanitary ‘courts’ vacated by the wealthy merchant-class [4]. The rising population in the second half of the C19 created a demand for new, well-built, sanitary homes [5] that was met by the terraces built on land freed by the break-up of the Steward and Unthank estates in Heigham [6].

From 1801 to 1861 the population of Heigham had risen from 854 to 13,894 – too large to be served by the old parish church of St Bartholomew (bombed in WWII). Four new parishes were therefore formed: Holy Trinity in Trinity Street (built on one of the first blocks of land released by CW Unthank [5]); St Barnabas’ (at the junction of Heigham and Northumberland Streets); St Thomas’ Earlham Road (damaged in WWII and rebuilt in the 1950s and 60s) and St Philip’s (at the junction of Stafford Street and Heigham Road).

St Philip’s church 1962, looking up Stafford Street towards Heigham Road. ©www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

In late 1944 a US bomber, in difficulty and trying to find its way back to base, clipped a pinnacle on the tower of St Philip’s [7]. The pilot courageously steered the plane towards waste ground near the station but none of the crew survived the crash.

This increase in the number of churches continued into the C20. Pevsner notes that around a dozen churches were built in the new suburbs between 1900 and the start of WWI [8]. However, after WWII the next generation’s churchgoing declined and St Philip’s became redundant and was demolished in 1977. On a recent visit I was told that the stone basin in the garden of the adjacent care home had been the church’s font.

Suggested to be the font from St Philip’s Church

St Philip’s church rooms, at the rear of the site, survive as the Douro Place chapel.

Douro place chapel.jpg

Only the tower of the original parish church of Heigham – old St Bartholomew’s – survived WWII and so its congregation met instead in the disused Primitive Methodist church (1879) in Nelson Street.

Reflecting an era of public philanthropy, the Nelson Street church has a foundation stone laid by mustard manufacturer JP Colman with a commemorative stone dedicated to printer and Sunday school supporter Thomas Jarrold.

The church’s roofline does seem rather alien, more suited to New England than the flatlands of East Anglia. This can be attributed to the narrow spire that was added in 1956 when St Bartholomew’s North Heigham was adopted as the parish church [9]. It is now Gateway Vineyard Church.

Built in Nelson Street as a Primitive Methodist in 1878-9, spire added by JP Chaplin in 1956. Now the evangelical Vineyard Centre

Nonconformist chapels like this sprang up across the expanding city during the latter part of the C19. While the Anglican Church (and perhaps the Wesleyan Methodists) tended to favour the Gothic other nonconformists built rectangular temples in Graeco-Roman form. In modernising his own Congregational Church in Princes Street (1869) Edward Boardman added a Classical facade with a triangular pediment, using white brick from Gunton’s Costessey brickworks (see previous post [10]). The ornate facade has four large Corinthian pilasters that Boardman may well have borrowed from the Old Meeting House across the river.

princes st.jpg

Below, Boardman repeated the use of giant Classical pilasters on the Primitive Methodist Chapel on Queen’s Road (1872).

Queens Rd.jpg

The Gothic Revival Baptist Chapel at the city end of Unthank Road was built (1874) during the city’s expansion southwards but – like other contemporaries – did not reach its century (1874-1954). Below, it is shown with the catholic church (now cathedral) of St John the Baptist in the background.

Photographed in 1939, the original Baptist chapel on Unthank Road with St John the Baptist Catholic church to the right. ©www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

The original Unthank Road Baptist Chapel (above), designed by Edward Boardman in 1874, was demolished in 1954 to be superseded by a Presbyterian church – a replacement for the church in Theatre Street that was destroyed in the Blitz. The new Modernist church incorporates the original foundation stone from Theatre Street. In 1972 the Presbyterians and Congregationalists came together to form the United Reformed Church [11]. In 1956 a former member of the Boardman practice – Bernard Melchior Feilden – designed what Pevsner thought the best postwar church in Norwich.

Trinity United Reformed Church, Unthank Road. Designed by Sir Bernard Feilden

On the eve of WWII (1939), the practice of Edward Boardman and Son replaced a Gothic-style Methodist chapel (1894) with the much larger St Peter’s Methodist that still stands – just about – at the junction of Park Lane and Avenue Road. It was a neighbour of mine for several years so it is sad to see it empty and in a state of disrepair.

st peters.jpg

Fewer churches were built between the wars [8]; the following come from the 1930s archives of local builder RG Carter.

This photograph taken by George Plunkett shows the Belvoir Street Wesleyan Methodist Church (1869) up for sale in 1989. It was demolished to make way for a block of flats but is survived by the adjoining twin-bayed Memorial Sunday School (seen on the far left) that Carters built in the 30s.

Belvoir St Wesleyan Reform Methodist church [6585] 1989-09-18.jpg

Courtesy RG Carter archive ©www.georgeplunkett.com

Blessing the foundations of the Belvoir St Sunday school in the 1930s. ©RG Carter Archive

The simplicity of the Norwich Christian Spiritualist Church, built in 1936 by Carter’s, contrasts with Gunton’s chimneys peeping out from the Victorian St Mary’s Croft further along Chapel Field North (see previous post [10]). This steel-framed one-storey building was funded in part by a large Spiritualist meeting held in Norwich after WWI, which was addressed by the faith’s most famous member, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

spiritual Ch.jpg

Incidentally, the Spiritualist Church was a temporary home for the city’s Jewish community after their synagogue was destroyed in the German Baedeker raids of 1942. The original building was in Synagogue Street – the only street of this name in the country. It was on the opposite side of the river to the Riverside complex alongside Thorpe Station.

©Ordnance Survey 1885

Synagogue in Synagogue St Norwich 1848-1942 [12]

In 1948 the Jewish congregation moved to a prefabricated building on Earlham Road, opposite St John’s Catholic cathedral. The present synagogue below was built (though not by Carters) on the site in 1968/9 and is now on a 999 year lease [13].

Carters also built: the United Congregational School, Jessop Road (opened 1931); Dereham Road Baptist Sunday School in Goldsmiths Street; the Anglican shrine at Walsingham; and a garden house at the back of the Old Meeting House. The garden house was named for Reverend REF Peill who died in the pulpit on Easter Day 1930.

In Recorder Road, just off Prince of Wales Road, Carters built a Christian Scientist church (1934) to hold 300. It is now a Greek Orthodox church. The chequer of flint and brick on the boundary wall and the main north wall are reminiscent of the turret on The Gatehouse pub on Dereham Road, also built by Carters (see previous post [14]).

Greek church.jpg

Of Carters’ inter-war churches a personal favourite is St Alban’s Lakenham (1932-1937). It was designed by local architect Cecil Upcher who lived and worked in Pull’s Ferry [15]. The detailing is especially pleasing. Externally, the vernacular whole-flint walls are outlined in red brick and tile …

Grove Rd.jpg

… internally there are several attractive features including the painted concrete ceiling.

Grove Road 2.jpg

In 1955, in response to a competition by the Eastern Daily Press to provide a work of art above the altar, Geoffrey Camp painted a reredos of an androgynous Christ in Majesty above Norwich. Camp is a founding member of the Norwich Twenty group of artists and a Royal Academician.

christ in majesty.jpg

The cityscape at the bottom of the reredos shares the same viewpoint – St James’ Hill – that John Moray-Smith used for The Norwich Panorama (ca. 1947), recently restored by the Norwich Society [16].

1, Caley’s chocolate factory; 2, Norwich Castle; 3, St Peter Mancroft; 4, City Hall; 5, Norwich Cathedral; 6, St John’s Catholic Cathedral.

A thread that runs throughout this post is that the city’s churches have been reused and adapted over a very long time. But despite Norwich being famed for its medieval churches (‘one church for every week of the year’) many of these older buildings are empty and still to find a new purpose. With such cultural treasure it should be possible to find imaginative uses to attract those who come to cities for something other than shopping.

An important start is being made by the Norwich Churches Project [17] who are looking into the relationship between the city, community and architecture. Its downloadable churches trail and guide is available HERE [18]. I can also recommend their free exhibition in the Archive Centre behind Norfolk County Hall, Norwich: ‘Drawing in the Archive: the Visual Record of Norwich’s Medieval Churches 1700-2017‘. Monday 21 August – Friday 17 November 2017.

Thanks: I am grateful to the RG Carter Archives, whose list of Carter’s 1930 buildings prompted this post. I am grateful to Jonathan Plunkett for permission to reproduce images from the essential and fascinating archive of Norwich buildings photographed by his father George (www.georgeplunkett.co.uk). Thank you Shea Fiddes for the information on Synagogue Street.

Sources

http://www.heritagecity.org/research-centre/churches-and-creeds/noncomformity-in-norwich.htm
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/03/15/three-norwich-women/
http://www.heritagecity.org/research-centre/churches-and-creeds/the-old-meeting-house.htm
Holmes, Frances and Holmes, Michael (2015). The Old Courts and Yards of Norwich: A Story of People, Poverty and Pride. Pub: Norwich Heritage Projects.
O’Donoghue, Rosemary (2014). Norwich, an Expanding City 1801-1990. Pub: The Larks Press.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/07/15/the-end-of-the-unthank-mystery/
http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Website/raids.htm
Pevsner, Nikolaus and Wilson, Bill (2002). The Buildings of England. Norfolk 1: Norwich and North-East. Pub: Yale University Press.
http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/mid.htm#Nelso
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/05/05/fancy-bricks/
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1392268
http://jscn.org.uk/small-communities/norwich-hebrew-congregation-synagogue/
http://www.norwichsynagogue.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/11th-12thcenteryjews.pdf
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/12/22/arts-crafts-pubs-in-the-c20th/
http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/norwichalban/norwichalban.htm
Burrall, Paul (2017). John Moray-Smith, a booklet published by the Norwich Society http://www.thenorwichsociety.org.uk/moray-smith-panorama (exceptional value at just £3!).
https://norwichmedievalchurches.org/
https://mediafiles.thedms.co.uk/Publication/ee-nor/cms/pdf/OTW_WEBChurchesWalkingTrail.pdf

The end of the Unthank mystery?

15 Saturday Jul 2017

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 21 Comments

Regular readers will know that I have been chipping away at the urban myth that claims a piece of tall wall at the Unthank Road/Clarendon Road junction to be the last remnant of the Unthank’s Heigham estate. Days after my last post on this topic I was still unable to confirm or deny the story … but then I stumbled across new evidence.

The double-height wall said to be the last vestige of the Unthanks’ Heigham estate

The story seems to have originated with Reverend Alfred Jonathan Nixseaman (1886-1977), vicar at Intwood Church, a field away from Intwood Hall on the southern outskirts of Norwich.

Intwood Hall from the churchyard

William Unthank’s son and heir, Clement William, moved to the Hall when his wife took possession of her family home in 1855. William Unthank (1760 – 1837) was buried in St Bartholomew’s church Heigham but his descendants are buried at Intwood church. Reverend Nixseaman was the incumbent there when the last of the Norwich Unthanks (Miss Margaret Beatrice Unthank d.1995) lived in the Hall.

Memorials in Intwood church to the Unthanks of Intwood Hall. Clement William moved from Heigham to his wife’s Intwood estate when their son, CWJ Unthank, was a young boy.

The Unthank memorial window in Intwood church

Nixseaman’s familiarity with the details of the Unthanks’ lives, and deaths, lends an air of authority to his self-published book, The Intwood Story (1972) [1]. He described in quite some detail the newly-built house to which William Unthank moved in 1793; its sylvan setting in the “highest part of Heigham”; a house with 70 acres of grass and woods.

“This Heigham House became the home of the Unthanks for about 100 years, from 1793 to 1891. It stood in its own Park grounds not far from St Giles’ Gates (at the top of Upper St Giles Street). Later when the estate was sold up piece-meal a terrace of houses was built on the site … All that now remains of the premises is some walling which formed part of the stables, seen at the corner of Ampthill Street, opposite Clarendon Road.” Later, “This old wall now shelters the surgery and residence of Dr A.G.Day (38 Unthank Road) from the roadway.”

This is where the myth of The Wall began According to Reverend Nixseaman, William Unthank’s Heigham House was unambiguously situated at the corner of modern-day Clarendon Road and Unthank Road. But even if we ignore the slight niggle that Ampthill Street is not opposite Clarendon Road there are enough other inconsistencies to have sent me on a wild-goose chase around various other Heigham Houses, Halls and Lodges of Victorian Norwich, as my previous blogpost on the topic demonstrates [2]. For instance: Clement William and his wife, Mary Anne Muskett, did not live in this particular Heigham House from 1835 to 1855 for according to the 1842 tithe map they lived 1000 yards away on their estate near modern-day Onley Street; Clarendon Road, Grosvenor Road, Neville Street and Bathhurst Road were eventually built on this site, not “a terrace of houses”; and other evidence indicates that brewer Timothy Steward was living in Heigham Lodge from 1836 onwards.

‘Steward’s House’ at the corner of Clarendon and Unthank Roads

The S in the S&P Limited refers to Timothy Steward, brewer. From the Eaton Cottage public house at the junction of Unthank Road and Mount Pleasant

In that previous blogpost on the Unthanks, when I was still contorting myself to accommodate Nixseaman’s plausible-sounding testimony, I speculated that William and Clement William might have had separate houses and that William sold his to Timothy Steward towards the end of his life. I therefore looked at the Land/Window Tax records for the parish of Heigham to check whether Steward ever lived in Unthank’s house. In every annual entry from 1790 to 1832, when the NRO’s records unfortunately stop, William Unthank is recorded as Proprietor and Occupier of House and Land. Unfortunately, the number and name of the house was never specified in these records. In 1832, Timothy Steward also makes an appearance but his entry (Proprietor and Occupier of House and Land) is the same as Unthank’s indicating that both were owner-occupiers, implicitly of separate houses.

Puzzlement about the exact site of the Unthanks’ house is not a new thing for on the 25th of May 1934 a correspondent to the Eastern Daily Press wrote:

“In reply to S.B. about 60 years ago Colonel Unthank’s House was near Mount Pleasant and, if my memory is correct, was in the space now occupied by Gloucester, Bury and Onley Streets. His grounds were enclosed by a brick wall and the house was some distance from the road (i.e., in contrast to Timothy Steward’s House whose carriage drive was close to the road). The Unthank Arms, at the top of Newmarket Street, at one time bore, as a sign, the elaborate armorial bearings of the Unthanks, so we may, I think, assume with some confidence that the family existed in the neighbourhood. Yours faithfully, W,B.”

In the same edition, a letter from William Unthank’s grandson, Clement William John Unthank (b 1847), should have settled the argument but appears not to have been seen by Nixseaman:

“My grandfather bought Heigham House and 70 acres of land between what is now Trinity Street and Mount Pleasant about 1793.”

This location for Heigham House is consistent with Rye’s History of the Parish of Heigham [3] that states: “Unthank’s house was on the other side of the road (to Timothy Steward’s), and was in well-wooded grounds.” It now looks as if Reverend Nixseaman, writing 100 years after the Unthanks left the parish, chose the wrong Heigham House on which to pin his imaginative account of their home.

The Unthank Estate. This estate on the east side of Unthank Road was extensive, as the 1842 tithe map shows. By 1843, six years after his father’s death, Clement William Unthank was living outside the city at Intwood Hall. Now he started selling off his father’s estate and was applying to be excused land rent charges, “since the lands have been divided into numerous building plots.” First he sold Unthank’s House and two adjacent plots, then in 1850 he sold 46 acres 2 rods and 26 perches of surrounding land, followed in 1878 by another Certificate of Redemption of Rent Charge relating to the sale of his former garden, ‘The Lawn’ and ‘The Plantation’. This all goes to show that the Unthanks’ Heigham House was on this ‘Onley Street’ estate, outlined in red below, and not on land for which they held no title further down Unthank Road. The terraces subsequently built on Unthank land account for much of the Victorian housing on the east side of Unthank Road: from Essex Street to Bury Street.

Plots sold by CW Unthank 1843-1878. The octagonal gaol (top right) – now the site of the Catholic Cathedral – is at the city end of Unthank Road marked yellow. The Unthanks’ Heigham House is marked with a red star; Timothy Steward’s Heigham House with a purple star. The green line marks the future Essex Street and parallel to this were built Trinity, Cambridge, York, Gloucester, Onley and Bury Streets. Redrawn from the 1842 tithe map of Heigham (NRO BR276/1/0051). Courtesy of the Norfolk Record Office.

So who did own The Wall opposite Timothy Steward’s version of Heigham House further up Unthank Road? Again, the 1842 tithe map comes to our aid. The accompanying apportionment record gives the ownership of the numbered properties on the map. It shows that The Wall is on a strip of land belonging not to the Unthanks, nor to Steward, but leased to others by the Norwich Boys’ Hospital. This charity, founded by the C17 mayor Thomas Anguish, supported boys’ and girls’ hospitals by leasing their land around Norfolk.

The upper pink house is Steward’s, the lower is the Boys’ Hospital (occupied house in pink, outbuildings in grey). The arrowed red line marks the tall wall. From the 1842 Heigham tithe map. NRO BR2671/0051 Courtesy of the Norfolk Record Office

Account ledgers for the Trustees of the Norwich Boys’ Hospital, covering the years 1834-1897, are held in the Norfolk Record Office.

NRO N/CCH84. Courtesy of the Norfolk Record Office

The only entry for the parish of Heigham records that a house and garden of one acre, known as Peddars Acre, had been leased to Leonard Harmer for 60 years from Michaelmas 1822. This period is from 15 years before William Unthank died to 25 years after Clement William moved to Intwood. The land and its ‘messuage’ (buildings) were not, therefore, part of the Unthank estate and the absence of Clement William’s name from the ledgers rules out the remote possibility that he rented the stables from them after his father’s death.

” (Where) every prospect pleases and only man is vile”. As to the unusual height of The Wall, Rosemary O’Donoghue [4], in her book on the C19 expansion of Norwich, mentions the steps that owners took to protect their privacy when breaking up their Heigham estates. Below, the 1842 tithe map of Heigham shows that Timothy Steward (whose house and grounds are outlined in red) owned another large plot of land, known as Home Close (black) on the other side of Unthank Road. This plot of arable land adjoined Peddars Acre (green) on one side and plot 466, which also belonged to Steward, on the other. Steward’s plots 453, 568 and 466 were almost as big as the Unthanks’ estate.

Steward’s house and grounds in red; Peddars Acre in green. He also owned plot 568 (black) and the adjacent plot 466. (Unthank’s House is #460 lower left). Redrawn from NRO PD522/44. Courtesy of Norfolk Record Office

The Victorian terraces of Trory, Woburn, Oxford and Kimberley Streets were to be built on Steward’s Home Close, plot #568. A purchase agreement dated 12th December 1853 (NRO N/TC/D1/277, 335 x2) refers to part of this land that William Trory (a tavern owner) had recently bought from Timothy Steward. The purchaser was required to:

“… build a good and substantial nine-inch brick wall, with 14-inch piers of the height of six feet … along the whole boundary of the said piece of land adjoining the garden ground of the said William Trory...”. [Trory leased Peddars Acre from 1837 to 1864]. The covenant continues, “And that no windows or other apertures shall be made in the said houses or buildings, or any of them (including those next to Unthank’s road) on the north-east side thereof, or so as to front or overlook the garden of the said William Trory.”

But in the original sale agreement with William Trory, Timothy Steward and his wife Lucy had gone to even greater lengths to limit what could be seen from their bedroom windows.

“… that before any offices or back premises of any description … shall be built on any part of the said land … a dwelling house facing towards Unthank Road and in a line to conceal such offices [an outmoded term for lavatory] or back-premises from being seen from the windows on the first-floor or first story (sic) of the residence of the said Timothy Steward“.

That is, the Stewards made sure that even if William Trory re-sold the land, as he did, the purchaser’s first legal duty would be to build an entire house facing the Steward residence so that their gaze should not alight on lavatories or other outhouses on the other side of the road. As a consequence, Trory Street is a cul-de-sac, blocked from opening directly onto Unthank Road.

Opposite Steward’s house

Furthermore, the Stewards had specified that nothing unsavoury should be seen, not just from their garden, but from their bedroom windows! A six-foot wall of the kind that Trory had demanded around his own garden could not have met this stringent condition but the Stewards’ sensitivities provide an explanation for the twelve-foot wall that separates the building on Peddars Acre from Unthank Road.

Sources

Nixseaman, A.J. (1972). The Intwood Story.ISBN 0950274208, Norwich. (Available from the Heritage Centre, Norwich Library)
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/04/15/colonel-unthank-rides-again/
Rye, Walter (1917) History of the Parish of Heigham in the City of Norwich. A digitised version is on http://welbank.net/norwich/hist.html#hhall
O’Donoghue, Rosemary. (2014). Norwich, an Expanding City 1801-1900. Pub, Larks Press ISBN 9781904006718.

See also the first blogpost on the Unthanks in: https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/01/30/colonel-unthank-…-golden-triangle/

and the second in: https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/04/15/colonel-unthank-rides-again/

Thanks. I am enormously grateful to the staff of the Norfolk Record Office for their help and advice in searching the records and for giving permission to reproduce images.

Barnard Bishop and Barnards

15 Thursday Jun 2017

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Barnard Bishop and Barnards, Norfolk Iron Works, Norwich industry, Thomas Jeckyll

There is little now to suggest that Norwich had an industrial past but the parish of Coslany, around the River Wensum, was once home to iron works, shoe factories, an electricity generating works and a brewery – all providing employment after the slow decline of the city’s wool-weaving trade.

Barnards lady2.jpg

From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Barnard Bishop and Barnards’ Norfolk Iron Works was a major part of the industrial landscape of Norwich-over-the-water.

Barnard, Bishop and Barnards’ Norfolk Iron Works. Courtesy Picture Norfolk (www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk)

Ordnance Survey 1908. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland (maps.nls.uk/index.html)

The son of a farmer, Charles Barnard (1804-1871) started making domestic and agricultural ironwork in Pottergate in 1842 [1]. Having lived on the land, Barnard was aware of the damage that wild animals could wreak on crops and began to experiment on a machine for weaving wire netting. Initially the netting was made on the machine below but later it was produced by a powered loom. Netting was to be remain a core activity well into the C20.

Barnard’s loom for weaving wire netting at The Museum of Norwich

In 1846 Barnard went into partnership with John Bishop, then in 1859 Barnard’s sons Charles and Godfrey joined the business, becoming Barnard, Bishop and Barnards.

Barnard Bishop and Barnards’ ‘four Bs’ trade sign – the two smaller bees representing Charles Barnard’s sons. Courtesy of The Museum of Norwich

This ‘four Bs’ rebus marks the firm’s attachment to puns: their designer Thomas Jeckyll used his own two-butterfly signature from the time of his early collaborations with Barnard and Bishop. Jeckyll, incidentally, was a friend of Frederick Sandys who drew the portrait of Charles Barnard above: both inserted a rogue ‘y’ into their surname.

I have already written at length about Jeckyll [2-5] but it’s not possible to omit him entirely since it was his designs that brought Barnards national attention, elevating some pieces to high art. Two examples: first, the intricate wrought and cast-iron ‘Norwich’ gates that won the firm ecstatic praise at the 1862 International Exhibition;

The Norwich gates, given to the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1863 as a wedding present by the citizens of Norwich and Norfolk. Now at Sandringham House, Norfolk. Courtesy of The Museum of Norwich

second, Jeckyll’s associations with a group of London artists – notably James Abbott McNeill Whistler – made him a key figure in the Anglo-Japanese Aesthetic Movement. Jeckyll used japonaise designs for Barnards’ fireplaces while his cast iron sunflower (to be seen on the gates of Heigham Park and Chapelfield Gardens) came to symbolise the Aesthetic Movement.

Courtesy of The Museum of Norwich

In 1871, Barnards moved their iron works to Calvert Street in the parish of St Michael-at-Coslany.

St Miles Works from the river. Courtesy The Museum of Norwich

The business contained a large foundry at one end while a new building housed the netting mill, for which steam was used to power the looms [1]. The factory was also known as St Michael’s Works; Miles is a diminutive of Michael and both are also applied to one of the city’s most beautiful churches, the elegant St Michael Coslany.

At the St Miles site the workforce of ca 400 produced an eclectic range of utilitarian objects. The drawing below lists: “a coke barrow, a garden arbour, trellis, wire netting, a garden seat, a chair, a pheasant feeder, a swing water barrow, a hose reel, a fire dog, a grate, a table, a roller & a sheep trough. ‘All made on the spot’“.

Courtesy of The Museum of Norwich

Still desirable. Garden chairs from Barnard Bishop and Barnards 1884 catalogue for their London showroom. Courtesy of The Museum of Norwich

Barnards celebratory brochure 1844-1925. Courtesy of The Museum of Norwich

The railways arrived in Norwich in the mid-C19 and Barnards provided much of the metal work for at least two of the city’s three stations. These ornate barriers at Norwich Thorpe station were made by Barnards and were designed by W. Neville Ashbee, the company architect for the Great Eastern Railway.

The wrought iron platform barriers at Norwich Thorpe station. Courtesy of The Museum of Norwich.

The barriers have gone but the cast-iron canopy supports with the elegant spandrels can still be seen along the platforms.

Norwich Thorpe station.JPG

The station forecourt is still enclosed by fine examples of Victorian ironwork.

Barnards also cast the columns and spandrels for Norwich City station. This station, near the St Crispin’s roundabout, was the terminus of the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway whose hub was at Melton Constable. It closed to passengers in 1959.

Norwich City station. Courtesy of The Museum of Norwich NWHCM 118.959.51

In 1882, a river bridge was built to provide access to the new City Station. St Crispin’s Bridge – manufactured by Barnards – became part of the ring road in 1970 taking traffic in clockwise direction. A new bridge built parallel to it takes traffic in the opposite direction.

Barnards bridge.JPG

Charles Barnard died in 1871 but the firm lived on as Barnards Limited (from 1907).

Mr and Mrs Charles Barnard in later life. Image courtesy of Norfolk Record Office via http://www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk

The managing director James Bower played a direct part in the running of the company, rebuilding and re-designing the wire netting machines. In 1921 they purchased part of the old Mousehold Aerodrome where, in the Second World War, they manufactured gun shells and parts for the Hurricane fighter. This attracted the attention of the Luftwaffe who bombed the site in July 1942, killing two people [6].

The Norwich engineering firm, Boulton and Paul, made aircraft (including the Overstrand and Sidestrand) but who knew that Barnards helped make planes? Barnards also made buses …

Bus made by Barnards Ltd in Cathedral Close. Image courtesy of Norfolk Record Office via http://www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk

… and at their factory in Salhouse Road they produced steam traction engines.

Image courtesy of Norfolk Record Office via http://www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk

Barnards Ltd ceased trading in 1991. The Coslany site is now occupied by social housing – Barnards’ Yard.

Barnards’ Ironworks now Barnards’ Yard social housing

Barnards yard sign.jpg

Sources

Williams, Nick (2013). Norwich, City of Industries (an excellent book on industrial Norwich).
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2015/12/26/two-bs-or-not-tw…s-thomas-jeckyll/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/04/15/thomas-jeckyll-the-boileau-family/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/01/06/jeckyll-and-the-sunflower-motif/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/11/10/jeckyll-and-the-japanese-wave/
http://www.heritagecity.org/research-centre/industrial-innovation/barnards.htm

Thanks to Hannah Henderson of The Museum of Norwich for kindly showing me the Barnards collection, and I also thank David Holgate-Carruthers for his help. Do visit the Museum of Norwich, which has a section devoted to Barnards and Jeckyll and gives a fascinating glimpse into Norwich as it once was. I am grateful to Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk for allowing me to reproduce photographs. Clare manages (https://norfolk.spydus.co.uk/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/MSGTRN/PICNOR/HOME), which contains a searchable collection of 20,000 images of Norfolk life.

Public art, private meanings

15 Monday May 2017

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Norwich statues, Public art

Once, I took part in an alternative sculpture-trail, visiting unexpected art in public spaces: pieces hidden in full view, works that had outlived their original purpose and unseen eroticism in a monument to a national heroine.

Edith Cavell monument by Henry Pegram 1918 [1]. Originally sited in the road outside the Maid’s Head Hotel (left) it is now placed beside the Erpingham Gate of the cathedral (right).

This was in May 1999 and the sculpture trail was led by Krzysztof Fijalkowski, a young lecturer from the Norwich School of Art [2]. Here, I retrace some of his steps and add a few of my own.

Open secrets.jpg

Edith Cavell, born in nearby Swardeston, was a nurse during WW1. In 1915 she was shot by a German firing squad in Belgium for assisting the escape of Allied prisoners and – according to former head of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington – for espionage [3]. Notes on the guided tour (price 20p) gave a Freudian interpretation of the Cavell Memorial, mentioning the wreaths that mark Cavell’s breasts and the soldier’s erect rifle “pointing straight to her sex”. Works of art can hold many meanings although not everyone agrees with them, as Tony Hall’s cartoon shows.

Eastern Daily Press May 20 1999 ©Tony Hall

Not far away we visited a curved mural, tucked away from passers-by at the top of London Street.

Boldly commissioned in 1974 by the Abbey National Building Society, Tadeusz Zielinski’s ‘Symbol of Norwich’ depicts a modern family, sheltered under the Society’s roof, against the background of the walled city with its cathedral (three panels up from the right). The modernist treatment is reminiscent of the Festival of Britain style of the early 1950s [4] but any obscurity of meaning will only have been increased by Betfred’s logo that – drilled and screwed into the artwork – now blocks the first row of panels. Aaaagh!

Who, when buying half a pound of six inch nails in Thorns the ironmongers in Exchange Street, has failed to notice the wall paintings on the first floor? On a recent visit, an assistant moved some ladders for me to see the paintings behind the protective screen. Emily Duke, a member of the Paston family – partners of the founder RE Thorn – told me that before the business was opened in the early C19th the building had been a hotel in which an artist painted the rooms in return for accommodation. The remaining figures seem to represent People of All Nations.

Courtesy of Emily Duke at Thorns, Exchange Street, Norwich [5]

The redundant church of St Laurence is one of five along St Benedict’s Street. It has one of the most prominent towers in the city yet it and the west doorway are easy to miss as you concentrate on the steep steps down St Laurence’ s Passage [6]. In the spandrels above the door are two gruesome deaths: the roasting of the eponymous saint on a gridiron and St Edmund riddled with Viking arrows. His head was thrown into a forest but rescuers were guided to it by a Latin-speaking wolf (bottom right) crying hic, hic, hic.

The Saints.jpg

High above Orford Hill stands a stag with moulting antlers – a 1984 fibreglass replica of the statue placed there about 100 years earlier.

Its original meaning is likely to be obscure for the bold wooden sign ‘GUNMAKER’, which advertised the trade of occupants George Jeffries then Darlows, has disappeared in recent years [7].

No8 Orford Hill in 1938. Edwards’ saddlery and Darlow & Co gunmaker. Courtesy georgeplunkett.co.uk

Another stop on the trail was to see one of the first purchases by the Norfolk Contemporary Art Society in 1978. At the time this work by Peter Hide, a former lecturer at the School of Art, was situated on a piece of wasteland behind the Duke Street carpark. Hide may have intended this as a formal exercise in ‘horizontality’ and balance but in its original location – a stone’s throw from Barnard, Bishop and Barnards’ Victorian ironworks – the girders provided an incidental link with the city’s industrial past.

Some time over the intervening years the sculpture has been re-sited next to the busy St Crispin’s roundabout near Halford’s store, gaining a further – less welcome – layer of meaning. The Girder Structure is now near the site of Norwich’s City Station, which was bombed in the 1942 Baedeker raids and eventually closed in 1959. This does add a further resonance to The Girder Structure in its new position but the industrial-strength attachment of the M&GN logo (presumably by the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway Preservation Society?) overrides the artist’s original intentions.

choo choo.jpg

The following examples of public art come from my own travels. At the corner of St Stephens and Surrey Streets, opposite Marks and Spencer, is a postwar block decorated with identical stone carvings hidden beneath the keystones of the three curved window arches.

Even if you can discern them without the aid of a telephoto lens (I couldn’t) it is not obvious that these animals commemorate the previous building on the site – the Boar’s Head public house, destroyed by a Baedeker raid in April 1942. The surname of the C19 licensee, Richard Norgate of Cawston, can just be made out on the pub sign below [8].

Old Boar Inn.jpg

A basket-maker’s shop on nearby Ber Street was also destroyed in the 1942 air raids. The reconstructed building is now occupied by Gerald Giles’ home-electricals store but the wooden carving on the tympanum above the door recalls a different post-war life. The panel by Joseph Lloyd Royal depicts dockers unloading ships, suggesting that the building was once a warehouse for storing goods from Norwich docks [9].

gerald giles1.jpg

The Wensum was still navigable by quite large vessels until the 1980s.

Coasters at the Port of Norwich ca 1936 broadlandmemories.co.uk

The Norfolk and Norwich Agricultural Hall (now occupied by Anglia TV), at the top of Prince of Wales Road, is built from alien Cumberland sandstone [10]. The Prince of Wales feathers relate to the prince’s involvement and to the road itself; however, there is no record of the identity of the worthies whose terracotta heads decorate the keystones of the ground floor windows. The bull’s head could simply be symbolic of agricultural trade but once you recognise the name of local philanthropist JJ Colman on the foundation stone it is impossible not to see the beast as an allusion to his family’s mustard business.

New Colmans montage.jpg

Around the year 2000, the City Council commissioned a sculpture of the Three Wise Monkeys to go on top of the pavilion at Waterloo Park. As well as seeing, hearing and speaking no evil, the monkeys have – with the passage of time – come to illustrate the speed with which technology becomes dated. Now, a monkey with an iPhone could do all three jobs.

Alex Johannsen ca 2000 [11]

Palimpsests – traces of past use – can be seen all around the city. Some of my favourites are the mosaics advertising what once were household names. The initials, FH&W, were used as a symbol to advertise national shoe chain Freeman Hardy and Willis in the 1960s but by the 1990s the chain had disappeared. The Maypole dairy chain was known, paradoxically, for promoting non-dairy margarine. Their name was phased out in the 1970s.

Magdalen Street, Norwich

Norwich, fortunately, isn’t blighted by equestrian statues of Victorian luminaries …

There once was a very famous man
On his famous horse he’d ride through the land
The people used to see him everywhere
When he died they put a statue in the square
(Hurray)

The Equestrian Statue, (click audio link) by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (composer Neil Innes)

… but it does have a statue that commands an entire square – the statue of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1689) on Hay Hill, near his house. Here he is contemplating a Roman burial urn found at Brampton, which was the subject of his book ‘Urne Burial’ (“man is pompous in the grave“).

Sir Thomas Browne by Henry Pegram 1905

At the foot of the Browne statue are several pieces of marble statuary comprising a work entitled, Homage to Thomas Browne. In his esoteric book, The Garden of Cyrus, Browne discusses the power of the quincunx – an interlocking figure where four points mark the corners of a diamond with the fifth point at the centre. The marble blocks do not, at first, appear to be arranged in a particular fashion but by phasing out the other blocks it can be discerned that the five high-backed seats are arranged in a quincunx [12].

Left, the Quincunx from The Garden of Cyrus 1658 (Wikipedia); right, one of five marble seats, part of the Homage to Thomas Browne by Anne and Patrick Poirier 2007

In the 1980s, the smell of chocolate would float over the city – usually on Sundays – from the Nestlé/Rowntree chocolate factory next to Chapelfield Gardens. Originally this had been Caley’s Fleur de Lys chocolate factory; it was another victim of the 1942 bombing raids but the building was reconstructed in the early 1950s. The site is now occupied by the Chapelfield Shopping Mall and the lost chocolate factory is commemorated by two pairs of panels, one either side of the St Stephen’s Street entrance. These sculptures were initially made for the postwar building by local artist Edward Barker who celebrated the ingredients: cocoa, exotic fruits, maize and milk [13].

The layering of history can also be seen inside the shopping mall. Two sets of 18 panels, high up on the top floor of the arcade, are based on the 18 relief panels decorating the bronze doors to the City Hall (1938) [14]. Their designer, James Woodford, depicted trades that were then associated with a thriving industrial city but which, like chocolate-making, have gone the way of the city’s shoe and aeronautical industries shown below.

On the left, in intuChapelfield Shopping Mall, are copies of James Woodford’s roundels (right) originally designed in the 1930s for the bronze doors of Norwich City Hall

©ReggieUnthank 2017.

Sources

http://www.racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=289.
Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Rachel Fijalkowski (1999) Open Secrets: Unexpected Art in Norwich (pamphlet produced as part of Norfolk Visual Arts Festival) see [4].
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/bbc/11861398/Revealed-New-evidence-that-executed-wartime-nurse-Edith-Cavells-network-was-spying.html
http://www.racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=86
http://www.thornsdiy.co.uk/pages/ourstory.html
http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/norwichlawrence/norwichlawrence.htm
http://www.racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=169
http://www.norridge.me.uk/pubs/areasrch/centre/pubs83/indiv/boar.htm
http://www.racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=316
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/07/28/norwichs-pre-loved-buildings/
http://racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=283
http://racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=591
http://racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=363
http://www.heritagecity.org/research-centre/social-innovation/norwich-city-hall.htm

I have drawn heavily on the essential website for local sculpture in Norfolk and Suffolk www.racns.co.uk and thank Sarah Cocke for patiently answering my queries. Do visit this fascinating archive.

Thanks: to Professor Krzysztof Fijalkowski for his blessing; to Tony Hall and the EDP for permission to use the cartoon; to Emily Duke for the Thorns photographs; Carol Gingell of Broadland Memories for the photograph of ships on the Wensum; and the georgeplunkett.co.uk website for the 1938 photo of the stag on Orford Hill.

The Norwich Society helps people enjoy and appreciate the history and character of Norwich. Visit: www.thenorwichsociety.org.uk

Colonel Unthank rides again

15 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

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Colonel Unthank, the golden triangle, Unthank Road Norwich

One man’s tireless search for his namesake.

The story so far … one year ago I wrote about the Unthank Road – the backbone of Norwich’s Golden Triangle of Victorian Housing – and about the family who gave name to it [1]. Of course, I am not an Unthank, I simply lived on the road for many years and became fascinated by an isolated piece of high wall said to have been the last remnant of William Unthank’s estate. He was not ‘Colonel Unthank’, unlike his grandson and great-grandson, but his business acumen propelled his descendants into the local gentry. What follows is an account of my further searches into Unthank’s house, full of dead ends and false leads but bear with me, I do reach a conclusion – sort of.

The father of William Unthank (b1760 d 1837), William Senior, was a barber who made perukes or periwigs of the kind worn by William Wiggett, Norwich Mayor.

An example of tonsorial determinism: William Wiggett, Mayor of Norwich 1742 [2]

William Unthank Junior was an ‘Attorney’ in Foster and Unthank. Fosters Solicitors on Bank Plain is still one of the city’s major law firms.

William Unthank. Courtesy of Fosters Solicitors Norwich [1a]

William Unthank’s son Clement William was also to become a partner in the firm.

Letter to CW Unthank, solicitor at Foster and Unthank’s offices, then at Queen St, Norwich 1835 [3]

William Jr accumulated 2416 acres of land, including the land between St Giles’ Gate (at the top of Upper St Giles Street) and Intwood/Cringleford on the city’s southern edges [4]. According to Reverend Nixseaman [4] Clement William – while courting the heiress of Intwood Hall – was able to ride across his father’s land along a back lane that became known as ‘Unthank’s Road’ [4]. Later, after he moved into his wife’s home, Intwood Hall, Clement William started to sell off blocks of land to create the Unthank estate of terraced housing [see previous post, 1].

Reverend Alfred Jonathan Nixseaman, the vicar of Intwood [4], described in some detail where William Unthank Jr lived. He said it was within sight of St Giles’ Gate and where Norwich Gaol – now the site of St John’s Catholic Cathedral – was built against the entrance to Unthank’s own parkland. This clearly places Heigham House at the extreme city end of Unthank Road. Nixseaman seems to be the originator of the story that the stretch of high wall, on the opposite side of Unthank Road, formed part of the Unthank stables.

The Wall, reputedly opposite Wm Unthank’s Heigham House

However, several of Nixseaman’s facts do not check out. He wrote that the Unthank family lived for over 100 years at Heigham House (approx 1790 to 1890) but another source says that CW, his wife and four children lived in Heigham from their marriage in 1835 until 1855 when they moved into Intwood Hall [5]. And, as we shall see, CW can be placed in a house further down Unthank Road at a time when Timothy Steward (of Norwich’s Steward and Patteson Brewery) was occupying Heigham Lodge as Heigham House was sometimes called (and as these maps show) [6].

Heigham Lodge on the 1883 1:2500 OS map: Heigham House on 1887 OS 6″ map [7]. Courtesy of OrdnanceSurvey and Norwich Heritage Centre.

These maps were made about 50 years after William Unthank died (1837) but the Norfolk Record Office holds an early undated map of the house and grounds (below) well before Edward Boardman surveyed the Heigham Lodge Estate (1887) and laid out Grosvenor, Clarendon, Bathhurst Roads and Neville Street [8].

Stewards House on ‘Unthanks Road’. The junction at left is with extant Oxford Street. Note the estate doesn’t include land on the opposite side of the road where ‘the wall’ stands. Courtesy Norfolk Record Office

There is good evidence from poll and census records that William Unthank’s son Clement William lived several hundred yards down Unthank Road.

Map by City Surveyor AW Morant 1873. The ‘Wm Unthank/T Steward ‘estate is outlined in red. The green star marks CW Unthank’s estate (The Unthanks) further south on ‘Unthanks Road’. Octagonal City Gaol top right. Courtesy Norfolk County Council.

The 1842 tithe map of the parish of Heigham (Norfolk Record Office) records CW Unthank as the owner of ‘The Unthanks’, comprised of house and gardens, lodge, lawn and a plantation. The 1851 census indicates he was living there with wife, two daughters, two sons and eight servants. Nixseaman makes no mention of this. By overlaying the circa 1840 tithe map onto a modern map, using Norfolk County Council’s invaluable Map Explorer [9], it can be seen that ‘The Unthanks’ stretched from Bury Street to the south to beyond Cambridge Street to the north. Clement William and his family moved to Intwood Hall in 1855 but as late as 1880-1884 the Ordnance Survey still records this as Unthanks House when the terraces had only encroached as far south as York Street.

© Norfolk County Council ©Crown copyright and database rights 2011 Ordnance Survey

Could one of three other large houses known as Heigham Hall/House/Lodge have been William Unthank’s House?

1. Heigham Hall was situated at the junction of Old Palace Road and Heigham Street.

Old Palace Road refers to the home of Bishop Holl who moved there after the Puritans had sacked the Cathedral and turned him out of the Bishop’s Palace. Heigham Street was once known as Hangman’s Lane. A letter refers to suicides being buried at the crossways at the bottom of the road where a stake was driven through the body [10].

This medieval hall was partly rebuilt by a butcher, John Lowden, who had been a contractor in the Napoleonic Wars. On Bryant’s map of 1826 Heigham Hall first appears as Marrowbone House but was also known as Marrowbone Hall [11].

Bryant’s map of Norwich 1826. Marrowbone House/Hall underlined in red. Courtesy Norfolk County Council

This Heigham Hall has the virtue of being very close to St Bartholomew’s church where William Unthank worshipped. In the early C19 it was the parish church of rural Heigham before the boom in terraced house building – triggered by the sale of Unthank land –necessitated the construction of other churches (e.g., Holy Trinity in Trinity Street). St Bartholomews was bombed in the war; the Saxon tower survived but the parish records didn’t nor, presumably, the family vault in which William Unthank was buried [4].

St Bartholomew Heigham, Norwich. Destroyed by enemy bombs 1942.

There is no evidence that William Unthank lived in this particular Heigham Hall but it provides a fascinating diversion. In 1836, Drs WP Nichols and JW Watson bought Heigham Hall and opened it as a ‘Private Lunatic Asylum’. (A letter from Dr Nichols’ granddaughter indicates Heigham Hall was first referred to as Heigham House [12]).

From, ‘Photographic Views of Heigham Hall’, Courtesy Norfolk Record Office. MC279/15

2. Heigham House – another private mental hospital just off present-day Avenue Road – was in competition with Heigham Hall [13, 14] . The Retreat, as ‘private madhouses’ were often called, was opened in 1829 by a Mr Jollye of Loddon who sold it to three doctors.

In 1852, Heigham Retreat was involved in a notorious scandal. To avoid being charged with the attempted rape of a minor a magistrate declared Reverend Edmund Holmes insane. Holmes was admitted to The Retreat but promptly regained his sanity and remained as the hospital’s chaplain. Local outrage led to a change in the law but the incident speaks of a time when being of ‘a good county family’ was sufficient qualification for the avoidance of justice [15]. In 1859 The Retreat was bought out by Heigham Hall who closed it down. Heigham Hall itself was demolished to make way for social housing in the early 1960s.

The outline of the Heigham Retreat estate is commemorated in the layout of the Victorian terraces that followed [16]. Part of the tree-lined avenue to The Retreat survives as Avenue Road as it branches off Park Lane (once known as Asylum Lane). Two of the boundaries align with Pembroke and Denbigh Roads while Cardiff, Swansea and (the top of) Caernarvon Roads run vertically down the map.

3. Heigham House existed on a plot of just over an acre at the junction between Heigham Road and West Pottergate Street [17]. It was adjacent to St Philip’s Church, demolished in 1977. There is, however, nothing to connect the Unthanks to this house.

Until two weeks before I made this post the most economical explanation seemed to be that William Unthank lived in the Heigham House/Lodge at the city end of Unthank Road while his son Clement William lived in Unthanks House/The Unthanks near Onley Street. William Unthank’s death certificate stated that he died (1837), not at home, but at his son-in-law’s house in Eaton, Norwich after “severe suffering for several years, in patient resignation to his affliction” [18]. Timothy Steward, recorded as living at Heigham Lodge in 1836 [6], could therefore have been merely renting the sick man’s house.

Then I came across two C20th letters promising authoritative recollections from the Unthank family. The first, dated 1983, is from Margaret Unthank, William Unthank’s great-great granddaughter, who refers to a newspaper article about ‘the wall’.

‘The wall on the left of your picture is, I am told, all that remains of the stables of Heigham House, which was demolished in 1891. I enclose for your information a photograph of a picture I have of the house and park.” M. Unthank, Intwood Hall [19].

This favours the ‘city end’ location of the wall but the second letter, dated 1934, from William Unthank’s grandson (Clement William John, b 1847) contradicts that.

“My grandfather bought Heigham House and 70 acres of land between what is now Trinity Street and Mount Pleasant about 1793 … Heigham House was pulled down about forty years ago …” CWJ Unthank, Intwood Hall [20].

Clement William John was about eight when his family moved out to Intwood Hall in 1855 and was surely old enough to have remembered the name and location of his first home, which he recalls as Heigham House near modern day Onley Street. Margaret Unthank, however, was writing 128 years after the move out of Heigham, qualifying her history with a hesitant, “I am told“. The photograph of the wall to which she referred is actually a series of low front-garden walls; one of them appears to belong to a house I once lived in. Miss Unthank was the owner of Intwood Hall when the Reverend Nixseaman was vicar of Intwood Church. The picture she gave to the newspaper of ‘Heigham House’ is the same that Nixseaman used as the frontispiece to his book and one wonders if it is his uncertain understanding of the location of the Unthank’s house that is being relayed here. Rather tellingly there is nothing in his book to say that the Unthanks spent any time at all in the ‘Onley Street house’ yet Clement William is placed there with some certainty by a tithe roll and two censuses. Also consistent with the ‘Onley Street’ option is an undated sale map of ‘garden ground’ – where the parade of shops on Unthank Road currently stands – stating that William Unthank owned the estate opposite, marked on other maps as ‘The Unthanks’ or ‘Unthank’s House’.

The triangular plot on the west side of Unthank Road ends just below the junction with Park Lane. Wm Unthank owns the land opposite. Norfolk Record Office NRS4150

We still don’t have smoking-gun evidence that William Unthank lived on the estate near present day Onley Street but it is the explanation I currently favour, even if it does orphan the wall at the other end of the road.

©ReggieUnthank 2017. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Thanks: We are fortunate in Norfolk to have the Norfolk Record Office and The Heritage Centre in Norwich Millennium Library – tremendous resources for historical research. The staff are unfailingly helpful and I couldn’t have written this article without them. I thank Eunice and Ron Shanahan for access to the CW Unthank letter and Fosters Solicitors for the portrait of William Unthank.

The Norwich Society helps people enjoy and appreciate the history and character of Norwich. Visit: www.thenorwichsociety.org.uk

Sources

See my previous post on the Unthanks: http://wp.me/p71GjT-zh Ref 1a: http://www.fosters-solicitors.co.uk/downloads/fosters-history.pdf
Portrait of William Wiggett, Mayor of Norwich 1742, by John Theodore Heins Snr (1697-1756). Norwich Civic Portrait Collection https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/search/collection:norwich-civic-portrait-collection-931/page/4
http://www.earsathome.com/letters/Previctorian/unthank.html
Nixseaman, A.J. (1972) The Intwood Story. Pub: R Robertson, Norwich.
A History of Intwood and Keswick by the Cringleford Historical Society (1998).
The 1832 Norfolk Poll Book (The Heritage Centre, Norwich Library) lists William Unthank of Unthank’s Road as a Freeman while Timothy Steward is an ‘Occupier’ on Unthank’s Road. White’s Gazetteer (1836) page 172, places the brewer Timothy Steward in Heigham Lodge.
Ordnance Survey maps Sheet LXIII and LXIII.15.1 in The Heritage Centre, Norwich Millennium Library .
https://www.norwich.gov.uk/downloads/file/3010/heigham_grove_conservation_area_appraisal
Using Norfolk County Council’s excellent interactive map explorer: http://www.historic-maps.norfolk.gov.uk/mapexplorer/
Letter by CC Lanchester to the Eastern Daily Press 20.9.1960.
Walter Rye’s History of the Parish of Heigham in the City of Norwich (1917). http://welbank.net/norwich/hist.html#hhall
Norfolk Record Office MC 279/6. Letter by Miss M. Nichols of Dawlish.
http://www.heritagecity.org/research-centre/social-innovation/heigham-hall.htm
Mackie, Charles (1901). Norfolk Annals vol 1, 1801-1850. [Feb 14 1829, the opening of Mr Jollye’s Heigham House, aka Retreat].
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/lunacy-and-mad-doctors/201505/did-the-victorian-asylum-allow-the-rich-evade-justice. The Heigham Hall referred to here is actually Heigham Retreat.
http://www.heritagecity.org/research-centre/social-innovation/heigham-retreat.htm
Sale catalogue of Heigham House 1934. NRO BR241/4/1067.
Death notice in Bell’s Weekly Messenger Sunday 19 Nov 1837.
Letter in the Norfolk Advertiser 30th June 1983
Letter in the Eastern Daily Press 25th May 1934

The flamboyant Mr Skipper

15 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by reggie unthank in Art Nouveau, Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 12 Comments

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Cosseyware, George Skipper, Hotel de Paris Cromer, James Minns, Jarrolds Norwich, Poppyland

Two architects changed the face of Victorian Norwich: Edward Boardman and George Skipper. Boardman sketched out the quiet fabric of a post-medieval city but it was Skipper who provided the firecrackers.

The son of a Dereham builder, Skipper (1856-1948), spent a year at Norwich School of Art studying art and – probably at his father’s insistence – architecture [1]. He did, of course, follow the architectural path but – as the Norwich Mercury wrote in 1906 – he was known for his ‘artistic temperament’ and he expressed this side of his personality in the exuberance of his buildings. He is reputed to have said, you “need an artist for a first rate building” [1a]. However, one of his early buildings (1890), for which he and his brother Frederick won the commission, was the “modestly ‘Queen Anne’ town hall” of Cromer [2] that gave little idea of the fireworks to come.

CromerTown Hall.JPG This project is important, though, for introducing the association between Skipper and the ‘carver’ James Minns, who was responsible for the decorative brickwork from Gunton Bros’ Brickyard at Costessey [3].

In addition to the decorative shields, James Minns sculpted the tableau in the pediment depicting the discovery of Iceland by local sailor Robert Bacon [4]

In the late 1880s Clement Scott’s column ‘Poppyland‘ in the Daily Telegraph extolled the virtues of the North Norfolk coast, particularly around Overstrand [5,6]. The book based on these articles, The Poppyland Papers, proved very popular and this, combined with the arrival of the Great Eastern Railway in 1887, transformed nearby Cromer from a quiet fishing village to a fashionable watering place for the wealthy.

Not everyone succumbed to the bracing pleasures of Cromer, including the young and homesick Winston Churchill who wrote to his mother: “I am not enjoying myself very much”.

The comfortable middle and upper middle classes came to see the coastal attractions and they needed suitable accommodation [5]. This triggered a wave of hotel building and Skipper was engaged by a consortium of Norwich businessmen to design several of them [6]. After The Grand Hotel he built The Metropole, which is said to have shown signs of Skipper’s flair and exuberance [1] but both hotels were demolished, as was another of his hotels, The Imperial.

The last vestige of the Hotel Metropole

A survivor was Skipper’s best known project, the Hotel de Paris (1896). Its frontage, which borrows features from the late medieval palace at Chambord, disguised the previous Regency buildings. Marc Girouard thought the result was cruder but jollier than Skipper’s other hotels [2].

The hotel demonstrates one of Skipper’s favourite tropes of using turrets and cupolas to provide interest at the skyline [6]. He used the same device to disguise an ugly lift heading at Sandringham [7].

Sandringham House. Skipper’s is the taller of the two cupolas. http://www.tournorfolk.co.uk/sandringham

Further along the clifftop at Cromer is another of Skipper’s hotels – The Cliftonville – with decorative ‘Cosseyware’ (fancy brickware) by Guntons of Costessey near Norwich [8]. Skipper was responsible for modifying the hotel originally designed by another Norwich architect, AF Scott [6]. The Cliftonville was transformed into an example of the Arts and Crafts style showing the influence of the French Renaissance as well as the C19th Queen Anne Revival.

Trevor Page & Co of Norwich provided the soft furnishings [6]. The company was a partnership between Henry Trevor (who made great use of Cosseyware seconds in creating the Plantation Garden in Norwich) and his stepson John Page. Much of the ‘hard’ interior decoration survives.

Clockwise from top left: Turret with octagonal cupola; stained glass peacock panel; Guntons terracotta panel; dining room doors referencing ‘Poppyland’; fireplace in the dining room.

Skipper designed several private houses in Cromer. St Bennet’s at 37 Vicarage Road, built in 1893, is one of the most impressive. Freely decorated in red brick panels it is said to have been carved by James Minns [6].

St Bennets, Cromer, designed by Skipper 1893; brick carving attributed to Minns

Skipper’s first offices (1880) in Norwich were in Opie Street but by 1891 he was employing about 50 people and in 1896 he moved to 7 London Street. At that time, architects were not allowed to advertise their services but, flying close to the regulatory wind, he commissioned Guntons to sculpt terracotta plaques depicting Skipper, on site, examining the work of sculptors and as the architect discussing plans with a client.

Carved brick tableaux at No 7 London Street. Upper centre: Skipper, with family to the left, inspecting sculpted work. Lower centre: Skipper showing work to clients.

I suspect the figure presenting Skipper the plaque in the upper panel could be James Minns himself – the ‘carver’ for Guntons. Although about 68 at the time Minns was still sculpting to a high standard for one year later he successfully submitted a carved wooden panel to the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy [9].

Minns Duo.jpg

Skipper’s designs draw on a variety of sources. The French Renaissance style of his early years (enriched by Flemish influences from his visit to Belgium as a student) were to give way to the more weighty Neo-Classical Palladian buildings – buildings such as the Norfolk and Norwich Savings Bank (now Barclays Bank) in Red Lion St, the Norwich and London Accident Assurance Association (now the St Giles House Hotel in St Giles’ St) and his most expensive and sumptuous project, Surrey House for Norwich Union Life Insurance Society. But around the turn of the century he still found time for more playful ventures, embarking on ‘the mildest flirtation with British Art Nouveau'[7]. The Royal Arcade – covered in a previous blog [10] – is one such ‘transitional adventure’ although the credit for this Art Nouveau gem must surely go to the head of Doulton Pottery’s Architectural Department,WJ Neatby, who designed the jewel-like surfaces.

In a post on decorative tiles [11], I noted the close similarity between Neatby’s design for the young woman holding a disc in the spandrels of the arcade’s central crossing and a self-portrait by the Brooklyn photographer Zaida Ben-Yusuf. But, drawing various threads together, it seems likely that both artists were borrowing from the work of Alphonse Mucha whose well-known posters illustrate young women holding very similar poses [see 10 for a fuller discussion].

Left: Zodiac figure by WJ Neatby (1899); right ‘The Odor of Pomegranates’ (ca 1899) by Zaida Ben-Yusuf

Hints of Art Nouveau were also to be seen in the turrets and domes of the Norfolk Daily Standard offices (1899-1900) on St Giles Street. This riotously decorated building survived the bombing of the adjacent building in the Blitz (1942) but later lost some of its features during a conversion to a Wimpy Bar.

Art nouveau touches can be seen on the spandrels above the first floor windows and on the Dutch/Flemish gables. The copper-domed turret is a familiar Skipper motif.

It was to ‘exuberant’ buildings such as these that Poet Laureate John Betjeman was referring when he made his well-known quotation comparing Skipper to Antonio Gaudi of Barcelona [7, 12].

Frontispiece to the catalogue of the Norwich School of Art’s exhibition on Skipper, 1975 [12]

A more convincing Art Nouveau building is the Royal Norfolk and Suffolk Yacht Club at Lowestoft. Skipper’s competition-winning design from 1902 is stripped of the decoration and frenetic eclecticism of his other projects to produce a building using “the vocabulary of British Art Nouveau … with more than a sidelong look at CFA Voysey” [7]. The plain stucco walls – one of Voysey’s signatures – and sloped buttresses are relieved by circular and semi-circular windows and topped by a copper dome. This puritanical excursion was a one-off for Skipper.

broadlandmemories.co.uk

Back in Norwich Skipper designed Commercial Chambers in Red Lion Street (1901-3), wedged into a narrow site between another of his projects (the Norfolk and Norwich Savings Bank 1900-3) and John Pollock’s veterinary premises designed by his great competitor, Edward Boardman (1901-2). Even on a such a narrow building Skipper manages to create interest at the skyline by using moulded cornice, statuary, a finial and a campanile that just sneaks above Boardman’s adjacent Dutch gable by the height of its copper dome.

Left, Boardman’s building for Pollock; centre, Skipper’s Commercial Chambers; right, Skipper’s Norfolk and Norwich Savings Bank.

Because Commercial Chambers was built for the accountant Charles Larking [7] you would be forgiven for thinking that the robed figure at the top of the building, making entries into a ledger, was Larking himself but it is clearly the self-publicist Skipper.

skipper montage.jpg

Between 1896 and 1925 [6] Skipper remodelled, in stages, the frontage of his neighbour’s department store on London and Exchange Streets. Original plans show that Skipper had also planned a dome to surmount the semi-circular bay – “rather like a tiered wedding cake” [1] – at the corner of Jarrolds department store. But at the end of this long project no copper-clad dome materialised [1].

Work began first on the London Street side whose second floor facade is punctuated by a series of Royal Doulton plaques bearing the names of authors first published by Jarrold Printing [7]. The one shown below commemorates Anna Sewell who wrote Black Beauty while she lived in Old Catton just outside Norwich.

On another project, Skipper’s plans for a dome were again frustrated. In 1907 Skipper completed the London and Provincial Bank (now GAP) a little further along London Street. Architectural interest was created by breaking the flat symmetry of the classical facade with a fourth bay containing a curved two-storey bay window [7]: the deeply recessed cylinder even broaches the massive cornice that caps the building. This is explained by the fact that Skipper originally planned to top the fourth bay with a trademark cupola whose circular section would have echoed the curved segment of the cornice. In the event, the cupola was abandoned because it would have infringed a neighbouring property’s ‘right of light’ [7].

Just before the First World War, Skipper had planned to retire but loss of his savings in the East Kent Coal Board meant he had to keep working. He designed various buildings in Norfolk, Kent and London and in 1926 built a second extension to the University Arms Hotel in Cambridge. Here, he did successfully add two cupolas: it was, “an unmistakable Skipper gesture, but in this case somewhat incongruous” [7].

University Arms Hotel as proposed after the fire in 2013. Painting by Chris Draper. johnsimpsonarchitects.com

During the Second World War Skipper had kept his London Street offices open while his son Edward, a fellow architect, was on active service [7]. Edward could not, however, afford to keep the offices open and in 1946 sold the building to Jarrolds. Skipper died in 1948 when he was nearly 92.

skipper cupolas2.jpg

Sources

Summers, David (2009). George Skipper: Norfolk Architect. In, Powerhouses of provincial architecture 1837-1914 (Ed, Kathryn Ferry). Chapter 6 pp 75-83. Pub: The Victorian Society. Ref1a http://www.heritagecity.org/research-centre/whos-who/george-skipper.htm
Girouard, Marc (1977). Sweetness and Light: The Queen Anne Movement 1860-1900. Pub: Yale University Press.
James Minns, Carver of Norwich. http://www.thenorwichsociety.org.uk/copy-of-norwich-history. Mentioned also in previous blog [9]:
http://racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=1132
http://jermy.org/poppy02.html
Hitchings, Glenys and Branford, Christopher (2015). ‘George John Skipper, The Man Who Created Cromer’s Skyline’. Pub: Iceni Print and Products. Available from Jarrolds and from City Bookshop, Norwich.
Jolly, David and Skipper, Edward (1980). Celebrating Skipper 100: 1880-1980. Booklet produced by Edward Skipper and Associates; foreword by Edward Skipper with posthumous contribution from David Jolly [see 11]. Available at Norwich Library Heritage Centre, Cat No. C720.9 [OS].
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/05/05/fancy-bricks/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/08/18/angels-in-tights/
http://wp.me/p71GjT-1C1
Jolly, David (1975). Architect Exuberant: George Skipper 1856-1948. Catalogue of an Exhibition Held at The Norwich School of Art, Norwich, 24th Nov.-13th Dec., 1975
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/09/29/decorative-tiles/

The Norwich Society helps people enjoy and appreciate the history and character of Norwich. Visit: www.thenorwichsociety.org.uk

Arts & Crafts pubs in the C20th

22 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 15 Comments

In an earlier post I mentioned two turreted pubs that reminded me of the ‘medieval’ towers by Victorian architects like the Williams, Morris and Burges – Gothic Revivalists who peddled nostalgia for a pre-industrial past. Why did these and other pubs continue to refer to the Middle Ages half a century or so after the height of Victorian medievalism?

The Artichoke PH in 1932 (c) georgeplunkett.co.uk

The first pub, at the end of Magdalen Street, was The Artichoke with its conical roofs so reminiscent of chateaux of the French Middle Ages. Built in 1934, The Gatehouse on Dereham Road shares a clear resemblance. Neither pub would have been out of place in 1860. William Morris’s version of the Gothic Revival in the mid C19th can be seen as a reaction to industrialisation – a symbolic retreat to sunnier times when honest craft was appreciated. However, the medieval-style pubs of the 1930s looked back at Merrie England from a different viewpoint: the intervening First World War provided a new and powerful reason for reacting against mechanisation and for settling on a style that so strongly rejected C20th Modernism.

The Gatehouse is clearly built in the revived medieval style. One of its intriguing stylistic details is the chequering produced by alternating panels of ubiquitous Norfolk flint with pressed concrete blocks substituting for the stone that is so scarce in Norfolk[1].

The Gatehouse 1939. (c) georgeplunkett.co.uk

A likely model for The Gatehouse was the Barbican gatehouse (1539) to the toll bridge in Sandwich, Kent [2]. The two-storeyed bays are very similar and the names are near-enough synonymous.

The Barbican, Sandwich, Kent (c) rollingharbourlife.wordpress.com

A third pub, The Barn, at the bottom of Grapes Hill shares a family resemblance to The Artichoke and The Gatehouse, perhaps not surprisingly since all three were designed by Norwich architects Buckingham and Berry whose offices were in Prince of Wales Road.

The Barn Trio1.jpg

The cockerel sign on The Barn marks a takeover by Courage but the lazy anchor in the gables shows that the pub was originally built for Norwich brewers, Bullards. Their sign of the jolly landlord was designed in 1909 by one-time student of Norwich School of Art, A. J.(later Sir Alfred) Munnings.

Bullards sign.jpg

A fourth family member is the Constitution Tavern on Constitution Hill, also designed in the early 1930s by Buckingham and Berry. With its projecting double-height semi-circular bay, capped with a conical roof, The Constitution Tavern taps into the medieval style while the catslide roof over the twin doors references the Arts and Crafts houses of Charles Voysey from the beginning of the C20th.

The former Constitution Tavern, now a private house

Not only were these four buildings designed by the same architects but they were all built by the same Norwich building firm of RG Carter.

RG Carter’s workers building The Constitution Tavern in 1933. (c) rgcarter-construction.co.uk

The Artichoke and The Barn stand just outside the city walls, at the Magdalen and St Benedict’s Gates, respectively. The Gatehouse and The Constitution Tavern are situated further out from the city: the latter on Constitution Hill on what was the old North Walsham Turnpike; the former on Dereham Road, near another circle of hell – the outer ring road.

RG Carter’s son Bob (in school cap) with workmen outside The Constitution Tavern (c)rgcarter-construction.co.uk

The construction of the outer ring road in the 1930s helped relieve unemployment and established an outer boundary to the expanding city. Up until the First World War most citizens lived within the walled city, a very large number of them in the Norwich Yards – dwellings made in the gardens and courtyards of grander houses abandoned by the wealthy. As Frances and Michael Holmes have graphically shown, by the 1930s these ramshackle houses were poorly ventilated, ill-lit and very unsanitary [3].

The conditions of life in this yard must be hard indeed. An open channel runs in front of the houses containing sewage, slops and rainwater. The smell was neither imaginable nor describable. One battered pump made in 1808 supplies water to…three yards. [Norwich Mercury, see 3].

King St Murrell's Yard [1265] 1936-08-13_s.jpg

Murrell’s Yard, King Street, Norwich 1936 (c) georgeplunkett.co.uk

To make ‘homes fit for heroes’ the 1919 Housing and Town Planning Act required local authorities to provide houses for families. The City Council responded by starting to build the large estates that now more-or-less encircle the medieval city. The council also received government funding to build five parks (Wensum, Eaton, Heigham, Waterloo and Mile Cross Gardens) that gave pleasure to the rising population as well as providing unemployment relief [4]. In the 1920s and 30s Captain A Sandys-Winsch supervised the laying out of these parks and planted the characteristic avenues of trees that still soften the roads beyond the old city walls.

In lock-step The Prince of Wales (centre), with Sandys-Winsch (on his right), opening Eaton Park in 1928. Courtesy of [5]

It was against this background of civic improvement that the new public houses were designed. Morgan’s Brewery, for example, took advantage of the new estates and the increased traffic on the ring road to build The Gatehouse on the site of a former pub. The wave of pub building was not confined to Norwich for about 1000 new pubs were built countrywide in the 1920s, and 2000 in the period 1935-1939. Most of these were part of the Improved Pub Movement that hoped to change the perception of public houses as places of drunkenness to a more respectable one with separate saloon bars, dining rooms, games rooms and gardens that would encourage women.

‘Both were on their knees and unable to rise’. Carlisle 1917. Courtesy www.cumbriaimagebank.org.uk

During the First World War the government became concerned by the absenteeism and poor productivity in munitions factories caused by drunkenness. In what became known as ‘The Carlisle Experiment’ the government nationalised breweries and pubs around Carlisle and parts of the Scottish Borders; they also redesigned pubs and food-providing taverns to try to control the excesses of munitions workers [6]. This experiment in public house reform had national impact and provided a model for the new public houses of the 1920s and 30s.

In 2015, Historic England awarded The Gatehouse and 20 other national pubs Grade II listing in recognition of their place in the historic Improved Pub Movement [7,8]. Virtually all are built in a backward looking Arts and Crafts style.

The rather baronial bar of The Gatehouse (c) Historic England/Pat Payne Ref: DP172339

The stained glass panels, just visible in the photo above, are thought to reference the Bayeux Tapestry, underlining the diversity of sources that the Improved Pub Movement used to evoke the faux medieval style.

Montage of stained glass panels in The Gatehouse

The building of roads, estates and pubs therefore took place as a more or less coherent campaign under the general banner of ‘improvement’. RG Carter’s building firm played a major part in shaping the outer city. Where the A1024 crosses the Drayton Road they built the Mile Cross Estate of 92 houses (1925) together with the shopping centre (and a similar one on the opposite side of the city where The Avenues crosses the ringroad).

Carters built a mirror image to this curved shopping centre, out of shot to the right

In 1929 Carter’s also built the nearby pub, The Galley Hill, in a simple Tudor Revival style. The S&P carved into the half-timbered gable end shows it was built for the Norwich brewery of Steward and Patteson. The MItre 2.jpg

Carters also built The Mitre in Earlham Road for Bullards – a solid Tudor Revival building with jettied central bay and timbered side bays infilled with herringbone brick. The local newspaper said it was a vast improvement on its Victorian predecessor and that the quality of its ‘half-timber work is not of the kind associated with speculative work and liable to be blown off by the wind.’ That is, the woodwork appeared to be a more integral part of the structure than the superficially applied beams on speculative pubs built in ‘Brewer’s Tudor’ [9]. It was presumably the cheapened form that John Betjeman referred to as ‘various bogus-Tudor bars‘ in his poem, Slough.

Earlham Rd 131 Mitre PH [B510] 1933-03-28.jpg

The Mitre 1933, Earlham Road, now a community space for St Thomas’ church, at left (c)georgeplunkett.co.uk

It is not clear who built The Boundary Inn at the intersection of the ring road and the A140 where a Mile Cross boundary marker used to stand. However, this pub does have the usual stylistic tics of the Tudor Revival style, with its high-pitched roof, prominent chimney, a hint of half-timbering and Tudor-arched doors. It was built in 1928 for Young, Crawshay and Youngs.

The Boundary PH, Aylsham Road, Norwich

Carters constructed the Bull Inn at Hellesdon [1935] although its historical credentials are Tudor-lite compared to The Mitre.

The Bull Inn 1.jpg

But after World War II the moment had passed, the Gothic and Tudorbethan revivals had lost their fascination and a new austerity had arrived, as can be seen from The Dial on Dereham Road, built for Bullards by RG Carter in 1950.

The Dial PH. Courtesy rgcarter-holdings.co.uk

Sources

http://www.rgcarter-construction.co.uk/about/
https://historicengland.org.uk/services-skills/education/educational-images/barbican-high-street-sandwich-cc56-00758
Holmes, Frances and Holmes, Michael (2015). The Old Courts and Yards of Norwich: A Story of People, Poverty and Pride. Pub: Norwich Heritage Projects.
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1001348
http://friendsofeatonpark.co.uk/history/
https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/first-world-war-home-front/what-we-already-know/land/state-control-of-pubs/
https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/news/twenty-one-best-inter-war-pubs-listed.
http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/find_out_why_heritage_chiefs_decided_to_protect_a_norwich_pub_1_4213510
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudor_Revival_architecture

I am indebted to the RG Carter Archive, Drayton, Norwich for supplying photos and information. I am also grateful to: Gareth Hughes for making the connection between The Gatehouse and Barbican Gate, Sandwich; Stephen White of Carlisle Library, Frances Holmes, and the invaluable Plunkett archive (www.georgeplunkett.co.uk).

The Norwich Society helps people enjoy and appreciate the history and character of Norwich. Visit: www.thenorwichsociety.org.uk

Dragons

20 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

dragons, norwich cathedral, snap the dragon, St George and the dragon, Stained Glass, The Tudors

To the medieval mind dragons stood as a metaphor for the devil and all his works, the origin of pestilence and plague. The concept of a dragon could have evolved from travellers’ tales about fabulous beasts or even fossils. In one incarnation, dragons were represented as giant worms – indeed, the Old English for dragon is wyrm (or Old High German, wurm). A beautiful manifestation of the worm-like dragon is to be seen on the C13th infirmary doors from Norwich Cathedral, now in Norwich Castle.

Courtesy Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery

The more familiar version is of a four-legged, bat-winged creature usually seen writhing at the end of St George’s lance or St Michael’s sword. The fable of St George and the Dragon is thought to have originated in the east and brought back to this country following the crusades. St George is usually represented as a knight on horseback as can still (just about) be seen in this C14th carving from Ragusa, Sicily.

St George Ragusa.jpg

Dragons feature strongly in Norwich’s history. St George is the city’s patron and the Guild of St George, founded in 1385 [1], became a prominent social institution, celebrating the saint’s feast day and performing acts of charity for its members and the needy. In 1417 the power of the guild was greatly enhanced when it was granted a Royal Charter by Henry V, perhaps in recognition of its members who fought alongside him at Agincourt. In 1548 the guild lost its religious basis, transforming itself into the secular Company of St George that celebrated the arrival of the new mayor. However, the dragon still took part in non-religious processions; it was first mentioned as taking part in 1408, it survived Puritanism then became a civic player, performing in annual guild days when the mayor was inaugurated.

Snap the Dragon at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery

Taunted by the chanting crowd the dragon would grab caps in its jaws, ransoming the headwear for a penny.

“Snap, Snap, steal a boy’s cap, give him a penny and he’ll give it back”

This C19th engraving gives a sense of the raucous nature of the guild day.

In the marketplace, outside the extant Sir Garnet (Wolseley )pub. (c) Picture Norfolk at Norfolk County Council

Although much of the pageantry disappeared after the passing of the Municipal Corporation Reform Act of 1835 it survived in mock pageants held in the district of Pockthorpe and in the nearby village of Costessey [1]. This 1887 photograph of the Costessey guild day nicely captures the flummery that accompanied the election of the ‘mayor’.

(c) Picture Norfolk at Norwich County Council

In 1951, Snap the Dragon was still being used in civic parades and is seen here accompanied by two whifflers (from Old English wifel for battle-axe) who, historically, carried weapons to clear the way through the crowd. The photograph is believed to be of the Pockthorpe Dragon, now stored by Norfolk Museums Service [2]

Festival procession snapdragon and whiffler [4008] 1951-06-24.jpg

(c) georgeplunkett.co.uk

Until the mid C20th another version of Snap was displayed in Back’s wine merchants in Haymarket, once known as the medieval Curat’s House [3], now landlocked behind a modern frontage (currently Fatface). During renovations the owner of a nearby shop discovered paperwork showing that Back’s used ‘Old Snap’ in their advertising.

Backs snapdragon.jpg

Probably the most famous Norwich dragon is to be found in Dragon Hall. In ca 1427, on the site of a previous building, wealthy textile merchant Robert Toppes [4] constructed a trading hall then known by the wonderful name, Splytts. Three-times mayor Toppes was member of the St George’s Guild, a fact celebrated in the beautifully-carved winged dragon in a roof spandrel.

dragon hall norwich3.jpg

Three pairs of dragons are to be found in the refectory roof of the Great Hospital, near the cathedral. The hospital has continuously provided for the needy since 1249, when it was built by Bishop Walter de Suffield to care for poor clergy, and is now a residential care home.

Also in the Great Hospital, in St Helen’s Church, is a fine example of the devil as the dragon. The dragon is said to have swallowed St Margaret of Antioch but her cross irritated the dragon, allowing her to break free. Here she is shown on a medieval pew end emerging from the dragon’s belly, illustrating her role as the patron saint of pregnancy and childbirth.

St Margaret.jpg

On St Ethelbert’s Gate of the nearby cathedral is another spandrel dragon, restored in the C19th. The dragon, facing an armed man/saint on the opposite side of the arch, may allude to a bloody C13th conflict between clergy and citizens for which 30 rioters were hanged [5]

spandrel St Ethelbert.jpg

Norwich Cathedral contains over 1100 roof bosses carved in stone: this boss is from the cloisters [6]. The swordsman’s nonchalant gaze could almost come from a piece-to-camera on how to kill a dragon.

C14th, Cloisters, Norwich Cathedral

Only yards away a rampant dragon appears amongst a series of coats of arms painted in the arches of the cloisters (restored in the 1930s). These represent the worthies who entertained Queen Elizabeth I during her progress to Norwich in 1578. The arms below belong to the queen herself and incorporate the lion of England and the dragon of Wales derived from her grandfather Henry Tudor.

Elizabeth 1 coat of arms.jpg

The city’s allegiance to the Tudors is also expressed in the first two of these exuberantly-carved bench ends in the Mayor’s Court of the Guildhall. The greyhound (lower left), with jewelled collar around its neck, represents the Beaufort line of Henry VII’s mother Margaret while the Welsh dragon (centre) refers to Henry Tudor’s Celtic father. And because of its imagination and skill I couldn’t resist adding (right) the greedy dragon from St Agnes Cawston (although the beast would be more frightening if its head were less like a labrador’s).

Visitors to King’s College Chapel Cambridge will be familiar with the dragon and greyhound from the numerous Royal Coat of Arms that Henry Tudor displayed to impress his entitlement to the throne.

Tudor arms.jpg

St George Tombland contains more dragons than any other Norwich church with the beast rendered in cast bronze, a C16th Germanic relief plaque, a weather vane as a font cover, and even some Snap-the-Dragons. The stained glass window of St George and the Dragon is by CC Powell 1907.

Here is one of Norfolk’s treasures, St George wielding a sword to vanquish the dragon; from the rood screen at St Helen Ranworth (late C15th).

St GeorgeRanworth2.jpg

… and demonstrating that dragons are still alive in the city of dragons.

Should twenty thousand dragons rise, I’d fight them all before your eyes!

By Malca Schotten, 2016. Based on Snap, part of Norwich BID’s mural programme. Red Lion Street

Thanks to David Kingsley for the Back’s ‘Snap’ advertisement, to Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk at Norfolk County Council for permission to use images, the staff of Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery for showing me their dragons, and Jumara Mulcahy of Norwich BID.

The Norwich Society helps people enjoy and appreciate the history and character of Norwich. Visit: www.thenorwichsociety.org.uk

Sources

http://www.dragonglow.co.uk/snap.htm
http://www.nor-folk.co.uk/Norwich%20Dragon/aliens.html
http://wp.me/p71GjT-3Zt
http://wp.me/p71GjT-t
http://wp.me/p71GjT-32e
Rose, Martial and Hedgecoe, Julia (1997). Stories in Stone: The medieval roof carvings of Norwich Cathedral. Herbert Press.

Read about Norwich’s dragons in http://www.heritagecity.org/events-festivals/norwich-dragon-festival/norwichs-dragons.htm

Norwich’s pre-loved buildings

28 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by reggie unthank in Decorative Arts, Norwich buildings

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Edward Boardman, George Skipper, Norwich architecture, Norwich shoe industry, Norwich textile industry, Norwich University of the Arts, Norwich weaving

Who, at this Victorian horse market outside Norwich Castle, would have predicted that motor vehicles would displace horses from the city’s streets or that a shopping mall with space for over 1000 cars would be excavated where they once stood? This post is about once-vibrant buildings, such as stables, corn halls, weaving sheds and leather boot and shoe manufactories, that outlived their original purpose and had to be reinvented in order to survive.

Norwich horse market on site of former cattle market ca 1900. (c) Norfolk County Council

It is still possible to catch glimpses of life in the horse-drawn era.The words above this arch (shoeing, forge, livery, stable) in Orford Yard off Red Lion Street are a reminder of John Pollock’s veterinary surgery and livery stables. The date on the building’s Dutch gable gives the date of this Edward Boardman building as 1902. Boardman turns out to be a major figure in this post. Looses Norwich.jpg The yard now accommodates Loose’s Cookshop and Chez Denis cafe and brasserie. Until 1998 the owner of Chez Denis had a previous business here, Cafe des Amis, the name of which can just be made out above the central arch in the photograph below.

Red Lion St Orford Yard former stables [7536] 1998-03-10.jpg

Former stables 1998, Orford Yard (c) georgeplunkett.co.uk

By 1840 Norwich’s weaving industry had been in decline for some years. Its hand-loom weavers were unable to compete with the steam-powered mills of the north whose better transport and production of popular cotton goods affected the sale of Norfolk’s more traditional worsteds [1]. As a consequence the shoe industry, which had been active for centuries, assumed a more dominant role. In the middle of the C20th there were about thirty boot and shoe manufacturers in Norwich that, together with allied trades, employed over 10,000 people. Now there is only one major shoe-maker, Van-Dal. This wall is all that remains of the Co-op Shoe Factory in Mountergate, and was only allowed to remain “as a baffle against traffic noise for Parmentergate Court” [2]. Coop factory.jpg

Above the gate, the last vestige of ‘Norwich Cooperative Industrial Society Limited’?

While the grander C19th public buildings tended to adhere to the binary choice between Classical or (particularly in the north of England) Gothic styles, the popularity of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of the 1851 Great Exhibition introduced a further option. Cast-iron was cheap and strong and, being able to support large expanses of glass on thin glazing bars, opened up new possibilities in which brick and stone were no longer the major players. In 1863, Holmes and Sons – who manufactured and sold agricultural machinery – built this showroom on Rose Lane. Now it is known as Crystal House and home to Warings furniture store.

The elegant facade of Crystal House (1863) – a great favourite of mine.

Haldinstein’s began making shoes in the early C19th and up until the early 1960s their Boot and Shoe Manufactory occupied seven blocks of buildings between Queen Street and Princes Street [1, 1a]. In the 1930s the firm went into partnership with the Swiss shoe company Bally but by the time shoe production stopped in 1999 only Bally remained [1]. The building at 2-4 Queen Street was renamed Seebohm House and now contains several businesses. The factory is dated ‘1872’ on the rain heads and, like Edward Boardman’s Colegate shoe factory of the same period (1876, see further below), is distinctly ‘modern’ and quite unlike Gothic Revival buildings of that period. However, the building does not appear to have been listed as one of Boardman’s despite his offices being only a few yards further down Queen Street in Old Bank of England Court.

The last remnant of the Haldinstein and Bally factory at 2-4 Queen Street

While the upper floors appear to look forward to C20th modernism – rejecting Neo-Gothic and Classical motifs – the appearance of the Gothic arch at the entrance is confusing and backward looking. The door grille, on the other hand, appears to anticipate the Art Deco period. Seebohm House2.jpg

Clarification lies in the Norfolk Record Office whose files reveal that Boardman did design the Haldinstein building. His original plan shows that the doorway shared the same shallow (and decidedly non-Gothic) arch as the ground and first floor windows. The files also contain other plans by the Boardman practice, dated June 18th 1946, for “Proposed Alteration to Ground Floor”. These relate to a reorganisation of rooms but since this was the year that George Haldinstein sold his 51% share to Bally [1] it strongly suggests that the Gothic entrance was a post-war addition as was the ground floor’s patterned stucco .

Boardman’s plan for Haldinstein’s Queen Street factory, with Philip Haldinstein’s signature over the sixpenny stamp. Note the original door and its surround. (c) Norfolk Record Office BR35/2/23/10/1-43

In 1870, Foster’s Elementary Education Act decreed that towns would build Board Schools in which the teaching of religion was to be strictly regulated [3]. Funded by the local rates these were amongst the first public institutions to be open to both sexes. Thousands of such schools were built throughout the country. For Norwich’s own Board School in Duke Street, JH Brown designed a Higher Grade School that was opened in 1888. It was built by J Youngs and Sons (now a part of the RG Carter Group).

The Norwich Board School in Duke Street with the city’s coat of arms to the left, surmounting “Literature, Science and Art”.

Probably following London’s influential board schools the Duke Street school was built in the contemporary and progressive Queen Anne Revival style (see previous post). The school therefore has the Flemish, high-gabled silhouette with small-paned upper lights and tall casement windows typical of many of this country’s schools [3]. Recently, the building was extensively refurbished by the Norwich University of the Arts – not a major leap from its original purpose but a reflection of current trends in higher education. Duke St School.jpg

Counterbalancing the image of the Victorians’ high moral purpose is the former skating rink in Bethel Street, where fun could be had by gaslight. Built as a roller-skating rink in 1876 it was then used for ten years (1882-1892) by the Salvation Army as their Citadel (see previous blog). The Citadel was entered from St Giles Street via the iron gates adjacent to the Army’s present building that was once Mortimer’s Hotel. I remember the skating rink towards the end of its 100 year occupancy by Lacey and Lincoln, builders’ merchants, before it was refurbished by the present owners in the 1980s. Now, Country and Eastern (below) is a spectacular eastern bazaar that – reflecting the owners’ interest in oriental culture – also contains a small museum of South Asian arts and crafts.

country and eastern.jpg

This factory-like building in St George’s Street was constructed in 1914 as premises for Guntons builders’ and plumbers’ merchants. At one time it was owned by Gunton and Havers – the latter being a relative of the actor Nigel Havers. Now the Gunton Building is another addition to the Norwich’s expanding University of the Arts. Guntons Building.jpg

The Gunton & Havers building in St Georges Street, Norwich 25th March 1967 (c) Archant/EDP Library

St Giles House (41-45 St Giles Street) – one of George Skipper’s big, Baroque and slightly overblown buildings – should dominate the street but it is set parallel to the road and difficult for the passerby to see face-on. It was built in 1904-6 for the Norwich and London Accident Insurance Association just after the opening of another of Skipper’s projects, Surrey House, for rivals Norwich Union: in fact, it has been described as “the Norwich Union in miniature” [4]. Its first rebirth was as a telephone exchange and is sometimes referred to as Telephone House. George Plunkett described it as “Municipal offices until 1938. Education and Treasurer’s departments.” Now it is a luxury hotel, St Giles House. St Giles Hotel.jpg

In 1770-5, the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital was built just outside St Stephen’s Gate by the architect William Ivory. However, the facade of the old hospital that we see today was the result of Edward Boardman’s makeover a century later. His pedimented Dutch gables and rather municipal clock tower do make it look like a town hall [4]. In 2001 a new hospital was built in the suburb of Colney and the old hospital was converted to apartments. NN hospital.jpg

Another building designed by Boardman architects (father EB and son ETB) was for the Norwich Electric Light Company. In 1892 they converted the old Duke’s Palace Ironworks to a site where coal-fired boilers generated electricity that, by 1913, lit over 1750 street lamps around the city. Only 13 years later, superseded by the power station at Thorpe, the over-worked Duke Street site was converted to offices [5]. Now the offices are used by car-sharing company Liftshare. Duke St electric offices2.jpg

The offices of the electricity works are dated 1913. Norwich City’s coat of arms is above the door.

Duke St 4 Electricity works floodlit [1633] 1937-05-13.jpg

Decorations on the floodlit electricity works celebrating the coronation of George VI (1937) (c) George Plunkett

Prolific Boardman had more effect on the appearance of Norwich than perhaps any other architect. His name lives on in Boardman House – the Church Rooms he designed along with the Congregational Chapel in 1879. In 2015 this building in Princes Street was imaginatively refurbished by Norwich University of the Arts to house the School of Architecture. Church Rooms.jpg

Boardman House, interior. 2016.

In the latter part of the C19th Edward Boardman spearheaded Norwich’s expansion, from church rooms to factories – the very diversity of his projects underlining “his aesthetic flexibility”[6]. Howlett and White’s shoe factory (later the Norvic Shoe Co Ltd) became the largest in Britain and between 1876 and 1909 Boardman & Son designed various additions for the expanding enterprise [1]. By the 1930s Norvic occupied virtually all of the land from the river to Colegate and from Duke Street to St George’s Street. But in 1981 the business was in receivership after being asset-stripped of its shops after a takeover in the 1970s [1]. Now the former factory contains offices, apartments, The Last Winebar (a punning reference to its previous incarnation) and, since 2014, The Jane Austen Free School.

Part of Howlett & White’s ‘Norvic’ shoe factory. Edward Boardman designed right of the tower in 1876 and left in 1895.

In the face of competition from mills in the north of England, the mayor Samuel Bignold (son of the founder of Norwich Union) tried to bolster Norwich’s textile trade by establishing the Norwich Yarn Company. The company’s plaque – dated 1839 – can just be seen below the dome of St James’ Mill, built on the site of a C13th Carmelite monastery. Norwich Yarn Co.jpg

Ian Nairn of The Observer, who could be fierce in his architectural reviews, loved this building and called it “the noblest of all English Industrial Revolution Mills” [4]. Its engine-powered looms were not, however, sufficient to avert the threat to Norwich weaving. St James’ Mill was subsequently used by the chocolate manufacturers Caley’s and, until a few years ago, as Jarrold’s Printing Works. Currently, the mill houses private offices. Visit the John Jarrold Printing Museum,which is situated in a riverside building behind St James Mill. Jarrolds Mill.jpg

As a county town Norwich benefitted considerably from the agricultural wealth of the surrounding countryside for which it was the trading centre. In 1882 this was recognised in the inauguration of the Norfolk and Norwich Agricultural Hall, designed for once by an architect other than Edward Boardman: JB Pearce. The opening ceremony was performed by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) as Patron of the wonderfully named Norfolk and Norwich Fat Cattle Show Association [7]. It is not recorded what the cattlemen thought of Oscar Wilde’s lecture on “The House Beautiful”given at the Hall some two years later. The building now houses Anglia TV’s offices and studios. Agriclrl Hall.jpg

Pearce’s sombre public building is made of local red brick faced with a deep red and alien Cumberland sandstone [4]. Further decoration is provided by moulded Cosseyware (see previous post) from Guntons’ brickyard in nearby Costessey. The keystones above the ground floor doors and windows are decorated with heads or emblems. The Prince of Wales feathers refer not only to the prince himself but to the adjoining Prince of Wales road that connects Thorpe railway station with the former cattle market on Castle Hill. One of several heads is shown below; it is evidently a portrait but the identities of these agricultural worthies are no longer known. The reference to the bull’s head seems more straightforward but since JJ Colman was Vice-Chairman of the Agricultural Hall Company might this also allude to what had been Colman’s trademark since 1855? [8].

Sources

Holmes, Frances and Holmes, Michael (2013). The Story of the Norwich Boot and Shoe Trade. Pub: Norwich Heritage Projects http://www.norwich-heritage.co.uk Ref 1a: Burgess, Edward and Wilfred (1904). Men Who Have Made Norwich.
http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/Industrial%20Architecture/Mountergate%20Coop%20shoe%20factory%20wall%20[7530]%201998-03-01.jpg
Girouard, Marc (1984). Sweetness and Light: “Queen Anne” Movement, 1860-1900. Yale University Press.
Pevsner, Nikolaus and Wilson, Bill (1997). The Buildings of England. Norfolk 1. Yale University Press.
http://www.heritage.norfolk.gov.uk/record-details?MNF61834-Duke’s-Palace-Ironworks-and-Norwich-Electric-Lighting-Company&Index=53786&RecordCount=56542&SessionID=071f84aa-3266-4621-85cc-d97a40c30c46
http://hbsmrgateway2.esdm.co.uk/norfolk/DataFiles/Docs/AssocDoc6824.pdf
http://www.heritagecity.org/research-centre/industrial-innovation/agricultural-hall.htm
http://www.mustardshopnorwich.co.uk/history-of-colmans-pgid15.html

Thanks. For permission to reproduce images I thank Jonathan Plunkett from the Plunkett archive; to Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk and to Siofra Connor of the Archant/EDP Library. I am also grateful to Frances Holmes, Philip Tolley and Diana Smith for their assistance.

Flint buildings

07 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by reggie unthank in Decorative Arts, Norwich buildings

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Flint buildings, Norwich architecture, Norwich buildings

“Very flat, Norfolk”. (Noel Coward. Private Lives)

“No place in England was further away from good building stone”. (Stefan Muthesius [1])

“The geology of Norfolk in eastern England largely consists of … sedimentary rocks of marine origin…” [2]

These three statements are, of course, related. Much of Norfolk is based on chalk derived from the skeletons of countless marine organisms that rained down upon the seabed some 60-95 million years ago when the sea level was much higher. In places, these layers of chalk are 300 metres (1000 feet) deep [3]. Quarry stone is therefore hard to find.

To build Norwich Cathedral the Normans brought in limestone from Caen in Normandy. Pulls Ferry (below), which was built later, is the medieval watergate that marks the route by which the stone was diverted from the River Wensum to the building site. However, despite this logistical triumph the core of the cathedral was still based on flint for the ashlar limestone is just a facing [2A].

Pulls Ferry, Norwich, which marks the entrance by which building stone was shipped into the cathedral precincts

Flint and chalk are found together. Skeletons of some marine organisms provided the calcium carbonate that formed the chalk strata: others – like this diatom – provided the silicon dioxide (silica) from which the nodules of flint were formed. I estimate this diatom to be ca. 15-20 millionths of a metre in diameter, giving some idea of the staggering number of organisms required just to make one flint nodule, let alone the blizzard of marine life needed to deposit 300 metre layers of chalk.

Arachnoidiscus sp.– a diatom (c) Zeiss Microscopy

It is thought that holes formed by sea creatures burrowing through the gelatinous ooze at the bottom of the seabed provided the right sort of chemical environment for dissolved silicon – released from exoskeletons – to recrystallise, growing the irregular flint nodules around the holes [4].

A hole through a flint nodule – a probable reminder of the burrow made by a Cretacean sea creature.

In a wonderful piece of inorganic chemistry in action, this metamorphosis of sludge on the seabed produced flint nodules; their ‘organic’ shapes fascinated C20th artists – as did the holes. In the 1930s, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth holidayed at Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast [5]. In 1931, apparently based on the Happisburgh flints, Barbara Hepworth created one of the first sculptures with a hole through it for non-representational purposes (Pierced Form. Lost in the war). And Henry Moore’s sculptures are famously “lumpy and bumpy and sometimes have holes right through them.”

Barbara Hepworth. Sea Form (Atlantic) 1964 at St George’s Green (outside Norwich Playhouse)

One idea why there are so many round-towered flint churches in East Anglia is that the lack of stone to make the quoins or cornerstones meant it was easier (and cheaper) to build circular towers from knobbly flints set in mortar [6] . Another idea is that the Anglo-Saxons introduced round towers as protection against the Danes but this seems to have been discredited by the finding that many towers are post-Norman Conquest [7]. Geology does seem to provide the answer for while continental invaders spread far further than Norfolk only five round tower churches escaped the confines of the East Anglian chalklands compared to the 126 made in Norfolk [6].

Norwich had one church for every week of the year and one pub for every day.

The actual number of churches appears to have been about 57, of which 31 are still in existence. I haven’t yet visited all the medieval churches but would guess that virtually all are built of flint – even the stone-clad St Peter Mancroft contains flint. However, not many of Norwich’s churches are round-towered. One was St Benedict’s church but this was bombed in the Baedecker raids of 1942 and only the tower, which is made of unknapped flint, survives.

Only the tower of St Benedict’s church remained after the bombing of 1942.

St Benedict's south side from church alley [0140] 1934-06-28

St Benedict’s Church in 1934. (c) georgeplunkett.co.uk

Well shaped flints occur on Norwich’s Guildhall, which is “the largest surviving medieval civic building in the country after London“[7]. It was built as a result of a royal charter of 1404 that gave the city the right of self-government. The east end (below) – rebuilt in the C16th with a clock turret added in the C19th – is a glorious example of diaper flushwork, where alternating diamonds of dark flint and light limestone form a smooth (i.e., ‘flush’) surface. The black and white chequerboard pattern may be a reference to the Guildhall’s use as an exchequer [8] in which a squared cloth was used for counting money.

East end of Norwich Guildhall C15th

In places, the Guildhall walls contain unshaped stones surrounded by shims of flint – a byproduct of knapping. Pushing flakes into the spaces around the flints – or galleting – filled the gaps and protected the exposed mortar. The selection of flints that would leave large gaps seems to have been deliberate since it allowed swirls of galleting to become a decorative feature in its own right.

‘Decorative’ galleting on the Guildhall

By contrast, parts of the east wall have been expertly squared up. Not only was the external face of these flints made smooth but four other sides were also square-knapped with such skill that the flints could be laid in regular courses without the need for galleting or, indeed, any visible mortar.

Coursed flints on the east wall of the Guildhall

Another civic building famous for the quality of its square-knapped wall is the Bridewell, which was built about 1370 as a private house and became a prison for minor offenders nearly 200 years later. It was named after St Bride’s Well, the first such institution in London.

North wall of the Bridewell, Norwich

The north wall of the Norwich Bridewell has claim to being “the finest specimen of faced flint work in the country” [9]. But the knappers seem to have been less constrained here by a requirement for perfect squareness. The square-knapping is not as precise as on parts of the Guildhall and the flints are of variable size. But this honesty with which a difficult material has been handled contributes to the beauty of the wall. Bridewell 2.jpg Flushwork was a speciality of Norfolk and Suffolk and was at its most inventive during the Perpendicular Period (1330-1530) [7, 10]. St Michael (often contracted to St Miles) Coslany is a famously exuberant example. The artist John Sell Cotman claimed that the flushwork on the south side was “one of the finest examples of flint work in the kingdom” [11]. Parts of the church were rebuilt in the C19th. Here on the east end, restored in the 1880s, the flushwork mimics the tracery in the Perpendicular-style window next to it. This fits the general rule that representational designs were made in stone with flint in-fills while non-representational examples were in flint on a stone background [10].

Replica window motif at St Michael (Miles) Coslany

The church of St Andrew in St Andrew’s Street, Norwich, was completely rebuilt in 1506. It also has tracery flushwork but just as fascinating is the re-set frieze of shields beneath the chancel window – the only survivor from the previous church [12]. These can be easily examined as you trudge up St Andrew’s Hill after leaving Cinema City. Kent and Stephenson [11] devoted an entire chapter to this frieze. Three of the thirteen shields (below) represent: the arms of Bishop Dispenser; Richard Fitzalan the Earl of Arundel; and possibly Thomas Mowbray who was later to become Duke of Norfolk.

Tracery flush work beneath the chancel window of St Andrews. Above this is a frieze of shields inherited from the previous church.

According to Stephen Hart [7] “the earliest positively datable example” of flushwork is on St Ethelbert’s gate of Norwich Cathedral (1316). The date is known with some certainty because of the events surrounding its construction. In 1272, conflicts between the cathedral and the citizens led to the torching of the Anglo-Saxon church of St Ethelbert together with the main gate to the monastery. Thirteen citizens were killed in the riots and thirty rioters were hanged [13]. (The man fighting a dragon in the spandrels above the gate may refer to this conflict – see 13A). The king decreed that the citizens should rebuild St Ethelbert’s gate. In 1815 this C14th gateway was restored by William Wilkins [7, 11] but although he generally followed the original pattern of three circular motifs Wilkins made significant changes to the flushwork. These circles are referred to as replica ‘rose windows’ [7] or ‘flushwork wheels’ [13A].

R Cattermole’s engraving of St Ethelbert’s Gate to Norwich Cathedral (right) [14] shows that Wilkins’ 1815 restoration modified the pattern of the flushwork on the parapet. (Courtesy of Norfolk Heritage Centre. Norfolk County Council Library & Information Service).

Another decorative technique, proudwork, was in contrast to the flatness of flushwork [7]. St Gregory’s provides a rare example in Norwich. In this case, the ashlar in tracery design stands proud of the flint.

Proudwork on the single-stage parapet of St Gregory’s church tower

It should not be surprising that Norwich, as a major centre of East Anglian flint-building, had its own brand of flushwork. In the Norwich style [7], vertical stone strips divided the flintwork beneath parapet crenellations into zones into which stone motifs were inset. This can be seen on the tower of St Clement’s Church in Colegate (near Fye Bridge), on which lozenges are decorated with blank shields indicating that God is shielding the building. The smaller lozenges appear to be recent restorations.

St Clement’s Colegate

In serial flushwork, letters or motifs are repeated in a frieze. A good example can be found at All Saints, East Tuddenham – a few miles west of Norwich. Above the porch is the inscription in Lombardic script (Italian lettering of the early Middle Ages): GLORIATIBITR (Gloria Tibi Trinitas, or ‘Glory be to you Oh Trinity’ [15]). The letters are crowned when referring to god, saints and martyrs but never donors [16].

Serial flushwork at East Tuddenham made of crowned Lombardic lettering

Seen here on the porch of St Michael at Plea (below) the Norwich workshop gave St Michael a crowned M as well as a crowned sword. The crowned sword can be seen following the first M but “over-zealous pointing” seems to have obliterated subsequent swords [16].

St Michael at Plea, Norwich. Crowned ‘M’ and (one) sword in serial flushwork above porch.

In 1671 the diarist John Evelyn wrote that Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich had told him that “they had lost the art of squaring the flints, in which they so much once excell’d, and of which the churches, best houses, and walls, are built...”[11]. The quality of the Victorian restoration at the east end of St Miles Coslany provided one example that the art of square knapping had not been lost; this men’s lavatory of 1892 is another – an example of a different kind of flushwork.

Men’s lavatory, St Andrew’s Plain, no longer in use

Square-knapped flint, dated 1892

Sources

Muthesius, Stefan. (1984). Norwich in the Nineteenth Century. Ed, C. Berringer. Chapter 4, pp94-117.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology_of_Norfolk [Ref 2A. http://nhbg.org.uk/getmedia/952a6b94-eced-411a-bb63-b508d00f6220/Newsletter-No-23-web.aspx].
http://www.discoveringfossils.co.uk/flint_formation_fossils.htm
http://www.northfolk.org.uk/_cretaceous%20leaflet.pdf
http://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/view/NCC081889. This links to excellent notes by Nicholas Thornton on an exhibition held in Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, in 2009: Moore/Hepworth/Nicholson. A nest of gentle artists in the 1930s.
Round Tower Churches Society. http://www.roundtowers.org.uk/about-round-tower-churches/
Hart, Stephen. 2000. Flint Architecture of East Anglia. Giles de la Mare Pub Ltd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwich_Guildhall
http://www.heritage.norfolk.gov.uk/record-details?MNF607-Norwich-Bridewell-Museum-Bridewell-Alley&Index=603&RecordCount=56881&SessionID=81a31ae1-509a-4c77-9cbe-4c9325a00b0d
Talbot, Margaret. 2004. Medieval Flushwork of East Anglia and its Symbolism. Poppyland Publishing.
Kent, Arnold and Stephenson, Andrew. (1948). Norwich Inheritance. Pub: Jarrold and Sons Ltd., Norwich.
http://www.cvma.ac.uk/publications/digital/norfolk/sites/norwichstandrew/history.html
https://norwichchurches.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/st-ethelberts-chapel-and-the-riots-of-1272.pdf. [Ref 13A Summers, Dominic John (2011) Norfolk Church Towers of the Later Middle Ages. PhD UEA].
Britton, John (1816). The History and Antiquities of the See and Cathedral of Norwich. Pub: Longman et al. London.
http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/easttuddenham/easttuddenham.htm
Blatchly, John and Northeast, Peter (2005). Decoding Flint Flushwork on Suffolk and Norfolk Churches.

Thanks to Jonathan Plunkett for permission to use an image from the George Plunkett archive http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk. I also thank the Norfolk Heritage Centre for their help.

	reggie unthank on Norwich knowledge (libraries)
	Grant Young on Norwich knowledge (libraries)
	reggie unthank on Norwich knowledge (libraries)
	Grant Young on Norwich knowledge (libraries)
	reggie unthank on Norwich knowledge (libraries)

COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH

~ History, Decorative Arts, Buildings

Category Archives: Norwich buildings

Street furniture: palimpsests

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“The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.” (Cicero)

The Norwich coat of arms

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Gildencroft and Psychogeography

Bullards’ Brewery

Post-medieval Norwich churches

The end of the Unthank mystery?

Barnard Bishop and Barnards

Public art, private meanings

Colonel Unthank rides again

The flamboyant Mr Skipper

Arts & Crafts pubs in the C20th

Dragons

Norwich’s pre-loved buildings

Flint buildings

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