Street names

15 Tuesday Oct 2019

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

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In a city as old as Norwich some of the more interesting glimpses into its past are to be found in the historically significant names given to streets.

Hotblack Road NR2 (off Dereham Road)

The uncommon name, Hotblack, which conjures up images for me of road-laying, tar, and snooker on the telly, commemorates the family of John Hotblack who was a boot and shoe manufacturer in the C19 when Norwich was still one of the country’s major shoe producers. Hotblack’s factory was in Mountergate, off Rose Lane, not far from the large Co-op shoe factory.

At top, one of the very few weavers’ windows remaining in the city

The Hotblack family lived next door in St Faith’s House.

Mountergate St Faith's House [1168] 1936-07-27.jpg

St Faith’s House in Mountergate 1936, home to the Hotblacks around the 1890s ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

John Hotblack’s son, Major-General Frederick Elliott ‘Boots’ Hotblack was decorated six times in the First World War and mentioned in despatches five times. ‘Boots’ was in charge of the Reconnaissance Department of the Tank Corps and had laid a trail of tape for the tanks to follow the next day. However, the trail was obscured by overnight snow so, under fire, he walked across the battlefield, showing the tanks the way [1]. Since Hotblack Road is given on the 1907 OS map it would appear that the street was named for the shoe-making family rather than the war-hero son.

‘Boots’ by Sir William Orpen 1917. Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum

Lyhart Road NR4

In 1463, lightning struck the central tower of Norwich Cathedral, setting fire to the roof in the crossing, causing the spire to crash down into the nave. In the 1470s the Bishop of Norwich, Walter Lyhart, replaced the wooden roof with a vaulted roof of stone, using some of his own money to employ stonemason Reginald Ely, who had worked on King’s College Chapel, Cambridge [2]. Lyhart’s contribution is commemorated in his rebus of a hart lying on wa(l)ter.

Another lying hart can be seen amongst the wonderful collection of roof bosses in the cloisters. The cloisters were damaged in the riots of 1272 and the restoration, which was halted by the Black Death, stretched over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. lyhart cloisters.jpeg

Bishop Lyhart also oversaw the installation in the nave of 255 stone bosses that mark the intersection of short lierne ribs with the main ribs of the vault. The bosses represent biblical scenes, from the Creation to the Last Judgement. A favourite of mine is the overthrow of the Pharaoh in the Red Sea; it shows the Pharaoh’s chariot – looking more like a farm cart – in a literally red sea.

There was a time when Lyhart’s rebus could be seen in the tower screen at Yaxley, Suffolk [3]. In the same screen was another piece of stained glass depicting the head of a bishop. Could this have been Walter Lyhart himself?

From ref [3]. 1932

Lound Road NR4

Major figures of the Norwich School of Painters (see previous post [4]) are well represented on road signs – for example, Cotman Road NR1, Crome Road NR3, Ladbrooke Place NR1 – but each time I travel clockwise around the ring road I am reminded of a less-well-known artist, Thomas Lound.

Early collodion positive of Thomas Lound 1850s

Lound (1802-1861) was a painter and etcher of local landscape but instead of scrabbling for a living, as many members of the Norwich Society of Artists did, he worked as a manager in the family brewing business and actually died with money in the bank. He was employed by the brewery of Tompson, Stackhouse & Co on King Street [5]. In 1844, Tompson’s was sold to the Morgan brothers, one of whom, Walter, drowned in a brewery vat [6]. Morgan’s was one of the ‘Big Four’ Norwich breweries in the first half of the C20.

Lound was taught by John Sell Cotman, whose influence can be seen in Lound’s paintings, though he probably followed more in the footsteps of Thirtle, whose work he collected avidly [7].

1850-view-from-old-barge-yard-by-thomas-lound-c-1850.jpg

View from Old Barge Yard by Thomas Lound (1850) shows the back of what is now called Dragon Hall, near his home in King Street. The open door (centre) is part of the original C14 doorway within the larger C15 ‘blind’ door-surround installed by Robert Toppes when the building was used as his wool-trading hall.

In 1839, six years after the demise of the Norwich Society of Artists, Lound became co-founding President of the Norwich Art Union [8] that – if it was anything like the Art Union of London – used subscriptions to buy works of art to be distributed amongst members by lottery. Lound was also involved in the Norwich School of Design (1846), a predecessor of the Norwich Technical Institute (1899) on St George’s Street, which is now part of the Norwich University of the Arts (NUA). In its first year the Art Union held an exhibition in its gallery at The Bazaar on the corner of Bridewell Alley and St Andrew’s Street [8].

The Great Hall of the Polytechnic Institution, The Bazaar, Norwich. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

The Bazaar is long gone but by one of those pleasing circularities its former site on the corner of Bridewell Alley and St Andrew’s Street is now occupied by NUA’s East Gallery.

East Gallery, site of former Royal Bazaar. Courtesy of NUA

Thomas Lound was also on the committee of the Norwich Photographic Society. In 1856 he exhibited five of his own photographs including one of Norwich Fish Market [8].

The Fish Market, Norwich by Thomas Lound, reissued as a postcard by AE Coe Opticians and Photographers. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

Bathhurst Road NR2

Bathurst Road at the city end of Unthank Road was built on the Heigham Lodge Estate that once belonged to Timothy Steward of Steward & Patteson’s Brewery. In 1877 architect Edward Boardman divided Steward’s former land into lots for sale. Three roads were laid around the estate, one of which – temporarily named Grove Street North – was renamed Bathurst Road after Bishop of Norwich, Henry Bathurst (1744-1837).

Bathurst Road (red) runs parallel to Unthank Road (yellow). Ordnance Survey 1883

As described in Colonel Unthank and the Golden Triangle [9], Heigham Lodge was mistakenly thought to have been the home of William Unthank, who had bought 60 or so acres in Heigham to establish the Unthank Estate. William Unthank and Bishop Bathurst both died in 1837.

Memorial statue to Bishop Bathurst in north transept of Norwich Cathedral

After the Reformation, Dissenters were banned by the Church of England from burial in their parish church. But in 1821, Bathhurst licensed Norwich’s Rosary Cemetery as the first non-denominational burial ground in the country (see [10] for The Norwich Way of Death). This chimes with the Henry Bathurst’s reputation as the only liberal bishop in the House of Lords and as someone who supported Catholic Emancipation.

Since their Oxford days, Henry Bathurst had been friends with Parson James Woodforde (1740-1803) of Weston Longville, about seven miles north-west of Norwich. When Bathurst was non-resident Rector of nearby Great Witchingham, Woodforde would collect surprisingly large tithes on his behalf. In his absorbing Diary of a Country Parson, Woodforde wrote:

About noon took a ride to Norwich … and dined, supped and slept at the King’s Head. As soon as I got to Norwich I went to Kerrison’s Bank and there recd. for cash etc a Note of £137 (about £8,000 today) which I immediately inclosed in a letter to Dr Bathurst, Oxford. I walked to the Post Office, and put the letter into the Post which sets for London this evening at 10 o’clock. I then went to the King’s Head and eat a Mutton Chop and before I had quite dined Mr Hall came to me, and we smoked a pipe and drank a Bottle of Wine [11].

Harvey Lane NR7

… named after Colonel John Harvey (1755-1842) who moved from the city centre to Thorpe, a few miles east of the city [12]. Harvey came from a long line of wealthy Norwich textile merchants who had turned to banking: he himself was a leading partner of Harvey & Hudson’s Bank. Like nine of his relatives, Harvey became Mayor of Norwich (1792) but in his mayoral portrait he chose to be portrayed as colonel of the local militia.

Colonel John Harvey 1792, painted by John Opie RA, fashionable portrait artist and husband of Norwich abolitionist, Amelia Opie. Presented by the Norwich Light-Horse Volunteers. Courtesy Norfolk Museums Collections NWHCM: Civic Portrait 33

We encountered Colonel Harvey last month in the large oil painting he commissioned from Joseph Stannard: ‘Thorpe Water Frolic, Afternoon’ (1825) [4]. Harvey instigated The Frolic in 1821, largely as a sporting event for the gentry, but opened it up to the working population two years later when city weavers were given a day’s holiday. 10,000 are said to have attended: polite society on the Thorpe side, workers on the opposite bank [12]. Last time, I focussed in on Stannard on the right bank, peering across to the gentry but here we see Harvey peering back from the left.

A fragment of ‘Thorpe Water Frolic, Afternoon’ by Joseph Stannard, showing the white-haired colonel in his Venetian gondola. Courtesy Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery

Harvey did not live on the riverside in Old Thorpe Hall – only parts of which remain – but at Thorpe Lodge, a five-bayed house that he built on the other side of the highway, re-routing the Yarmouth Road in the process [12]. In the 1930s the central third storey was removed and the east wing demolished; it now houses the Broadland District Council.

Thorpe St Andrew Thorpe Lodge [5423] 1974-09-14.jpg

Thorpe Lodge 1974 ©georgeplunkett.co.uk. In the 1930s the curved east wing was removed along with the third storey of the central bay.

Colonel Harvey is thought to have brought old doors from family properties in Norwich to install in the garden wall of Thorpe Lodge [12]. Two plaques – one dedicated to Robert Harvey (1696-1773) the other to Thomas Harvey (1710-1772) – mark fine Georgian houses in Colegate, in the heart of the Norwich weaving quarter, but the Tudor door below comes from neither of these. The garden-wall doors at Thorpe seem to have disappeared in the 1970s but, fortunately, Arnold Kent photographed this door at Thorpe Lodge in 1948 [13]. The flat-arched Tudor oak door came from Mayor George Cocke’s home (1613) at Bacon’s House in Colegate.

Photographed in the garden wall of Thorpe Lodge 1948, a Tudor door from the home of Mayor George Cocke (1613) at Bacon’s House, Colegate. The left-hand spandrel contains the Grocers’ arms, the right contains Cocke’s initials as part of his merchant mark. From [13].

Towards the end of the C18 a downturn in the Norwich textile trade brought increasing unemployment [14]. But business took an upturn when Harvey started making highly patterned silk ‘fillover’ shawls that could now be woven-in instead of having to be filled-in/embroidered by hand. These expensive items (12-20 guineas each) were the height of fashion and a counterpane shawl, twelve feet square and woven on Harvey’s looms, was presented to George III and his wife Queen Charlotte [14].

In 1792 the Royal Mint was unable to obtain sufficient silver for coinage. Harvey responded by minting Norwich trade tokens from base metal, their value no doubt backed by the Harvey & Hudson bank. This can be seen as a philanthropic way of keeping the city’s trade flowing although the loom on the reverse of the coin would also have served to advertise Colonel Harvey’s role in the local economy during his mayoral year [15].

The reverse of a Harvey token shows a hand-loom, the obverse shows the Norwich City coat of arms, the rim is impressed with Harvey’s name. Norfolk Museums Collection NWHCM : 2006.79.1

Onley Street NR2

The Harveys were related to the Unthanks but to understand the origins of this street name we have to untwist the limbs of the Harvey family tree.

Colonel Harvey’s brother Charles (1757-1843) dropped the surname Harvey when he inherited Stisted Hall in Essex from his uncle, the Reverend Onley. The Reverend had himself adopted his wife’s family name, Savill, making him a Savill-Onley. Double-barrelled names were often adopted to preserve a family name that would otherwise have died out due to lack of male heirs or, in the case of Reverend Savill-Onley, ‘in appreciation of the fortune (£33,000) his wife had brought with her’ [16].

Charles Harvey, MP for Norwich, later Savill-Onley. Courtesy Norfolk Museums Collections THEHM:DS.25

When Charles Savill-Onley died his son adopted the name of Onley Savill-Onley [17].

Onley Savill-Onley Esq 1795-1890. From [16].

Onley Savill-Onley had a daughter, Judith Sarah, and it is she who connects us with the Unthanks by marrying Colonel Clement William Joseph Unthank of Intwood Hall [9]. Their eldest son was Clement William Onley Unthank (1874-1900). Sadly, when only in his twenties, he died of a polo accident while serving in India.

Clement William Onley Unthank ca 1900. From [9].

When Colonel CWJ Unthank and his wife moved to her family house at Intwood Hall, CWJ started selling off the Unthank estate in what is now Norwich’s Golden Triangle. Over the years the estate was developed from Trinity Street down to Mount Pleasant and, in memory of their son, one of the later side-roads off Unthank Road was named Onley Street [9].

To be continued …

©Reggie Unthank 2019

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‘An excellent Christmas-stocking filler’. The book Colonel Unthank and the Golden Triangle, which contains more about the Unthank family and describes the development of the the streets either side of Unthank Road, is still available from: Jarrolds’ Book Department (https://www.jarrold.co.uk/departments/books); or City Bookshop in Davey Place (http://www.citybookshopnorwich.co.uk/); or direct from me via the contact form (https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/contact/).

Sources

https://www.edp24.co.uk/features/norfolk-war-hero-who-was-too-brave-1-4801801
Paul Hurst (2013). Norwich Cathedral Nave Bosses. Pub: Medieval Media, Norwich.
Christopher Woodforde (1932). The Medieval Glass in Yaxley Church. Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History vol XXI pt 2.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2019/09/15/the-norwich-school-of-painters/
https://suffolkartists.co.uk/index.cgi?choice=painter&pid=4128
https://www.norridge.me.uk/pubs/names_/brewers/morgan.htm
Josephine Walpole (1997). Art and Artists of the Norwich School. Pub: Antique Collectors’ Club.
http://www.earlynorfolkphotographs.co.uk/Norwich%20Photographic%20Societies/Norwich_Photographic_Societies.html
Clive Lloyd (2017). Colonel Unthank and the Golden Triangle. ISBN 978-1-5272-1576-4
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2018/10/15/the-norwich-way-of-death/
https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.227134/2015.227134.The-Diary_djvu.txt
Trevor Nuthall (2014). Thorpe St Andrew: A Revised History. Pub: Trevor Nuthall ISBN 978-0-9543359-1-5.
Arnold Kent and Andrew Stephenson (1948). Norwich Inheritance. Pub: Jarrolds and Sons Ltd.
Walter R Rudd (1923). The Norfolk and Norwich Silk Industry. Norfolk Archaeology vol XXI, pp245-282.
Katy Barrett. Eighteenth Century ‘Hand-Loom’ Token. Analysing the English Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum. https://england.prm.ox.ac.uk/englishness-token.html
Reverend A J Nixseaman (1972). The Intwood Story. Printed in Norwich by RR Robertson.
https://www.jjhc.info/harveyjohn1842

Thanks. I am grateful to Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk, Ken Skipper of Cork Brick Gallery Bungay and the George Plunkett archive (www.georgeplunkett.co.uk).

Catherine Maude Nichols

15 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

catherine maude nichols, Norfolk and Norwich Art Circle, Norwich School of Artists, The Woodpecker Club

I first came across Catherine Maude Nichols in a book published in 1910 called ‘Citizens of No Mean City’, a Jarrolds trade book containing over 360 potted biographies with accompanying photographs of ‘Norwich Citizens of To-day’ [1], some of whom probably paid for advertising their business on the facing page. I was attracted by the fact that Kate Nichols was one of only three women … and by the flamboyant hat. CM Nichols.jpg

Although she herself was not a major figure her artistic life is fascinating for spanning the last days of Crome and Cotman’s Norwich School of Artists and the emergence of English Impressionism.

From [1]

Kate was born in 1847 behind this fine Georgian doorway at 32 Surrey Street, Norwich, where she was looked after by a nanny and a nurse.

Surrey St 32 Regency Georgian doorway [0468] 1935-04-19.jpg

The Regency doorway at 32 Surrey Street ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

This was on the opposite side of the street to the tall terrace, built in 1761 by Thomas Ivory (Assembly House, Octagon Chapel), where Sir James Edward Smith of Linnean Society fame lived from 1796 to 1828 [see previous blog post 2]. Unfortunately, this fashionable Georgian street was bombed in WWII and the even-numbered houses on the east side no longer exist. Fortunately, George Plunkett recorded No 32 in 1935.

Surrey St 30 to 34 [1028] 1936-06-14AA.jpg

30-34 Surrey Street 1935. ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

Kate Nichols’ father was born into a wealthy Norfolk farming and landowning family who lived at Alpington Hall, a few miles south of Norwich [3].

Alpington Hall. ©Evelyn Simak. Creative Commons

Her father, William Peter Nichols, was related to the Musketts. Regular readers may recall that when Colonel C. W. Unthank married Mary Anne Muskett and moved into her family home at Intwood Hall, a few miles south of the city, he started selling off his own land on which much of Norwich’s present-day Golden Triangle was built [4].

Kate’s father trained in London as a surgeon and returned to Norwich in the 1820s. In the 1850s he was appointed one of the four surgeons at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital where he specialised in removing bladder stones – something once common in Norfolk.

The north-east wing of N&N Hospital, built by Thomas Ivory’s son William in the 1770s. Most of Ivory’s hospital was rebuilt by Edward Boardman 1879-1884 [5].

At various times William Peter Nichols was to be mayor and local magistrate as well as surgeon to the police, to the prison and to the Bethel Hospital. The latter was opened in 1713 by Mary Chapman as an asylum for the curable mentally ill and may well have been the first purpose-built asylum in the country. In 1836 Nichols bought Heigham House as a ‘private lunatic asylum’ for ladies and gentlemen. We previously encountered this mansion at the junction of Old Palace Road and Heigham Street when trying to discover which of several Heigham Houses/Halls was home to the Unthank family [6]. This mental asylum was in competition with the genteel Heigham Retreat whose tree-lined avenue is commemorated by Avenue Road.

Etching of Heigham Retreat by Henry Ninham ©Norfolk Record Office MC279/6. Avenue Junior School now occupies part of this site.

Nichols and two other doctors bought out Heigham Retreat but closed it in 1859 after it was involved in scandal. In 1852 a curate from Hethersett, Reverend Edmund Holmes, was accused of raping a young girl but, because of his family’s standing in the county, Holmes was promptly admitted to The Retreat by Dr Nichols in order to evade arrest. Nichols then appointed Holmes as chaplain to the asylum [7] and boasted that he had rescued one of his class from the clutches of the law [3].

In 1870, Sir Robert John Harvey, senior partner in Norwich Crown Bank on Agricultural Hall Plain, shot himself after bankrupting the business. Hard to believe but in a letter to the Eastern Daily Press dated 1960 the correspondent recalls tales of a suicide being buried with a stake through the heart at a crossroads in Heigham [8]. Although such roadside burial was repealed in 1823 those who committed self-murder whilst still in control of their faculties could only be buried in cemeteries between 9pm and midnight, and without ceremony. William Nichols was the Harvey family’s doctor and it was his diagnosis of hereditary ‘excitement’ (i.e., whilst the balance of his mind was temporarily disturbed) that allowed Sir Robert a Christian burial.

Norwich Crown Bank on Agricultural Hall Plain. After the Harvey affair the goodwill and building were bought by Gurneys Bank, the forerunner of Barclays.

It was into this wealthy and politically involved family that Kate was born. And when, in Dr Nichols’ mayoral year (1866), the Prince and Princess of Wales visited Norwich together with the Queen of Denmark it was Kate who presented the princess a book of Norwich photographs on behalf of the women of the city [7].

The royal party at the music festival held at St Andrew’s Hall in aid of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital ©Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

That evening Kate accompanied her parents to a ball held at Costessey Hall where the royal party stayed for three days with the Jerninghams in their never-completed Gothic fantasy.

Costessey Hall. A C19 Neo-Gothic fantasy made of Gunton Bros ‘fancy bricks’ from the nearby Costessey Brickworks [9].

Costessey Hall was made of ‘Cossey’ brick, baked from Jerningham clay by the Gunton family who went on to supply decorative and carved bricks that can still be seen around the city [see previous post 9].

Guntons’ Tudorbethan chimneys on a house in Chapelfield North

There seems to have been something Walter Mitty-like about Kate Nichols. She was to describe herself as a spinster with no close relatives but in so doing she ignored two brothers, three nieces, two nephews and a dozen cousins [3]. She would also tell others that she was a self-taught artist despite: having a drawing mistress at school; studying with David Hall McEwan, a member of the Royal Society of Watercolour Artists; and at age 27 studying for two terms at the Norwich School of Art where she probably learned etching and won a prize in the Advanced Division. Indeed, the Head of the NSA stated that Kate Nichols and George Skipper were the two best students during his 25-year tenure [3].

Not recorded as such but this is an excellent likeness of George Skipper, Norwich’s flamboyant architect, sitting on top of his Commercial Chambers in Red Lion Street [see 10].

There was an artistic strand in the Nichols family for her four aunts had been taught at Alpington Hall by co-founder of the Norwich School of Artists, John Crome, some of whose landscape paintings hung in Kate’s home in Surrey Street [3].

Almost always described as ‘etchings’ most of Kate’s output was actually dry point engraving. Unlike etching, which involves ‘eating’ into a copper plate with acid, dry point engraving involves incising lines directly onto a copper sheet with a sharp tool; this raises a ‘burr’ that – when inked – is pressed onto paper to create an impression. Because printing produces a mirror image the original scene should be drawn in reverse but for some reason Kate did not do this for ‘Tombland’.

Left: Tombland Alley with the house of Augustine Steward, which was used by Royalist troops during Kett’s Rebellion of 1549. Right: ‘Tombland’ drypoint by CM Nichols courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

Kate’s first dry point engraving for which there is a record, ‘College’, was made in 1875 when she was 28. There was something about this linear technique that suited Kate’s fondness for landscape for she seems to have been less accomplished with the rounded forms of the human body [3].

‘College’ (which appears to be St John’s Cambridge) 1875. Courtesy Norfolk Museums Collections NWHCM : 1969.557.63

Here we see the gardens of the Bethel Hospital, where her father was surgeon.

Dry point and oil painting of the Bethel Hospital. Undated but after 1882. Courtesy Norfolk Museums Collections. NWHCM : 1940.75.19 and NWHCM : 1940.75.8

Kate Nichols was single and adventurous, dropping in – apparently – on artists she admired, such as Lord Leighton and John Everett Millais [3]. She travelled alone to France and from 1876-8 visited Barbizon, south of Paris, to join others painting there. This was a generation after the original founders of the Barbizon school, such as Corot and Millet, had painted landscape from nature in the manner of East Anglian John Constable. Future Impressionists like Monet, Renoir and Sisley also went to Barbizon and although Kate may not have met them she at least mixed with ‘hundreds of artists’ who were also paying their dues [3]. In 1879, she stayed in Newlyn – the Cornish counterpart to Barbizon – and this time she was not too late to catch the wave: now she was amongst painters out of whom the ‘Newlyn Group’ of artists would emerge with their impressionistic style.

Old Houses, Cornwall 18979 ©The Trustees of the British Museum

Back home, Kate was to draw from the countryside around Norwich as well as the urban landscape of the city itself. She exhibited widely and between 1877-1908 some of her engravings were shown at the Royal Academy. The first was of Ber Street, Norwich, which illustrates animals being driven towards the livestock market around the castle.

Ber Street 1878 ©Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kate was influenced by the Norwich School painters whose work had hung in her family home [3]. In 1907 she was to produce a folder of prints entitled ‘After Crome’.

Left: ‘The Poringland Oak’ (1880-1820) by John Crome. The Tate, Creative Commons Licence. Right: ‘Poringland Oak (After Old Crome)’ by CM Nichols. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

Oil painting ‘Old Norwich River’ by CM Nichols (her drypoint of this scene is labelled ‘Widdow’s Ferry’. Could this be Pull’s Ferry since Pull married Widow Sandling and took over Sandling’s Ferry?). Courtesy of Norfolk Museums Collections NWHCM 1952:125

She was obviously fond of the area around Cow Hill.

Left: Drypoint of Cow Hill 1883, exhibited at The Royal Academy and reproduced in The Studio; courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk. This looks up to great St Giles with the morning sun spilling down from Willow Lane.

The houses in Willow Lane, off Cow Hill, are largely as Kate must have seen them, though not all of the houses on Cow Hill survive.

Left: Willow Lane by CM Nichols. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

She drew George Borrow’s House half way up the hill between Pottergate and Willow Lane.

Left: The C17 George Borrow’s House, Willow Lane by CM Nichols. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk. Right: the house today, viewed through a modern archway.

George Borrow (1803-1881) was a larger-than-life character: a boxer, a spinner of tales, a gipsy traveller and a linguist who taught himself Old Norse and Welsh. He was born in Dereham but his family lived for a while in Norwich where George was taught at Norwich Grammar School alongside Kate’s father and uncle [3]. In 1913 Kate was to provide engravings of the interior of the Borrow house for a souvenir booklet produced a decade late for Borrow’s centenary.

The George Borrow centenary souvenir booklet with cover by Alfred Munnings, who painted scenes of gypsy life. Courtesy of [11].

The Society (later the Royal Society) of Painter-Etchers was formed in 1880; two years later Kate submitted a diploma piece, Scotch Firs, for which she was elected the first female fellow.

Scotch Firs 1882. Courtesy of Norfolk Museums Collections NWHCM : 1965.82.1

In 1882 Kate was baptised into the Catholic faith, causing a rift with her family. In 1891 she is recorded as living a few doors away at 12 Surrey Street and by 1900 she had ventured further along the road to Carlton Terrace.

Surrey St 47 to 79 Carlton Terrace [6461] 1987-05-19.jpg

Carlton Terrace at the south end of Surrey Street. George Plunkett’s photograph was taken in 1987, eight years after Edward Skipper and Associates restored the 1881 terrace for Broadland Housing Association. Kate Nichols lived at the far end. ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

Before St John’s Catholic Church (later Cathedral) was completed in 1910 Kate worshipped at the Old St John’s Chapel (1794), which is now the Maddermarket Theatre.

Left: Off St John’s Alley, The Old St John’s Catholic Chapel pre-1900 (from [12]). Right: Converted to the Tudor style Maddermarket Theatre in 1921.

For the frontispiece of a book celebrating Catholicism in Norwich Kate painted the new Catholic church from Chapelfield North [12].

Frontispiece of ‘A Great Gothic Fane’ by CM Nichols. From [12].

In this book Kate appears on a photographic plate of notable Catholic women.

Kate age 66. From [12].

Kate Nichols’ closest friend was the wealthy Mary Radford Pym who lived in an exotic Tudor Revival house in Chapelfield (once home to my dental practice).

St Mary’s Croft (1881) in Chapelfield North

Mrs Pym was philanthropic. She funded the clocktower in Sheringham and gave land on Earlham Road to be used as a park. She also gave money to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital for a nurses’ home; this funded Pym House on the corner of Unthank and Christchurch Roads [3].

Pym House, purchased in 1927. A plaque records that this was for the use of the Jenny Lind Children’s Hospital on the opposite side of Unthank Road, now the site of the Colman Hospital and prior to this the Priscilla Bacon Lodge.

In 1889, Mrs Radford Pym arranged for her good friend Kate to be installed as President of the newly-founded Woodpecker Art Club, a title she held until her death 34 years later. The Woodpeckers – who included Alfred Munnings among their members – were so named because they chipped away at wooden engraving blocks, unlike Kate who inscribed metal. In addition to outings the club held an annual meeting upstairs in ‘Princes’ high-class confectioners in Castle Street, owned by Margaret Pillow a friend of Mrs Pym.

From [1]

Kate died in 1923 and in her memory Mrs Pym arranged for a portrait, painted 20 years earlier by neighbour Edward Elliot, to be bought and donated to the Castle Museum. It was presented by Prince Frederick Duleep Singh, who succeeded Kate as President of The Woodpeckers (Frederick was son of the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, Maharaja Sir Duleep Singh, a favourite of Queen Victoria who lived in exile at Elveden Hall, near Thetford).

Miss Nichols by Edward Elliot. Courtesy Norfolk Museums Collections NWHCM : 1923.75. This captures Kate around the late 1890s when overblown leg-of-mutton sleeves were fashionable.

In 1927 the Woodpeckers merged with the Norwich Art Circle (est. 1885), which continues as the Norfolk and Norwich Art Circle[13].

The colophon of Jarrolds of Norwich who printed Kate Nichols’ later drypoints

Sources

Citizens of No Mean City (1910). Pub: Jarrold, Norwich.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/01/15/when-norwich-was-the-centre-of-the-world/
Pamela Inder and Marion Aldis (2015). ‘A Forgotten Norwich Artist: Catherine Maude Nichols’. Pub: Poppyland Publishing, Cromer.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/07/15/the-end-of-the-unthank-mystery/
Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson (1997). The Buildings of England: Norfolk I.Norwich and North-East. Pub: Yale University Press.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/04/15/colonel-unthank-rides-again/
http://www.hellenicaworld.com/UK/Literature/CharlesMackie/en/NorfolkAnnals2.html
Letter by CC Lanchester to the Eastern Daily Press 20.9.1960.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/05/05/fancy-bricks/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/02/15/the-flamboyant-mr-skipper/
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/21538/21538-h/21538-h.htm
A Great Gothic Fane: The Catholic Church of St John the Baptist, Norwich (1913). Pub: WT Pike and Co., Brighton.
https://www.nnartcircle.com/about.html

Thanks

I have relied for background on ‘A Forgotten Norwich Artist: Catherine Maude Nichols’ by Pamela Inder and Marion Aldis – a model of local historical research (and still available). I also thank Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk for permission to reproduce photographs (try the site: https://norfolk.spydus.co.uk/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/MSGTRN/PICNOR/HOME). Thanks, too, to Jonathan Plunkett for allowing access to his father’s invaluable collection of Norwich photographs: http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Website/.

City Hall Doors # 2

15 Friday Mar 2019

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

James Woodford, Norwich City Hall doors, Public art

The Normans left Norwich a magnificently tangible legacy of Castle and Cathedral but traces of their Scandinavian cousins – the Vikings – are harder to find.

Roundel 4A: The Vikings

For the first roundel in this ‘second half’ of his plaques on the City Hall doors (1936-8), James Woodford acknowledged the significance of the Viking invasion to the development of proto-Norwich. The Great Heathen Army first invaded East Anglia in 865AD but there is little physical evidence that Scandinavians settled in Norwich until the C10 [1]. Then, there is evidence of an Anglo-Scandinavian settlement – a North wic on the northern side of the Wensum, centred along modern-day Magdalen Street, defended by a looping, 13-foot-deep ditch and probably topped by bank and fence. This may have been constructed in response to Anglo-Saxon pressure from Edward the Elder of Wessex who overcame the East Anglian Danelaw in 9 I 7.

Anglo-Scandinavian Norwich outlined in red. Dotted lines mark the known defensive ditch. Blue triangle = St Clement Colegate; yellow diamond = Tombland marketplace. Map courtesy of Norfolk Museums Service, redrawn from Philip Judge’s map in [1].

This protected settlement was sufficiently important and stable in the C10 to have its own mint making Anglo-Saxon ‘Nordwic’ coins.

Æthelstan, Anglo-Saxon King of Wessex. Penny minted in Nordwic ca 930AD. © CNG 2019

Scandinavian influence can be detected in the naming of churches: St Clement – the patron saint of sailors – was much favoured by the Scandinavians and his churches occur at rivers or portals as here, at St Clement’s on the corner of Fye Bridge Street and Colegate. Norwich also had two churches named after St Olave or Olaf, the Norwegian king canonised in 1030.

St Clement’s Fye Bridge/Colegate, perhaps pre-Conquest, now mostly C15/16

The Anglo-Scandinavian settlement was not confined to the northern bank for it extended southwards to form a double burh joined across the river by a wooden causeway where Fye Bridge now stands [1]. A few hundred yards south of the river was the marketplace in Tombland, from the Danish word täm for open space and it is from their word ‘gata’ meaning street that we have inherited Finkelgate, Fishergate, Pottergate, Colegate, Mountergate etc. What may have caused Nordwic to abscond to the south bank was the raid in 1004 when Sweyn Forkbeard – whose sister Gunhilde had been amongst the hundreds of Vikings killed in the so-called St Brice’s Day Massacre – laid waste to Norwich. When the French descendants of the Vikings – the Christianised Normans – arrived a few decades later they established their presence on the south side with their cathedral of stone and a castle overlooking a re-sited marketplace.

Roundel 4B: Textiles and agriculture

The middle roundels 3B and 4B on the central pair of doors

On roundel 4B Woodford presents us with much the same layout he used on the facing roundel (3B, see previous post): the wool comb could be a mirror image of the comb on the left-hand roundel, there is another yarn winder and, again, a stand – this time a candle holder seemingly warming a tool clamped above (anyone?). Again, an object at the bottom breaks the weaving sequence but here it is not specifically related to Norwich industry but to Norfolk in general. The wheels on this plough reduce friction so that one ox could draw it through the light Norfolk soil and as such the image refers to Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester (1754-1842), who was first to have harnessed rather than yoked oxen. From his Holkham estate on the North Norfolk coast Coke is credited with sparking the British Agricultural Revolution [2].

The Leicester Monument (1845) at Holkham Hall, in memory of the 1st Earl. Between the wheeled plough and the ox are sheep, referring to the ‘English Leicester’ – an improved breed promoted by Lord Leicester. © racns [3]

Roundel 4C: Kett’s Rebellion

Here hangs Robert Kett from the walls of Norwich Castle.

The success of the Norwich weaving trade, and the rising price of wool, led to rich landlords enclosing common land in order to graze their own sheep. In 1549 Robert Kett, a tanner from Wymondham, sided with those uprooting hedges and fences. Under his leadership the uprising swelled to about 15,000 ‘rebels’ encamped on Mousehold Heath. Kett’s men defeated forces led by the Marquess of Northampton but were finally overcome at the Battle of Dussindale. Robert Kett was hanged from a gibbet erected on the battlements of Norwich Castle and “left hanging, in remembrance of his villany, till his body being consumed, at last fell down”. His brother was left hanging by chains from the steeple at Wymondham [4]. The C18 historian Francis Blomefield wrote that Kett’s army contained the ‘scum of Norwich’ but, of course, one man’s rebel is another man’s freedom fighter and a plaque on the castle walls expresses a more enlightened view:

In 1549 AD Robert Kett yeoman farmer of Wymondham was executed by hanging in this castle after the defeat of the Norfolk Rebellion of which he was the leader.
In 1949 AD – four hundred years later – this memorial was placed here by the citizens of Norwich in reparation and honour to a notable and courageous leader in the long struggle of the common people of England to escape from a servile life into the freedom of just conditions.

Roundel 5A: Chocolate and crackers

We know this represents Caley’s, rather than other confectioners, because of the combination of chocolate-making and Christmas crackers that we see arranged around the perimeter of this roundel. Twelve years before James Woodford drew this design Caley’s installed 44 chocolate-piping machines [5] so the worker is piping chocolate in their Fleur-de-Lys Factory in Chapelfield.

Registration of Caley’s trade mark ‘The Prentices Christmas in the Snow’ (1899). Note ‘Ye Sign of ye Fleur de Lys’. Courtesy Norfolk Record Office BR266/119/2

Between the 1864 and the 1883 editions of Kelly’s Directory, chemist and druggist Albert Jarman Caley – ‘manufacturer of aerated & mineral waters, & ginger ale’ – had moved from London Street to Chapelfield (1883), presumably to take advantage of a nearby deep well with the purest water in the city [7]. His sodas were bottled in an old factory in Chapelfield that had made cloth for glove-making but this was just the beginning of Caley’s expansion.

Caley’s Fleur de Lys works 1928 now the site of Chapelfield shopping mall. Chapelfield Gardens are to left and, below, is the triangle of The Crescent where Alfred Caley lived

In order to provide year-round employment for his summer workforce, Caley started to make drinking chocolate in 1883 and three years later began to make chocolate confectionery using milk from a farm in nearby Whitlingham [6]. In 1932 Caley’s was sold to Mackintosh’s, the toffee-makers from Halifax, who modernised the factory and produced new lines, like the chocolate-toffee combos ‘Rolo’ and ‘Quality Street’ assortment. The factory was rebuilt after being badly damaged in the 1942 Baedeker Raids. In 1969 the business was acquired by Rowntree’s and then by Nestlé (1988) who sold the site to be redeveloped as intu Chapelfield shopping mall (2005). Have I mentioned the aroma of chocolate over the city, usually – it seemed – on Sunday mornings?

This stone roller once used for grinding cocoa beans is now used as a seat at the Chapelfield Road entrance to the intu Chapelfield mall where Caley’s once stood

In 1899 the Caley’s fancy box department expanded into making Christmas crackers – some of the boxes decorated by a young Alfred Munnings who had recently graduated from the Norwich School of Art. Tom Smith, inventor of the Christmas cracker [8], opened his factory on Salhouse Road in 1953, too late to be considered an influence on Woodford’s roundel.

Caley’s Christmas cracker boxes ca 1900. Some, such as the first two, bear Munnings’ signature. Courtesy Norfolk Museums Collections

Roundel 5B: Livestock markets

Norwich was the trading centre for a major agricultural county and, since at least the time of James II, livestock was brought to the Castle Ditches or Dykes for sale [9]. The ‘Market for Horses Cows Sheep & Swine’ is clearly marked on King’s C18 map. Also marked are Old Horse Fair, Haymarket, Hog Hill (Orford Hill near the Bell Hotel), Horse Market (now Rampant Horse Street) and the Old Swine Market on All Saints’ Green – all contributing to a sense of the city as a hub for the county’s agriculture.

Samuel King’s New Plan of Norwich 1766. Courtesy of Norfolk Museums Service

After the coming of the railways, cattle would be driven from Norwich Thorpe Station, up the new, wide Prince of Wales Road to various sites around the castle commemorated in the street names: Cattlemarket Street, Market Avenue, Farmer’s Avenue.

Cattle Market view NE from Market Avenue [4541] 1960-03-12.jpg

Norwich Cattlemarket from Market Avenue, 1960. This is to the rear of the Agricultural Hall with the cathedral spire just visible, right of centre. Courtesy of http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

Here we see the Cattlemarket in 1877. Today, this is the site for the garden and glazed roof of subterranean Castle Mall. In 1960 the Cattlemarket was taken out of town to Hall Road.

Sheep sale at the Cattlemarket at a time when the castle was Norwich Prison. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

Roundel 5C: Shoe-making

The City Hall stands on the site of a former Start-rite shoe factory and it is shoe-making that is celebrated in this roundel.

Preparing soles

By the 1840s the city’s textile trade was in decline but the same pattern of work – production by outworkers controlled by garret-masters – was inherited by the city’s rapidly expanding boot and shoe manufacturing trade. Soon, this piecemeal form of production was overtaken by large-scale manufacture in factories. Numerous small businesses became consolidated into the Big Five companies that dominated Norwich’s boot and shoe trade: Edwards & Holmes; Howlett & White (later the Norvic Shoe Co.); Haldinstein’s (later the Bally Shoe Co.); James Southall (later Start-rite); and H. Sexton & Sons (later Sexton, Son & Everard). About the time that Woodford was designing this roundel the Norwich boot and shoe trade was employing about 10,000 workers, although none of the major factories are operating now [10, 6].

The former Norvic Shoe Co at the corner of St George’s Street and Colegate was once the biggest shoe factory in the country

Roundel 6A: Soldering mustard tins

Here, the worker is soldering tins with what appears to be a pool of molten lead; a soldering iron is highlighted on the left. He would have been working on a production line at Colman’s of Carrow, famous worldwide for producing mustard. This company’s yellow tins of mustard powder were emblematic of the city and it is a great sadness that the factory will close in 2019 after over 150 years at the old Carrow Abbey site. Roundel 6A.jpg

Roundel 6B: More livestock

Roundel 6B.jpg

This image is paired with the ‘livestock’ roundel on the facing door (5B above).

The Hill at Norwich on Market Day, by Frederick Bacon Barnwell (1871). Looking down Cattlemarket Street at the ‘back’ of the Castle, separating into Market Avenue to the left and, to the right, down Rose Lane to a distant Thorpe Hamlet

Roundel 6C: Silk weaving

6C Silk weaving.jpg

This plaque almost certainly refers to the firm of Francis Hinde & Hardy who employed several hundred people in St Mary’s Works on Oak Street [6].

Silk weaving at Hinde’s St Mary’s Mill at Oak Street. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

In the 1550s and 60s Dutch and Belgians Protestants fleeing from religious persecution settled in Norwich, eventually comprising a third of the city’s population. These ‘Strangers’ revived our flagging textile trade and helped develop New Draperies that included silk. Even in the C19, when the textile trade was in serious decline, Norwich silk shawls and ‘Mourning Crape’ kept business alive [11]. In the 1920s Hindes expanded, taking over other Norwich silk weavers and building a silk-weaving mill at Mile Cross; they also owned another silk mill at Oulton Broad. In the 1920s and 30s Hindes were experimenting with nylon and an artificial silk (Rayon) so the roundel may depict the weaving of artificial yarn [12]. Later, Hindes’ produced parachute fabric in WWII.

1949 advertisement. Courtesy [13]

In 1964 Hindes was bought by the giant Courtaulds; the factory closed in 1982, ending 700 years of textile manufacture in the city [6].

The 19^throundel

For the final – the 18th – roundel, Woodford chose to illustrate silk weaving but his designs indicate that his original intention was to show tubes being filled with toothpaste [3]. I did read that the toothpaste was ‘Odells’ but it turns out to have been ‘Odol’ by Cranbux Ltd of 103 Westwick Street – a firm owned by Coleman & Co Ltd [14]. Remember Coleman’s (with an ‘e’), the wine-bottling company from Westwick Street that we saw on roundel 1A?

When Norwich had its own toothpaste. ‘Odol’ marketed by Cranbux, owned by Coleman & Co Ltd, Norwich. Photo courtesy of atlasrepropaperwork.com [14]

We have to ask whether these roundels gave a fair reflection of the city. Well, it’s rather puzzling why Woodford even considered the filling of toothpaste tubes when he could have chosen the famous home-grown insurance business, Norwich Union (now Aviva). Woodford’s vision was decidedly backward-looking but who in 1936 anticipated the war and could imagine what post-war life would be like in a post-industrial Britain? Now, Norwich is a city of literature and science, amongst many other things, but it would take a brave person to commission another set of roundels to fix this moment in time.

(That was to have been my ending but, serendipitously, I came across someone who did have the courage to predict the city’s future. In 1935 an Art Master at CNS School, Walter Watling, drew ‘Norwich in AD 2035’. In his prophetic dream he was introduced to someone over the “televisophone” who “promised to send along the glasses and in another minute they arrived by the pneumatic tube delivery service [15].” Quite a good stab at the smartphone and Amazon, no?)

‘Norwich in AD 2035’ by WT Watling [15, 16].

Sources

Brian Ayers (2004). The Urban Landscape. In, Medieval Norwich (Eds Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson. Pub: Hambledon and London.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Coke,_1st_Earl_of_Leicester_(seventh_creation)
http://racns.co.uk/sculptures.asp?action=getsurvey&id=6
Francis Blomefield (1806). ‘The City of Norwich’ Ch 25, online at: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/topographical-hist-norfolk/vol3/pp220-265
Norfolk Record Office BR266/93.
Nick Williams (2013). Norwich: City of Industries. Pub: Norwich Heritage Economic and Regeneration Trust.
Barry Pardue (2005). Norwich Streets. Pub: Tempus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_cracker
http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/markets.htm
Frances and Michael Holmes (2013). The Story of the Norwich Boot and Shoe Trade. Pub: Norwich Heritage Projects.
Gillian Holman (2015). Made in East Anglia: A History of the Region’s Textile & Menswear Industries. Pub: The Pasold Research Fund http://www.pasold.co.uk/download/%7BA14AC35B-4095-46E1-BBB9-F54A05D5DA92%7D/made-in-east-anglia
Communication from Cathy Terry, Senior Curator at Strangers’ Hall Museum, Norwich.
https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Francis_Hinde_and_Sons
https://www.atlas-repropaperwork.com/odol-toothpaste/#comment-22921
Walter T Watling (1935). ‘Norwich AD 2035: A Prophetic Fantasy’. In, The Norwich Annual 1935.
https://www.edp24.co.uk/features/remembering-scatty-an-art-master-with-a-future-vision-1-5894702

Thanks: to Cathy Terry of the Strangers’ Hall Museum for information on silk weaving; Cathy acknowledges the research of Thelma and Alan Morris. I am grateful, as ever, to Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk for permission to reproduce images. I also thank Derek James of the Eastern Daily Press for kindly sending me the Watling illustration. See his article on Walter Watling in [16].

City Hall Doors # 1

15 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Boulton & Paul, Norwich City Hall doors, Norwich industry

The northern mill towns that had put Norwich’s centuries-old textile industries out of business celebrated their new prosperity in a Victorian campaign of civic building that passed our city by. In the 1930s, by the time Norwich got around to replacing the medieval Guildhall, the city had reinvented itself as a centre of light industry that could advertise its modernity, not with Town Hall Gothic or Georgian Classical, but with the clean lines of Scandinavian Art Deco. This made Norwich City Hall “the foremost English public building of between the wars” [1] – the figurative roundels on its bronze doors providing a snapshot of Norwich in this inter-war period.

In 1934, James Woodford had designed magnificent bronze doors for the Royal Institute of British Architects headquarters in London …

James Woodford’s bronze doors for the Royal Institute of British Architects at 66 Portland Place London1934 ©RIBApix

… and was subsequently commissioned to design three pairs of bronze entrance doors for Norwich City Hall [2]. Unveiled in October 1938 the 18 roundels – three per door – paid homage to history, trade and industry.

James Woodford’s design for the left-hand side pair of doors. ©Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service

Roundel 1A.Bottling wine *[The three pairs of doors are numbered 1-6 and the three roundels on each door are labelled A-C, downwards].

Pic A.jpg

Incidentally, all 18 of Woodford’s designs are repeated – albeit in a simplified form and without the Art Deco influence – around the top floor of Chapelfield Mall (2005).

Coleman & Co Ltd – not to be confused with Colman’s of mustard fame, who took them over in 1968 – bottled wine that arrived in tankers from various European countries. The factory on Westwick Street/Barn Road occupied a large area centred around Toys R Us (but even this landmark closed in 2018) [3]. Another first for Norwich: Coleman’s were the first company in the UK to make wine-in-a-box. From the 1880s Colemans also made Wincarnis, the name describing a mixture of fortified wine and carne, meat, from a time when this pick-me-up contained beef stock.

From, The Museum of Norwich at the Bridewell

Coronation Westwick St Wincarnis works [1623] 1937-05-13.jpg

The Wincarnis Works in Westwick Street 1937, destroyed by the Luftwaffe in an incendiary attack 1942 ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

Wine being bottled and labelled by hand, not by a man in a cap as in the roundel, but by female workers at Coleman & Co Ltd. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk.

Roundel 1B illustrates building the base of the City Hall using blocks of stone with rusticated (set-back) edges. Incidentally, when buying a suit (a rare occurrence) in London the shop assistant told me that his grandfather, a master mason, travelled to Norwich each week to help build the City Hall. Pic B.jpg

Roundel 1C. The city’s aeronautical industry Pic C.jpg

This roundel celebrates one of our largest industries of the time, mainly based around Boulton and Paul’s engineering works on Riverside where they made aeroplane parts. B&P were used to making prefabricated structures like sheds and bungalows; in 1915 this led them being awarded government contracts to build planes [4]. The roundel also acknowledges another Norwich firm, formed by Henry Trevor and his step-son John Page. Trevor, Page & Co. had made furniture since the 1850s and in WWI were contracted by the government to make wooden propellers.

Staff of Trevor, Page & Co (registered at Upper King Street) with two wooden propellers. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

Trevor is perhaps best known locally for his transformation in the 1850s of a disused quarry on Earlham Road into the wonderful Plantation Garden.

Henry Trevor’s Plantation Garden on Earlham Road https://www.plantationgarden.co.uk/

The planes were assembled and tested by Boulton & Paul on Mousehold Heath, which became Norwich Municipal Aerodrome in 1933. 30129032936909Boulton&PaulHangar.jpg

One of Boulton and Paul’s hangars on Mousehold Heath. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk.

The Municipal Aerodrome was opened in 1933 by the Prince of Wales who inspected a flight of B&P’s medium bomber, the Sidestrand – a twin engined biplane.

The Sidestrand. Picture: Ian Burt

Towards the end of WWI, the Sopwith Camel became the country’s most successful fighter (and 50 years later Snoopy’s biplane of choice). Boulton & Paul are said to have made more Sopwith Camels than any other company. Here is the production team with what may well have been one of their last Camels.

Courtesy Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

In 1936, at about the time that Woodward was designing the City Hall doors, Boulton and Paul’s aeroplane division moved to Wolverhampton [4] leaving the old aerodrome to become the Heartsease housing estate. In 1971 the old RAF Bomber Command airfield at Horsham St Faith was redeveloped as Norwich Airport.

Roundel 2A: the filling of soda siphons.

Each of the big four Norwich breweries (Bullards, Youngs Crawshay & Youngs, Morgans, and Steward & Patteson) marketed their own soda siphons. In addition, Caley’s produced table waters from 1862, which were its main product until they began manufacturing drinking and eating chocolate some 20 years later [5]. Caley’s Fleur-de-Lys works in Chapelfield, which was destroyed in the Baedeker raids of 1942, was rebuilt only to be demolished in 2004 to make way for the intu Chapelfield shopping mall. For a few years, from 1958, Caley’s marketed their table waters under the Delecta brand.

Delecta soda siphon Norwich ©picclick.co.uk

The Mineral Water Works (red star) was situated inside what is now the Theatre Street entrance to Chapelfield Mall.

Red star = Caley’s Mineral Water Works; Blue star = Assembly House (formerly the Girls’ High School; Yellow star = St Stephen’s Church. The red line = the walk through St Stephen’s Churchyard. 1885 OS map hosted by norwich-yards.co.uk courtesy of georgeplunkett.co.uk

Roundel 2B. The brewing industry.

Although Norwich is famed for having so many medieval churches, this number (‘one for each week of the year’) was dwarfed in the late C19 by 655 licenced houses, far more than the well-rehearsed ‘and one for each day of the year’ [2]. Most of these were eventually brought under the umbrella of the big four Norwich breweries; all, of course, now gone: Bullards on Anchor Quay [2]; Morgans at the Old King Street Brewery – the site now being redeveloped for housing as St Anne’s Quarter; Steward and Patteson’s Pockthorpe Brewery on Barrack Street; and Youngs Crawshay and Youngs on the Wensum Lodge Adult Education site, King Street. Walking down historic King Street today you would never realise it was once home to two large breweries.

Roundel 2C: Making wire netting.

In 1844 Charles Barnard invented a machine for making wire netting based on weaving looms that would still have been a common sight and sound around the city. His Norfolk Iron Works [see previous post 6] was on the north side of the river, opposite Bullards’ Anchor Quay Brewery.

Charles Barnard’s wire netting loom in The Museum of Norwich at The Bridewell.

Barnards wire netting.jpg

The advertisement underlines the point that Barnards were the originators of wire netting and warns against being misled by other brands. Who might they be?

In 1903, Boulton & Paul stocked over 700 miles of wire netting

Across the city, Boulton and Paul were also making wire netting. In WWII – a few years after Woodford designed his roundels – B&P were producing the ‘Summerfeld’ wire-netting track, used as temporary runways for aircraft [7].

Roundel 3A: Building the Castle. Door3A–Altv.jpg

If we had to guess the location of this scene from the scant clothing and hair styles alone we would be excused for placing these men somewhere between the Nile and the Tigris rather than cold old Norwich. This would at least be consistent with Woodford’s Assyrian designs for the two flagpole bases [2] in the Memorial Gardens opposite City Hall where figures ‘walk like an Egyptian’: torso twisted, face in profile.

The roundel illustrates blocks of stone being hoisted up to a building with rounded Norman arches. However, something more efficient than the cranked windlass illustrated here would have been needed to lift large stone blocks (although the treadwheel only seems to have appeared in the mid-C13 [8]). Whatever … it is stone that is being celebrated here for there is none in this desert of flint and chalk, and to raise both castle and cathedral the Norman conquerors imported their own stone at great expense from Caen in Normandy. Norwich Castle was ‘architecturally the most ambitious secular building in western Europe’ [9] and, as the only royal castle in Norfolk and Suffolk, this assertion of Norman power made Norwich the regional capital [10].

Blind arcading on Norwich Castle, which was re-faced with Bath stone in the 1830s

On the roundel we can just make out that the space beneath the rounded arch, which frames the left-hand worker, is filled in with blocks of stone. Such blind arcading is a common decorative element in Norman architecture but the fact that a utilitarian building like the castle has external decoration at all is “remarkable”. As Pevsner and Wilson wrote, “France e.g. has nothing to compare with Norwich” [1]. Hurrah!

Roundel 3B: ‘Historical implements’ [11]

The wool comb on the right is for carding wool; that is, disentangling it and drawing it into parallel fibres ready for spinning the thread. A denser comb with shorter nails would be needed to produce finer yarn used for worsted. Worsted is a smooth cloth without a nap that was particular to Norwich and the surrounding villages (e.g., Worstead); the manufacture of worsted was probably the city’s major industry throughout the late middle ages [12]. The whirligig in the centre is an ‘umbrella swift’ for winding yarn – either silk or wool [13]. The stand on the left holds two yarn winders on which the thread is spooled ready for weaving. The simplicity of these implements emphasises the pre-industrial nature of the early textile business, often conducted in small workshops and attics by family groups [13].

I was surprised that the final object, seen at the bottom of the roundel, was a cobbler’s bench [2] because, surely, Woodford wouldn’t interrupt his textile cycle by including a different trade? Well, there it is at The Bridewell Museum, a turnshoe maker’s bench. shoemaker's bench1.jpg

Roundel 3C: The Black Death Roundel 3C.jpg

According to the historian Francis Blomefield the bubonic plague first arrived in Norwich on January 1st 1348 [14] but it was to return intermittently over the next three centuries. In the years preceding the first outbreak the city’s numbers were swelled hugely by the arrival of land-starved peasants coming in from the country to seek work [15]. The Black Death reduced this jam-packed population by about a third to a half and wasn’t to return to its original level until the late C17 [15]. Bodies were buried in communal pits in the Cathedral Close and the churchyard of nearby St George Tombland; in the Great Plague of 1665-6 Chapelfield was used as a mass grave [16]. High and low were struck down alike.

The last British example of the Dance of Death in stained glass. St Andrews, Norwich ca 1510.

Next month, the other nine roundels

Contains Photographs of the Unthanks and material not included in the blog. From Jarrolds Book Department or online (click here) and the City Bookshop, Davey Place, Norwich (or click here).

Sources

Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson (1997). The Buildings of England. Norfolk 1: Norwich and North-East. Pub: Yale University Press.
Richard Cocke (photography by Sarah Cocke) (2103). Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk. Pub: Liverpool University Press.
http://www.wisearchive.co.uk/story/the-silent-e-in-colemans/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulton_%26_Paul_Ltd
http://letslookagain.com/tag/a-j-caley-of-norwich/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/tag/barnard-bishop-and-barnards/
Boulton and Paul (1947). The Leaf and the Tree: The Story of Boulton and Paul Ltd 1797-1947. Pub: Boulton and Paul.
https://uccshes.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/medieval-treadwheels-artists-views-of-building-construction.pdf
T.A. Heslop (1994). Norwich Castle Keep: Romanesque Architecture and Social Context. Pub: Centre of East Anglian Studies, UEA.
Bryan Ayers (2004). The Urban Landscape. In, Medieval Norwich. Eds Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson. Pub: Hambledon and London.
http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/stp.htm#Stpet
Penelope Dunn (2004). Trade. In, Medieval Norwich. Eds Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson. Pub: Hambledon and London.
Ursula Priestley (1990). The Fabric of Stuffs: the Norwich Textile Industry from 1565. Pub: Centre of East Anglian Studies, UEA.
Francis Blomefield’s history of the City of Norwich (1806) available online at: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/topographical-hist-norfolk/vol3/pp79-101
Elizabeth Rutledge (2004). Economic Life. In, Medieval Norwich. Eds Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson. Pub: Hambledon and London.
http://www.chapelfieldsociety.org.uk/history-of-chapelfield/.

Late Extra: The Norwich Pantheon

01 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history, Norwich maps

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Norwich Pantheon, Norwich pleasure gardens, Norwich Victoria Station, Quantrell's Gardens, RanelaghGardens, Victoria Gardens

Once, I stayed in a hotel next to the Pantheon in Rome. Constructed some 2000 years ago it is a breath-taking example of the Roman genius for engineering – its circular rotunda spanned by the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome. Surely, anything bearing that name in Norwich could only be a much-diluted version of the Roman Pantheon so what was ours really like? Two weeks after my previous post [1] I received fascinating correspondence that I show here in order to set the historical record straight. First, a brief recap.

The portico of the Roman Pantheon with the rotunda behind

The dome was coffered with diminishing panels to lighten the weight. The central oculus is open to the weather. Built ca 100AD

In my previous post on Norwich Pleasure Gardens I mentioned London’s Pantheon – an impressive structure that prompted the building of our provincial version. The 1000-seat Norwich Pantheon was erected in New Spring Gardens – later called Vauxhall Gardens – on the riverside, off King Street.

800px-Pantheon_painting,_probably_by_William_Hodges_with_figures_by_Zoffany_edited.jpg

The clues to Norwich’s own Pantheon are few and start with Hochstetter’s map of 1789.

Hochstetter’s plan of 1789, courtesy of Norfolk Record Office

This map clearly shows that the Norwich Pantheon on Riverside was originally octagonal, as does Cole’s map of 1807.

Cole’s plan of 1807 with The Pantheon at centre. Courtesy Norfolk Museums Service

However, Cole is thought to have based his map on Hochstetter’s earlier survey [see 2] and in 1807 he wrongly drew The Pantheon in this riverside location from which it had been absent for about a decade. In the 1790s Samuel Neech had bought the defunct Vauxhall gardens, including its Pantheon, and used the building materials to construct a new rotunda (for which he retained the old name of The Pantheon) in his own Ranelagh Gardens. This rival garden – situated just off the present-day St Stephens roundabout – now had a building that is said to have accommodated 2,000 persons [3]. (These pleasure gardens had various owners who gave them different names but for simplicity’s sake I will call them ‘Ranelagh/Victoria Gardens’ here.)

In 1849 the Ranelagh/Victoria Gardens were bought by the Eastern Union Railway Company who repurposed the existing buildings [3]. Fortunately, Norwich Victoria Station survived well into the C20 so photographs exist.

The booking office of Norwich Victoria Station 1913. Courtesy Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

I ended the previous post by asking if we could be looking at The Norwich Pantheon, a ghost from over two centuries ago.

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It was at this stage that Bill Smith – a railway enthusiast who had come to Victoria Station from a different angle – asked if there was evidence that the above building was the fabled Pantheon. The booking office in the photograph approximates to a circular form rather than the distinct octagon shown in Hochstetter’s map. Might it therefore be a different building, such as the ‘amphitheatre’ that a previous owner is said to have constructed eight years before The Pantheon appeared on the site [3]? Unfortunately, Hochstetter’s plan shows no large buildings on the Ranelagh/Victoria site.

Ranelagh Gardens from Anthony Hochstetter’s Plan of 1789. Courtesy of Norfolk Museums Service

But, using the excellent Norfolk Map Explorer (http://www.historic-maps.norfolk.gov.uk/), Bill had downloaded the 1842 tithe map that does show a building on the Ranelagh/Victoria Gardens plot. It is hard to make out whether the building is circular or octagonal.

However, the 1830 map by WS Millard and J Manning gives a clearer view. Ignoring the flaps fore and aft the main building appears as an octagon, or is that a rectangle with rounded corners? Those rounded corners turn out to be useful.

From the 1830 Plan of Norwich by WS Millard and J Manning. Courtesy Norfolk County Council

By the time Ranelagh/Victoria Gardens had become Victoria Station the main garden building, now wider, was situated between the two platforms. Here, Bill has placed the rotunda on a 1905 OS map.

OS map, redrawing courtesy of Bill Smith.

On a more detailed map of 1880 Bill was able to scale the rotunda to fit two circular segments of the building (the ’rounded corners’) and, using the 56½-inch gauge of the railway tracks as a standard, to calculate the rotunda’s diameter at around 74 feet.

The rotunda sized by Bill Smith to fit the rounded corners.

The panelled conical ceiling with its roof light therefore sits on what is almost certainly a circular rotunda, not an octagonal one. Samuel Neech may have recycled material from the old Norwich Pantheon for his own building but it seems quite clear that he didn’t stick to the original’s octagonal floor plan. Bill’s evidence strongly indicates that The Pantheon was the large circular building so an ‘amphitheatre’ has to be something else. Indeed, Fawcett supports the idea of two separate buildings when he describes the layout after the Eastern Union Railway Company took over the gardens in 1849: “Station platforms were laid on either side of the Pantheon … The Amphitheatre became a ticket office and luggage room.” The amphitheatre would therefore be the rectangular building behind, and extending either side of, the entrance portico.

Norwich Victoria Station in the early 1900s. Behind the entrance portico is situated the Amphitheatre. The roof light of the Pantheon (arrowed) peeps out to the rear. Wikipedia, Creative Commons

Below, this aerial photograph from 1935 provides interesting insight into the layout of the station inherited from the Ranelagh/Victoria Gardens. First, to the left, is the entrance off St Stephens Road as shown in the photograph above. Next, perpendicular to this, comes the Amphitheatre with a pitched roof; this is followed by the rotunda/Pantheon; followed by a smaller building with a pitched roof; then a glimpse of the triangular garden illustrated in the larger scale map (two images above).

1935 aerial map, ringed by Bill Smith to show the Pantheon at Norwich Victoria Station. From Flickr user ‘mira66’ [4], Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In 1946, just after the war, the buildings in the station complex were roofless, providing an accidental glimpse into the internal layout, illustrating the large rotunda/Pantheon at centre.

1946 aerial survey ©Norfolk County Council

Update: After posting this article, Grant Young recommended another 1946 aerial photograph from ‘Britain from Above’, which shows the roofless station complex in greater detail [5].

The red star indicates the postwar Victoria Station on the site now occupied by Marsh Insurance. Below, the enlargement clearly shows the circular section of The Pantheon. ©Historic England/Britain from Above EAW001999

Bill then outlined the main compartments as far as possible.

The plan drawn by Bill Smith

With this plan in mind it is now possible to walk ourselves through the rooms of the Ranelagh/Victoria Gardens as described in 1849 [3]:

“Two sides of the spacious area which presented itself on passing the entrance, to the west and the north were occupied with “boxes”, or “arbours”, where parties could sit, and enjoy their refreshments, or sip their wines, while they listened to the instrumental or vocal music … On the South, was a large room … used as a “Nine-pin-room”. It opened into a spacious and excellent bowling green. To the eastward, and nearly in the centre, of the grounds, stood a building, called ‘The Pantheon’. Over the entrance was an orchestra; and on each side of the entrance-passage were rooms, from the windows of which refreshments were supplied. The passage led to a spacious and lofty saloon, often converted into a ballroom; beyond this was an arena, which was, in the Assize-weeks, used as a Concert-room; at other times it was occasionally used as a circus … and anon a theatre … Beyond the Pantheon, the grounds were tastefully laid out, and several walks for promenading were constructed … The palmy days of these gardens is now fading fast … but there was a time, when they were the resort of our fashionable aristocracy; and the public breakfasts … were amongst the most gay and pleasant assemblages, that it was ever our good fortune to encounter.”

The illustration below gives a sense of these Gardens when they were ‘the resort of our fashionable aristocracy’. [Added 7th March 2019].

Victoria Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens.jpg

Sources

https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2019/01/15/pleasure-gardens/
Raymond Frostick (2011). The Printed Maps of Norfolk: a Carto-bibliography. Pub: Raymond Frostick.
Trevor Fawcett (1972). The Norwich Pleasure Gardens In, Norfolk Archaeology vol 35, Pt 3, pp382-399.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/21804434@N02/6652825845/in/photostream/
https://britainfromabove.org.uk/en/image/EAW001999

Thanks. The idea for this supplementary post was prompted by Bill Smith’s key insights into Victoria Station and the buildings it had inherited from the Ranelagh/Victoria Gardens. Bill worked out where the Pantheon fitted into the station’s building plan and calculated its size; I am grateful to him for letting me reproduce his ideas. I also thank Grant Young for suggesting the final aerial view and Rosemary Dixon of the Archant Archives for the final print of Victoria Gardens.

Pleasure Gardens

15 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

My Lord's Gardens, Pablo Fanque, Pleasure gardens, Quantrell's Gardens, Ranelagh Gardens Norwich, The Wilderness Norwich, Vauxhall Gardens Norwich

For over 200 years, Norwich’s pleasure gardens provided public recreation, from bowls and leisurely walks in the C17th to Pablo Fanque’s Fair in the C19th.

Pablo Fanque and steed from The Illustrated London News

I ended the previous post with a passing mention of My Lord’s Gardens, a relic of the Dukes of Norfolk. Here it is, on Samuel King’s map of 1776, some 100 years after the gardener and diarist John Evelyn designed it for Henry Howard who – now that the dukedom had been restored by Charles II – was keen to re-establish his family’s presence in Norwich. This was to be the first of several pleasure gardens in Norwich.

Between King Street and the bend in the river opposite the modern-day railway station were My Lord’s Gardens (outlined in red, the name underlined in green) and Spring Gardens (blue). From, A New Plan of the City of Norwich, by Samuel King 1766. Courtesy Norfolk Museums Service.

The Sixth Duke rebuilt his family’s frequently-flooded riverside palace near the present-day Duke St Car Park [see previous post] and, to compensate for its lack of recreational space, Evelyn was to lay out a garden on the other side of the city. Around 1663 the duke paid £600 for a plot on the site once occupied by the Austin Friars. This plot, east of King Street, was to become the first pleasure garden outside London. Throughout the 1700s Norwich was one of a handful of cities, like Bath and Tunbridge Wells, where the rising ‘middling rank’ could enjoy provincial imitations of London’s fashionable pleasure gardens [1].

Dr Edward Browne (son of philosopher Thomas Browne) said My Lord’s Garden contained: “a place for walking and recreations, having made already walkes round and crosse it, forty foot in breadth. If the quadrangle left bee spatious enough hee intends the first of them for a fishpond, the second for a bowling green, the third for a wildernesse, and the forth for Garden.”

In 1681 Thomas Baskerville arrived at the garden by boat and ascended ‘some handsome stairs’ to be served ‘good liquors and fruits’ by the gardener. He saw a fair garden with a good bowling-green and many fine walks. We have no image of the garden in those early days and must glean what we can from later maps. Looking west towards King Street from the Thorpe side, this prospect of 1741 shows the area in the bend of the river occupied by My Lord’s Garden. The major feature is the formal parterre of what appear to be low hedges and shrubs in a ‘Union Jack’ pattern separated by densely-planted trees from the houses behind (King St). However, the map’s key reveals the barely visible ‘9‘ at the centre of the parterre to be Spring Gardens rather than My Lord’s Garden. Could the Bucks have been mistaken for none of the other maps show the smaller competitor occupying so much of the riverside leading up to King Street [1]? S&N Buck 1741Clipped2.jpg

Samuel and Nathaniel Buck’s 1741 prospect of Norwich from the south-east. King Street runs left-right behind the garden. NWHCM:1922.125.4:M

Perhaps the gentlefolk surveying the city from high on the east bank would have been the sort of clientele attracted to My Lord’s Garden in the C18. S&N Buck Folk.jpg

Fifty years later, well after the Dukes of Norfolk had retreated to Arundel in Sussex, the portion of My Lord’s Garden closest to Howard House (red star) appears as a cluster of rectangular gardens with a large lawn. The bowling green was still around in 1770 [1], so might the rest of the now-public garden also adhere to the original plan or had it become kitchen gardens?

My Lord’s Gardens (red) in 1789. Red star marks Howard House now being restored on King Street. Spring Gardens in blue, with the octagonal Pantheon marked with a blue star. Anthony Hochstetter’s map courtesy of Norfolk Record Office.

In 1772 the owner of My Lord’s Garden tried to outflank his newer competitors by building an artificial cascade modelled on the one at London’s Vauxhall, for public gardens now featured performance. There, water cascaded down to turn a watermill; the sound of rushing water was made by ‘mechanics’ turning a wheel to which tin panels were attached, making a noise that was sufficiently realistic to impress Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus [2]. Norwich claimed a better cascade with the addition of swans while the sun and moon were made to move across the sky.

Vauxhall Gardens - from the Microcosm of London vol3.jpg

Vauxhall Gardens, from The Microcosm of London (1808-10). Courtesy [2].

The only remaining vestige of My Lord’s Garden may be the wall on King Street, which George Plunkett [3] suggested to be the original boundary wall of the Austin Friars.

Howard House. Left: http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk 1934; right, 2018. The gateway has been walled in but the same pattern of tumbled-in stone remains in the flint wall to the left.

In 1739, John Moore designed the neighbouring New Spring Gardens as a place where ladies and gentlemen could promenade or take a pleasure boat and enjoy wines and cider, cakes and ale.

Map of Spring Garden(s) by City Surveyor WS Millard, early 1800s. The inlet was the East Creek that defined a boundary. Courtesy Norfolk Record Office

Moore named his garden after London’s New Spring Gardens [1], which were mentioned by Samuel Pepys and later – when renamed Vauxhall – visited by Becky Sharpe in Vanity Fair. Following suit, Norwich Spring Gardens were renamed Vauxhall Gardens in the late C18. Initially, Moore’s was a ‘rural garden’ where people could stroll through “a very curious Transparent Arch built in the Gothick taste”, no doubt aping London’s Vauxhall. But in 1768, in response to competitors, Moore’s widow began illuminating the garden and entertaining guests with music and fireworks. Around 1776 the gardens were acquired by performer and scene painter James Bunn, which gives an idea of the increasing theatricality now expected of public pleasure gardens: what had started as a fashionable stroll had now become commodified entertainment. Bunn responded by building an octagonal 1000-seater Pantheon, named after the building on London’s Oxford Street [1].

Bunn’s octagonal Pantheon in New Spring Gardens, from Hochstetter’s map of 1789.

The Oxford Street Pantheon, designed by James Wyatt, was demolished as late as 1937 and is now the site of Marks and Spencer [4].

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The Pantheon, Oxford Street, London. Probably by Wm Hodges with added figures by Zoffany. The coffering (recessed panels) in the roof copy those in the Roman Pantheon. Wikimedia Commons

Situated on the hill between Bracondale and King Street, high above present-day Carrow Bridge, The Wilderness became the city’s third public garden – leased to Samuel Bruister in 1748, [1]. His wrestling matches would have attracted a less genteel clientele but in a few years – during Assize Week when circuit judges came to town – The Wilderness had raised its sights, competing with New Spring Gardens with public breakfasts and music. In practical terms a ‘wilderness’ suited the hilly terrain but was also more in tune with ideas of naturalistic landscape expounded by Capability Brown. However, when part of The Wilderness was re-opened as Richmond Hill Gardens ca 1812 it was primarily as a venue for fireworks [5].

The Wilderness Public Gardens were just inside the city walls on the east side of Bracondale, on the hill above King Street. There was a gravelled Long Walk beneath the city walls, up to the Black Tower and the Wilderness Tower. Norwich 1789. ©The Historic Towns Trust

The Walk under the wall on top of Carrow Hill (entrance at top of Carrow Hill). The Black Tower in the distance

Wilderness Tower and Black Tower [2190] 1938-03-21.jpg

The ‘Wilderness Tower with Black Tower behind. ©www.georgeplunkett.co.uk

Between present-day Sainsbury’s on Queen’s Road and the St Stephens roundabout the fourth pleasure garden was to become the city’s most popular.

Quantrell’s Gardens (later Victoria Gardens) on Hochstetter’s map of 1789. The circle marks present-day St Stephens roundabout, the star marks the old Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.

Widow Smith’s Rural Gardens started ca 1763 as a nursery garden [1] but when she began to illuminate the grounds on Guild Days and to sell cider and nog, she set two men at the gate to keep out disagreeable persons; she also employed William Quantrell as engineer for her firework shows and before long he owned Quantrell’s Gardens. Competition was intense: My Lord’s Garden had installed complex machinery to represent land and sea battles; The Wilderness had a “grand Piece of Machinery … to run 680 Yards upon a Line”; but Quantrell had Signor Pedralio’s “Globe 21 feet in Circumference which will turn round its Axis, and fall into four parts, and will discover Vulcan inside, who will be attended by his Cyclops … Vulcan’s (pyrotechnic) Cave and Forge and the Eruption of Mount Aetna.” When Spring Gardens poached Signor Pedralio, Quantrell’s riposte was to get Signor Antonio Batalus to “Fly across the Garden with Fire from different Parts of the Body [1].” Who wouldn’t pay good money to see that?

After the first manned balloon flight was made in France in 1783, England experienced Balloon Mania. The following year Bunn’s balloon floated quite happily inside his Norwich Pantheon, but when taken outside was quickly lost in a shower of hail.

Patheon_Lunardi's_Balloon.jpg

Vincento Lunardi’s balloon in the London Pantheon. Wikimedia Commons

In 1785, Quantrell won this contest by hosting a balloon ascent by Norwich man James Decker with a 13-year-old girl as passenger. The balloon was damaged in a squall, Miss Weller was left behind but Decker ascended and came down safely near Loddon [1]. In his diary, Parson Woodforde mentions that the balloon passed over him as he stood on Brecondale (sic) Hill.

Courtesy Norfolk County Council, at Picture Norfolk

And it was from Quantrell’s that Major John Money made his famous balloon flight in 1785. In trying to raise funds for the nearby Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, the major took off only to be carried away by an ‘improper current’. He descended into the sea off Yarmouth in which he was immersed for seven hours before rescue [see earlier post 6].

1024px-Major_Mony's_Perilous_Situation_When_he_fell_into_the_Sea_July,_23,_1785,_off_the_Coast_of_Yarmouth_NASM-745A8AFD32D22_001.jpg

Proto-windsurfer Major John Money, off the coast of Yarmouth.

At the end of the C18 Quantrell’s Gardens came into the hands of Samuel Neech who renamed it Ranelagh Gardens, after the pleasure gardens in Chelsea. From Canaletto’s painting of the London resort it is hard to believe that its Norwich counterpart was anything like as ambitious.

the-interior-of-the-rotunda-ranelagh-gardens.jpg!Large.jpg

The interior of the Rotunda, Ranelagh Gardens, London. c1751 Canaletto.

Confusingly, the advertisement below places the Norwich Pantheon in Ranelagh and not at the Vauxhall/Spring Gardens but this was because Neech had bought The Pantheon from the defunct Norwich Vauxhall and erected it on his own site, to add to his Amphitheatre.

Courtesy Norfolk County Council, at Picture Norfolk

Just before Ranelagh Gardens closed it had contained a circus operated by William Darby of Ber Street, known as Pablo Fanque, whose circus was celebrated in The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album – ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’ [7]. Rather wonderfully, his name is commemorated in the new Pablo Fanque House on All Saints Green, providing student accommodation.

Pablo Fanque House in All Saints Green, opposite John Lewis. Portrait of equestrian and circus owner William Darby aka Pablo Fanque

In 1849, Ranelagh Gardens (Royal Victoria Gardens since 1842) were closed and sold to the Eastern Union Railway Company who built platforms either side of The Pantheon.

Top left, Quantrell’s Gardens 1789; Centre, OS map of Victoria Station 1905; Lower right, Marsh Insurance Ltd C21. The St Stephens roundabout (red circle) with Queen’s Road to the right. Latter two images reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland

The Booking Office of Norwich Victoria Station 1913. Could this be The Norwich Pantheon? Courtesy Norfolk County Council, at Picture Norfolk

Other smaller pleasure gardens grew up around Norwich in the C19: some as tea gardens, some attached to public houses; e.g., The Mussel Tea Gardens in Telegraph Lane, Thorpe; The Greyhound Gardens on the east side of Ber Street; The West End Retreat, Heigham; The Gibraltar Gardens, Heigham Street – all providing breathing space from the crowded city, [8]. Prussia Gardens at Harford Bridge was a popular venue where, in 1815, balloons were still in fashion: a Mr Steward took off but only ‘skimmed and skimmed and skimmed and skimmed’, to stop 500 yards away. In WWI some soldiers removed the pub sign bearing the King of Prussia’s head, prompting the patriotic change of name to the King George. It is now the Marsh Harrier.

The Marsh Harrier PH, the site of Bensley’s Rural Gardens at the King of Prussia. Was it Glen Miller who took over the piano one night during WWII? [9].

A clue to the demise of public pleasure gardens in general can be found in the demise of Norwich’s Ranelagh/Victoria Gardens, literally subsumed beneath the railway that led to the rise of seaside resorts and changed the public’s perception of leisure.

Now in its fourth printing, available from Jarrolds Book Department or online (click here) and the City Bookshop, Davey Place, Norwich (or click here).

Sources

Trevor Fawcett (1972). The Norwich Pleasure Gardens. Norfolk Archaeology vol XXXV, part III pp382-399. (The well-researched standard text).
https://www.regencyhistory.net/2015/10/the-cascade-at-vauxhall-gardens.html (An excellent blog post about The Cascade at London’s Vauxhall Gardens by Rachel Knowles).
http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/kin.htm#Kings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_London
Sarah Jane Downing (1988). The English Pleasure Garden 1660-1860. Shire Publications.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/12/01/entertainment-victorian-style/
http://www.100greatblackbritons.com/bios/Pablo_Fanque.htm
Walter Wicks (1925). Inns and Taverns of Old Norwich, With Notes on Pleasure Gardens. Pub: Page Bros (Norwich).
http://www.norfolkpubs.co.uk/norwich/knorwich/nckge2.htm

Thanks to Jill Napier (née Quantrell) for suggesting this post about her ancestor. I am grateful to Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk for permission to use images.

The absent Dukes of Norfolk

15 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Duke's Palace, Dukes of Norfolk, Earl of Surrey, Norwich maps

The Dukes of Norfolk are conspicuously absent from the county that bears the name of their title; for over 400 years their seat has been at Arundel Castle, Sussex, and barely a trace of them remains in Norfolk’s county town.

Arundel Castle, Sussex ca 1770 by James Canter ©Arundel Castle

But before sifting Norwich for the remains of the Dukes of Norfolk let’s look at the ebb and flow of power (and religion) that explains their absence.

Earlier lineages of the Dukes of Norfolk had petered out so, in the latest line, John Howard was created the First Duke of Norfolk in 1483 by Richard III as reward for helping him usurp the throne. Howard died at the Battle of Bosworth, along with Richard III, when struck in the face by an arrow. Howard’s son, who also fought at Bosworth, was placed in the Tower and stripped of lands and title by the victor, Henry VII. Henry VII restored the title of Surrey but it wasn’t until the reign of Henry VIII that the title, (Third) Duke of Norfolk, was restored after Thomas Howard defeated James IV at Flodden.”

Hans_Holbein_the_Younger_-_Thomas_Howard,_3rd_Duke_of_Norfolk_(Royal_Collection).JPG

Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk by Hans Holbein the Younger, holding the baton of the premier Earl Marshal. Courtesy Royal Collection.

As a religious conservative the Third Duke challenged the reforms of Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, but gained the upper hand when Cromwell fell out of favour for promoting the king’s unsuccessful marriage to Anne of Cleves.

Anne_of_Cleves,_by_Hans_Holbein_the_Younger.jpg

Anne of Cleves by Hans Holbein the Younger. Henry said “She is nothing as fair as she hath been reported” . The marriage was unconsummated. Credit: Louvre Museum

Cromwell was accused of treason and it was Norfolk who snatched the chains from the neck of the condemned Chancellor, “relishing the opportunity to restore this low-born man to his former status”.

Thomas Cromwell’s Garter Collar

But in this noble game of snakes and ladders the Duke of Norfolk had the great misfortune of being uncle to Henry’s two beheaded wives – the first being Anne Boleyn (Wife II) from Blickling. The second was Catherine Howard who Henry married on the day that Cromwell was beheaded, just three weeks after divorcing Anne of Cleves (Wife IV). It was Catherine’s supposed promiscuity that led to her execution and the Howards’ loss of power [1].

The Third Duke’s son, Henry Howard, has been called: “the most folish prowde boy that ys in Englande”.

Henry Howard, ‘The Poet Earl of Surrey’, aged 29 (1546). Attributed to William Scrots

Henry Howard unwisely improved his coat of arms in the family’s Kenninghall Palace in South Norfolk by quartering them with the royal arms of his ancestor, Edward the Confessor. Henry VIII saw this as treasonous so Howard who, as a young man had been made to witness the execution of his relative Queen Catherine Howard, was himself beheaded aged 30 [2].

The attainted arms of Henry Howard. The arms of Edward the Confessor are fifth in this series (Azure, a cross flory between 5 marlets Or)

His father, the Third Duke was also in the Tower, but was reprieved by Henry VIII’s death the day before the planned execution. After Henry’s daughter, Bloody Mary – who burned dozens of Norwich Protestants at Lollards’ Pit – became queen she rewarded the staunchly Catholic Howards by restoring the Dukedom of Norfolk. However, after Henry’s other daughter – the staunchly Protestant Elizabeth – became queen the Third Duke of Norfolk was found guilty of plotting against her and so, once more, lands and title were forfeit.

The Fourth Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, is suggested to have commissioned Thomas Tallis’ 40-part motet Spem in Alium; after hearing of Striggio’s 40-part mass he asked “whether none of our Englishmen could sett as good a songe” [3]. For this alone he is my favourite Norfolk. During the 2010 Norfolk and Norwich Festival I heard Spem in Alium played in St Peter Parmentergate on King Street. Janet Cardiff had arranged 40 speakers so that the audience could walk around and listen to recordings of each of the 40 voices played through a dedicated audio channel [4]. Magical.

Janet Cardiff’s 40-speaker motet in St Peter Parmentergate. Courtesy of [3]

Arundel Castle became the Howard seat after Thomas Howard married Mary Fitzalan, the Earl of Arundel’s heir, in 1555. But the duke became embroiled in a Catholic conspiracy to enthrone Mary Queen of Scots. He was executed by Elizabeth I and Norfolk lands and titles were – yet again – held forfeit. It wasn’t until 1660, during the Restoration, that these were restored to the Fourth Duke’s great-great-grandson who was held in a mental asylum in Padua and on his death the title passed to his brother, the Sixth Duke [5,6].

Henry Howard, Sixth Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal, 1st Earl of Norwich (ca 1670-80?)

The Howards in Norwich. In 1544 the Third Duke’s son, (that most folish prowde boy) had begun building a sumptuous mansion on the site of St Leonard’s Priory given to the Norfolks by Henry VIII. On St Leonard’s Hill the building, Mount Surrey [7], looked over the city; five years later Robert Kett’s army used the mansion as its headquarters after which it was totally demolished [8].

1581 Map NorwichGeorg Braun and Franz Hogenberg.jpg

Site of Mount Surrey, on St Leonard’s Hill (to the right of ‘Leonardes’), overlooking Bishop’s Bridge (twin towers, centre) and the cathedral spire (lower edge). From Braun & Hogenberg’s map 1581. Courtesy of Norfolk Museums Collections.

The Poet Earl’s other house in Surrey Street, Surrey Court, was barely finished by the time of his execution. It was on this site that George Skipper was to build Surrey House, aka The Marble Hall, for Norwich Union, 1901-1906 [9]. Some of Surrey’s C17 stained-glass coats-of-arms were reinstalled in Skipper’s building that – had they been seen by his prosecutors – would have confirmed their accusations of Surrey’s and Norfolk’s treasonous intentions [10].

C17 glass from Surrey Court now in Aviva’s Surrey House. Lower far right is the Third Duke’s coat of arms surrounded by the Order of the Garter, surmounted by the ducal crown. On this shield the Howard arms occupies the top left quadrant with ancestral arms in the remaining quarters.

Around 1540, on what is now the site of the Duke Street Car Park, the Third Duke built his own palace as a copy of Surrey House on the other side of the city [11]. This is where the Fourth Duke wooed the devoutly Catholic Mary Queen of Scots with talk of marriage that earned him Elizabeth I’s disapproval [quoted in 12]. In 1672 the palace was rebuilt in the modern Italianate style but probably never completed.

The north side of Duke of Norfolk’s Palace, John Kirkpatrick 1710. Courtesy Norfolk County Council, at Picture Norfolk

Thomas Baskerville (1681) didn’t hold back: (it is)“seated in a dung-hole place … it hath but little room for gardens … and is pent up on all sides … with tradesmen’s and dyers’ houses, who foul the water by their constant washing and cleaning their cloth” [10]. As we saw in the post on the Blood Red River [13] waste was still being emptied into the Wensum from adjacent dyeing houses some 200 years later.

The cast-iron Duke’s Palace Bridge (built 1822) next to Michael Stark’s dye works. Drawn by James Stark. Courtesy of [15].

One reason why the palace was abandoned in 1711 was that the cellars had been sunk so deep “that the water annoyed them much” and the floors above subsided [14]. An image from a recent post shows just how devastating the slow-flowing Wensum can be [13].

The flooded Anchor Quay Brewery in 1912, a few hundred metres downstream. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council, at Picture Norfolk

Another reason for the Eighth Duke’s departure from Norwich is claimed to have been the mayor’s refusal (1708) to allow him to process into the city with his comedians and trumpeters [8]. It does sound mean-spirited but there are deeper currents. Blomefield [7] records that in 1683 the Earl of Arundel had brought letters from Charles II (who made a death-bed conversion to Catholicism) limiting the ancient rights of the Norwich Assembly. Charles’ successor, the Catholic James II, also tried to impose direct control upon the Assembly. In 1688 Henry Duke of Norfolk rode into the marketplace at the head of 30 knights and gentlemen and declared for a free parliament; i.e., that Catholics should be free of a test that effectively barred them from both Houses of Parliament. That year, the Norwich ‘rabble’ rioted and burned a Popish chapel and houses [7]. Charitably, the mayor’s refusal to permit the procession can be seen as a sensible precaution against stirring up the Protestant mob but now that an intensely Anglican monarch (Queen Anne) was on the throne the Assembly may have felt safe in thumbing their noses at the Catholic nobility after years of interference.

Made of stone – a rarity in Norwich – the Tuscan columns on Mayor John Harvey’s house at No 20 Colegate are said to be recycled from the Duke’s Palace [8 and, more ambiguously, 16].

The domestic wing of the Duke’s Palace was leased to the Corporation in 1711 as a workhouse [11].

1766 A New Plan Norwich by Samuel King 5.jpg

The workhouse. Samuel King 1766. Courtesy, Norfolk Museums Service NWHCM: 1997.550.81:M

The Court of Guardians (of the Poor) inserted a great number of dormer windows into the former bowling alley to let light into the paupers’ dormitories; lower floors provided workrooms.

Workhouse, formerly the duke’s bowling alley. By Eastgate ca 1806. Courtesy Norfolk County Council, at Picture Norfolk

In 1764 the Tenth Duke built a Roman Catholic chapel with a chaplain’s house on the site

The derelict former Catholic chapel, presumably in the 1960s. Courtesy Norfolk County Council, at Picture Norfolk

… but in 1794 his successor, who was Anglican, let the chapel to the Norwich Public Library [18, 19]. This particular link with the Dukes of Norfolk was finally broken in 1839 when chapel and house were sold to the Norfolk and Norwich Museum; in the 1960s the building (by then a billiard hall) was demolished to make way for the Duke Street Car Park.

The Old Public Library ca 1900 on St Andrew’s Street. Courtesy Norfolk County Council at http://www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk

The link with the Dukes of Norfolk was resuscitated when the Roman Catholic Church of St John was built in 1910 for Henry Fitzalan Howard, the 15th Duke of Norfolk. It was designed by George Gilbert Scott Jnr (and finished by his brother John Oldrid Scott). From its vantage point on the site of the old city gaol, high on the west side of Norwich, it looks down upon the city much as the ancestral Mount Surrey had overlooked the east side some 360 years before. This fine building, which became a cathedral in 1976, is all lancet windows, built in the Early English style favoured by the duke. RC Cathedral.jpg

Old maps show one final, tantalising trace of the C17 Howards – My Lord’s Gardens – but I’m reserving that for the next post on Norwich pleasure gardens.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Howard,_3rd_Duke_of_Norfolk
William A. Sessions (1986). Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life. Pub: OUP.
http://www.classical-music.com/article/quick-guide-talliss-spem-alium
https://www.overgrownpath.com/2005/05/tallis-forty-loudspeaker-motet.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Norfolk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Howard,_6th_Duke_of_Norfolk
Francis Blomefield (1806). 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), British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/topographical-hist-norfolk/vol3.
Frank Meeres (2011). The Story of Norwich. Pub: Phillimore & Co Ltd, Andover.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2018/01/15/the-norwich-coat-of-arms/
Ernest A. Kent (1932). The Houses of the Dukes of Norfolk in Norwich. Norfolk Archaeology vol XXIV.
L.G. Bolingbroke (1921). St John Maddermarket: its Streets, Lanes and Ancient Houses, and their Old-time Association. Norfolk Archaeology vol XX.
http://hbsmrgateway2.esdm.co.uk/norfolk/DataFiles/Docs/AssocDoc6824.pd
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2018/07/15/the-bridges-of-norwich-1-the-blood-red-river/
John Kirkpatrick (1889). The Streets and Lanes of the City of Norwich. Pub: Agas H. Goose.
http://www.heritage.norfolk.gov.uk/record-details?TNF1521-Norwich-Duke%27s-Palace-Bridge—James-Stark-(Archaeology-and-Art)
Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson (1997). The Buildings of England. Norfolk 1: Norwich and North-East, page 284. Pub: Yale University Press.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Howard,_8th_Duke_of_Norfolk
http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/sta.htm
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2018/06/15/norwich-knowledge-libraries/

Thanks to: Clare Everitt at Picture Norfolk for permissions to use images from the superb collection of old photographs of Norfolk from Picture Norfolk. Visit: www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk

Nairn on Norwich

15 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Anglia Square, Ian Nairn, Magdalen Street flyover, Subtopia

Born in Bedford 1930, dead of cirrhosis of the liver 1983, Ian Nairn wrote about towns not as a trained architect but as an outsider [1,2]. In 1955 he produced a maverick edition of Architectural Review entitled Outrage in which he railed against the homogenising effect of bland postwar development and the blurring of lines between town and country – ‘urban sprawl’. The result was a subtopia (his word) in which “the end of Southampton will look like the beginning of Carlisle.” He also wrote about Norwich … and not in a good way.

Ian Nairn. Photo: Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Library Photographs Collection

Nairn was stationed on the outskirts of Norwich at RAF Horsham St Faith, now Norwich Airport. On a personal mission for Architectural Review, Nairn flew his Gloster Meteor jet in search of evidence of John Soane’s 1784 Music Room at Earsham Hall [2].

John Soane remodelled the Music Room at Earsham Hall, near Bungay, 1784. He also designed Shotesham Hall, just outside Norwich, 1785. © Evelyn Simak

Nairn is said not to have been able to separate his private from his professional life so it was probably to the city’s detriment that Norwich was the only one of the 16 ‘Nairn’s Towns’ in which he had actually lived (other than London). The two uneventful years he spent on the celestial Unthank Road with his first wife, Joan Parsons, allowed him far longer to polish his hostility than was possible on the other provincial drive-bys. His 1964 essay on Norwich was “particularly rancid” [2] …

“… the traveller comes on a brand-new building announcing the city centre at the southern end of St Stephens Street, which for crushing banality must have few equals in Britain … to come first in a field as large as this is no joke.” [3]

St Stephens Street was flattened in the war after which it was decided that there was nothing worth saving except – according to Pevsner and Wilson [4] – Marks & Spencer’s 1912 Adam Revival building, formerly Buntings Department Store. In his 1967 postscript, Nairn wrote that the rebuilding of St Stephens Street was “probably the worst thing of its kind I have ever seen in what passes for a cultured city.”

The western side of St Stephens Street – an unconsidered jumble of post-war building

By contrast, Nairn loved George Skipper’s ‘old’ Norwich Union building (1900-1912) in nearby Surrey Street, calling it “a super-Palladian palace which is as good as anything of its style in the country.” But the adjacent new headquarters were “a completely anonymous slab” [3].

Skipper’s Norwich Union building of 1903-4 next to the 1960-1 building by T P Bennet & Sons ‘without the conviction Skipper wielded in his day” [3].

Like fellow ‘dilettante journalist’ and architectural commentator, John Betjeman, Nairn approved of our local architect, identifying the Telephone Manager’s Office in St Giles Street as, “another firework by Skipper … smaller but if anything even richer.” Built 1904-6 for the Norwich and London Accident Insurance Association (now St Giles House Hotel) it has been called “the Norwich Union in miniature” [4].

St Giles Hotel.jpg

Nairn loved the unlovable; he was neutral about historic Elm Hill “with its cobbles and antique shops” but he outrightly condemned the decline of Pottergate and King Street. Despite suffering from faceless post-war infill Pottergate manages to thrive as part of a vibrant mix of independent shops in the Norwich Lanes. King Street, however, has changed more dramatically since Nairn’s visit.

After George Plunkett took the above photograph the ground floor of 125-129 was ripped out and the shop fronts replaced with plate glass, the full horror of which can be seen now that the building is derelict. This is adjacent to Dragon Hall (under scaffolding), one of the ‘Norwich 12’ iconic buildings. Further along, behind the hoarding is the new St Anne’s Wharf housing development; the opposite side is now mainly modern housing in ‘traditional’ style and so character developed over centuries has all but evaporated.

To the north of the city the spirit of the Coslany ward, said Nairn, had been stifled by “over-zoning and carelessness“. In the first of the Civic Trust’s redecoration schemes (1959) attempts had been made to revive Magdalen Street, as can be seen in a short film [5]. Facades were stripped of unnecessary clutter and painted in pastel shades from a palette of 18 colours and 13 alphabets selected by Coordinating Architect, Misha Black. However, while The Times reported on the Walt Disney effect [6], Nairn – citing one of the ‘malpractices’ from Outrage – wrote that the pastels were “cruelly out of touch with the local colour-range, and after five years it looks as jaded as last year’s fashion.”

Before and after: book cover of Civic Trust 1959 project. From the archives of The Royal Windsor Forum

Nairn did manage to extract a few good points, singling out plans by City Architect David Percival for the old people’s flats clustered around the churchyard of St John Ber Street but, sixty years on, it is hard to share the warmth of Nairn’s enthusiasm.

Alderson Place, Finkelgate

Another of Nairn’s bright spots was Denys Lasdun’s University of East Anglia campus. Lasdun designed the campus to face the newly-excavated lake with the ‘teaching wall’ behind; this was separated by an elevated walkway from the ziggurats – the stepped boxes providing student accommodation. In his 1967 postscript, Nairn was evidently minded to approve this icon of New Brutalism on principle since building had only just begun.

Lasdun’s “laudanum dream of Anglicised modern architecture” [7]

Nairn did concede that there were still many marvellous things to see in Norwich, including “one of the great town views of England.”

He thought the Anglican Cathedral had never received the praise it was due although his own praise was correspondingly muted: “no fireworks”.

“Such a balanced and even-tempered masterpiece”

He did like the Perpendicular vaulting added to the Norman nave after the timber roof was destroyed by fire in 1463; he thought it “a splendid match for the three-storey elevation underneath.” It is a glorious stone roof, a masterpiece of late medieval craftsmanship, but you would hardly call it a ‘match’ since it is hard to disguise the stylistic chasm between the delicate lacework of lierne ribs and the ponderous Norman piers made of lighter Caen stone.

Supporting one of the Perpendicular fans is a hart lying on water – the rebus of Bishop Walter Lyhart who initiated the vaulting of the nave roof.

The only other building in Norwich “with the authority of the cathedral” was St James Yarn Mill on the Wensum, built in 1843 to give a boost to our waning textile trade. Nairn’s first wife worked for local printers and booksellers Jarrolds, whose printing works were then in St James Mill; according to Gillian Darley it was Nairn’s intervention that gained the building its Grade I listing in 1954 [8].

As he wrote words of praise about this temple of industry Nairn was using his other hand to take a swipe at “the intricate antics of the city’s interminable late-Gothic churches. Interminable is about right“. He liked the interior of St George Colegate but then its Gothic fittings had been replaced with unfussy Georgian. “Good things have to be hunted down piecemeal like … the enchanting toy vault under the tower of St Gregory Pottergate” (below).

The toy vault

At St Peter Mancroft, Nairn said nothing about one of the best angel roofs in the country nor of the outstanding C15 Norwich School glass in the great east window. Instead, he thought the building “one of the most neurotic and inconsistent designs that ever received universal adulation.” But in this he was at odds with Nikolaus Pevsner, with whom he had co-edited the 1960s volumes on Sussex and Surrey for The Buildings of England. Pevsner – who thought Nairn’s contributions too subjective – judged St Peter Mancroft “the Norfolk parish church par excellence”; John Betjeman thought it “superb” [9]; and Simon Jenkins wrote, “Few who enter St Peter’s for the first time can stifle a gasp” [10].

Within spitting distance of St Peter Mancroft (too close for a dyspeptic critic) is the City Hall. St Peter Mancroft was “old, big and has a lot of carving on it” but the very freedom from fuss that Nairn admired in Jarrolds Paper Mill was positively disliked at City Hall: it was timorous, suffering from a fatal “drawing back from commitment.”

Nairn summed up City Hall’s personality defects by comparing “the empty bombast of the lions in front … with their C12 prototype in Brunswick.” Both are quite stylised, both things of beauty; the Norwich lion (left) does have a slicker hair-do but this was at a time when Norwich City Council was demolishing hundreds of medieval slums, looking forward to the streamlined kind of future promised by Swedish Neoclassical architecture [4].

Lion Duo.jpg

In opposition to Nairn’s glumness, Pevsner and Wilson thought Norwich City Hall “must go down in history as the foremost English public building of between the wars … (an) architectural triumph” [4].

Pevsner & Wilson [4] noted the influence of Stockholm City Hall by Ragnar Östberg (1923) and Stockholm’s Concert Hall by Ivar Tengbom (1926) on Norwich City Hall (1939)

Below City Hall lies the large marketplace founded by the Normans in their New Borough and joined umbilically to their castle by Davey Place. Nairn was enthusiastic about this little street and thought “This part of Norwich could be nowhere else.”

Davey Place is not without charm but is no longer unique, marred by blank-faced intrusions from the C20th.

In his 1967 postscript Nairn wrote:

The highlight of 1965 was the approval of a proposal by the City Engineer to build a flyover exactly half-way down that recently famous Magdalen Street; meanwhile, a property company has bought up large chunks of ‘old rubbish’ to the north; the character of Coslany has finally gone.

Lovely old Magdalen Street barely survived the bisection.

The flyover that bisects Magdalen Street. Looming on the left is the Hollywood Cinema, part of the failed Anglia Square development.

On Nairn’s ‘chunks of old rubbish’, immediately behind Magdalen Street, the St Augustine’s area was bulldozed so that Norwich could have its own copy of urban revitalisation – the pedestrian precinct. The problem was that pedestrians had a long walk from the city centre to a satellite from which they were notionally excluded by the new inner ring road [see previous posts 11 ,12]. Now, Anglia Square is a collection of downmarket discount stores, the multi-storey carpark is closed, the excessive surface parking around the uncompleted development is tatty, and Her Majesty’s Stationery Office – the love-it-or-hate-it Sovereign House – lies abandoned [13].

The Brutalist Sovereign House, part of the Anglia Square development (1970)

Around the time of his second visit to Norwich, Nairn was falling out of love with ‘new architecture’, using the front of the Observer’s Review to shout: “Stop the architects now. The outstanding and appalling fact about modern architecture is that it is not good enough” [14]. The lesson learned from the last 70 years of post-war town planning is that open urban space needs to be on a human scale and in tune with the historic environment if it is to be loved. It is therefore hard to comprehend why plans have been submitted to redevelop Anglia Square with a 25-storey tower. Whether it is 25 or a concessionary 20 storeys high is immaterial for any tall tower plus three large 12-storey blocks will be cruelly out of scale with the surrounding Conservation Areas [15]. It is essential that the overriding values of retail and property are not allowed to determine the texture of the streetscape for a further 70 years. Click to read the Norwich Society’s response to the revised Anglia Square proposal [16]

FOR YOUR CHRISTMAS STOCKING The book of ‘Colonel Unthank and the Golden Triangle’ contains much more about the development of the Golden Triangle than covered in my blog posts, including photographs of the Unthank family.

Sources

Ian Nairn (1955). Outrage. Architectural Review 1 June 1955.
Gillian Darley and David McKie (2013). Ian Nairn: Words in Place. Pub: Five Leaves Publications.
Ian Nairn (1964). Norwich: Regional Capital. In, Nairn’s Towns, edited and updated by Owen Hatherley (2013). Pub: Notting Hill Editions Ltd.
Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson (1997). The Buildings of England. Norfolk 1. Yale University Press.
http://www.eafa.org.uk/catalogue/304
‘Norwich’s Skilful Use of Colour’, The Times, 13 April 1959.
Owen Hatherley (2013). In, 2013 postscript to Norwich: Regional Capital by Ian Nairn. From Nairn’s Towns (Introduced by Owen Hatherley, Pub: Notting Hill Editions).
Gillian Darley (personal communication).
John Betjeman (updated by Richard Surman) (2011). Betjeman’s Best British Churches. Pub: Collins.
Simon Jenkins (1999). England’s Thousand Best Churches. Pub: Penguin Books.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/11/15/reggie-through-the-underpass/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/10/15/gildencroft-and-psychogeography/
https://c20society.org.uk/botm/sovereign-house-norwich/
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/03/ian-nairn-architecture-critic-against-sprawl-biography
http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/politics/anglia-square-revised-plans-due-but-will-controversial-tower-s-height-be-cut-1-5668872
https://www.thenorwichsociety.org.uk/future-norwich/anglia-square

Thanks. For permission to reproduce images I am grateful to Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk and to Roger, editor of The Royal Windsor Forum

The Norwich Way of Death

15 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

Boardman, Bullard, Colman, Dissent in Norwich, Earlham Cemetery, Jarrold, Skipper, The Rosary

We have often talked about this city’s proud history of independence that often tripped into dissent and outright opposition against church and state. But after the Reformation the extent to which you disagreed with the Anglican Church would have decided whether or not you could be buried in your local churchyard.

Following the Reformation, Nonconformist factions like the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and Quakers were discriminated against by the Established Church for, despite having to pay church rates, Dissenters were still refused burial in their local churchyard. An Act of 1836 allowed Nonconformists to conduct their own funeral services but it wasn’t until 1880 [1] that they had the right to be buried in a parish church, using their own rites instead of a Church of England service [2].

After the 2011 census, Norwich was reported to be the country’s most godless city [3] but the 1851 census had already shown that the majority of Norwich citizens attended neither church nor chapel [4] and as far back as the early C18 – when dissent could well have been under-reported – as many as 20% of Norwich population were classed as Dissenters [5].

Nonconformist chapels therefore tended to be built with their own burial grounds. The Octagon Chapel in Colegate, built by Thomas Ivory in 1756 to replace a Presbyterian meeting house of 1686, was ‘the first of its kind in England’ [6].

The chapel, which is octagonal rather than cross-shaped, was called ‘The Devil’s Cucumber Frame’ by others. It is now a Unitarian chapel.

To the left of the portico is a gate into the small garden that was the burial ground until 1821; the significance of this dates comes later.

The garden at the OctagonChapel was once its burial ground

In Norwich, The Society of Friends (The Quakers) originally met in private houses or in the open air but in 1676 they bought a modest quarter of an acre in Goat Lane on which to build a Meeting House [7].

This building of 1826 replaced the C17 building in Goat Lane

By 1700 their congregation had grown to around 500 [7] so the Friends built a second Meeting House in Gildencroft, in Norwich-Over-the-Water (and now Over-the-Ring-Road), next to an acre of land already used for their burial ground.

Simple headstones at the Quakers’ Burial Ground, Gildencroft

However, access to the burial ground via narrow Gildencroft Lane (now Quakers Lane) was difficult for pall bearers …

… and so the Quakers rented land between the burial ground and St Martins (or Whores) Lane off Oak Street to allow horse-drawn wagons to bear the coffin [8]. This strip of land with wagon-turning circle can be seen on a map of 1789, long before the ring road.

The turning circle can be seen below the Friends’ Meeting House (pink), adjacent to their Burial Ground. The amber road at left is now Oak Street. The lane beneath the turning circle is now bisected by the dual carriageway/inner ring road at St Crispin’s Road (red lines). © 2011 Historic Towns Trust

A ghost of the turning circle remains in the form of the crescent-shaped wall adjoining the burial ground. This ‘second’ meeting house was bombed in WWII and the site is now occupied by a children’s centre.

A few yards west of Quakers Lane, in Gildencroft, between the inner ring road and Talbot Square, is the site of a small Jewish cemetery established in 1813; it closed when the corporation cemetery was opened at Earlham (1856). Before this, the county’s Hebrew Congregation used a larger C18 cemetery at the top of Horn’s Lane, off Ber Street [9], on the same side of the city as the synagogue on Synagogue Street (bombed in WWII).

George Plunkett recorded the Jewish Gildencroft cemetery in 1937, five years before the Luftwaffe bombed the Meeting House, which can be seen in the background.

Oak St Talbot Square Hebrew cemetery [1514] 1937-03-26.jpg

A small stone marking the cemetery is visible from St Crispin’s Road.

Side-stepping some of the difficulties surrounding dissenting burials the Unitarian minister, Thomas Drummond, established in 1819 The Rosary Cemetery in Thorpe [10]. He may have been motivated by his time in Ipswich when a curate refused a funeral service in the parish church for a young child who Drummond himself had baptised [11]. The Rosary was the first cemetery in the country where anyone could be buried irrespective of religion, without having to be supervised by an Anglican minister. The first occupant was Drummond’s wife, Ann, who was disinterred from the Octagon Chapel.

The Rosary became the resting place for some of the city’s prominent mercantile families, such as the Jarrolds and the Colmans [13].

The City Surveyor JS Benest designed the lodge (not shown) in 1860 but this was redesigned in 1879 by Edward Boardman. Boardman also designed the mortuary chapel (above) and its carriage porch [10] in the prevailing Victorian Gothic style.

Boardman (1834-1910), “who had more effect on the appearance of Norwich than perhaps any other architect” [14], was himself buried at The Rosary.

Boardman had married Florence, daughter of Jeremiah James Colman (1830-1898) who owned the family mustard business. In 1898, Jeremiah James’ funeral cortège included his firm’s horse-drawn wagons followed by 1200 workers from the Carrow Works [13]. Although Protestant he made point of holding services for his workers on non-denominational lines [15] and in the same spirit the family’s memorial stones are simply worded: factual and secular. Several members of the Colman family are buried in the family plot. Its Celtic Cross – and there are several at The Rosary – might imply a distancing from Anglican symbolism but inscriptions on the obelisk rectify any such impression with reminders of the Christian afterlife (e.g., ‘I know that my redeemer liveth’).

One of the memorial stones unites Jeremiah James and Caroline Colman with their son Alan Cozens-Hardy Colman. Alan died in Egypt and, in his memory, his sisters Ethel and Helen built the pleasure wherry Hathor – the name borrowed from the Nile boat on which he had been convalescing from tuberculosis. Hathor’s interior contains decoration in the Ancient Egyptian style, designed by Boardman.

When Hathor was launched on the Norfolk Broads (1905), Edward and Florence Boardman’s young daughter Joan (three and a half) released doves [16].

The many good works that the philanthropic Colmans performed go unsung at The Rosary: you would never guess from the simple inscriptions that in 1923 their daughter Ethel Mary (1863-1948), who campaigned for female suffrage, became the first woman Lord Mayor in Norwich and, indeed, in Great Britain.

As a memorial, Jeremiah Cozens (d. 1849), whose niece married JJ Colman, has the only cast-iron sarcophagus at The Rosary.

One of the first memorials you see when entering through the carriage porch is dedicated to the Jarrold family of Dutch or Huguenot origin [17]. John Jarrold II started out as a printer and bookseller in Woodbridge, Suffolk. At Wickham Market he was drawn into defending the right to public worship since Dissenters attending services could be stoned by unruly mobs. In 1823, he moved to Norwich where Jarrold & Son opened their new business in London Street where it remains – still selling books nearly 200 years later.

The only mausoleum at The Rosary belongs to Emanuel Cooper, an eminent eye-surgeon (d. 1878). Cooper’s mistress Anne Julia Pearson bore him a daughter – Ada Nemesis – who married John Galsworthy’s cousin Arthur. Ada was not happy in this marriage and entered into a long affair with John, whom she eventually married. Irene in The Forsyte Saga is said to have been modelled on Ada [18].

The angel gazing heavenwards epitomises Victorian sentimentality; it was carved (1898) by the Stanley family of stonemasons in St Stephens Street to commemorate a father and his two wives.

This cast-iron birdbath (below), with Moorish influences, commemorates the Hines family who ran a foundry (est. 1820) in St Margaret’s Street off St Benedict’s Street.

The collection of heads is said to represent family members [13].

The ornate memorial below tells the story of John Barker (1837-1897), a Steam Circus Proprietor who, when erecting a railway ride at the Cattlemarket (Plunkett says in Tombland), was fatally crushed between two wagons [13]. John Barker.jpg

The simple headstone to George Wilde (1825-1887) recalls a man injured in the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War [13].

The Rosary is a microcosm of Victorian Norwich in which you will encounter figures whose works can still be seen on walks around the city: Robert Tillyard, for instance, whose leather-currying business gave rise to Tillyard and Howlett, later Howlett and White [19]. Edward Boardman designed Howlett and White’s shoe factory in Colegate, which once employed around 2000 workers [14].

Robert Tillyard (1803-1879 ) and Sir George White (1840-1912)

I also came across an obelisk amongst the undergrowth, dedicated to William Stark. The lettering was indistinct but this was surely the master dyer who stained textiles Norwich Red and who – as mentioned in a recent post [20] – made the Wensum run scarlet when he emptied his vats.

In 1848-9 Norwich suffered a cholera epidemic and from 1855 the Home Secretary banned burial in the city’s overflowing churchyards [21]. But as far back as 1671 the diarist John Evelyn had written: I observed that most of [Norwich’s] church yards (though some of them large enough) were filled up with earth, or rather the congestion of dead bodies one upon another, for want of earth, even to the very top of the walls, and some above the walls, so as the churches seemed to be built in pits [12].

The raised churchyard of St John Maddermarket

In 1856 the City established a public cemetery at Earlham and from the beginning it had space for unconsecrated as well as consecrated burial. The original Gothic-styled twin chapels for Anglican and Nonconformist burials were lost when the crematorium was built but Roman Catholic and Jewish mortuary chapels remain.

Possibly the most striking monument in the older C19 section marks the grave of the horse dealer, John Abel (1800-1883).

In several posts I have mentioned the Bullard family of brewers [22]; their plot is outlined by cast-iron railings. Could these have been made by the Barnard Bishop and Barnard foundry just across the river from Bullards’ Anchor Quay Brewery?

While the versatile and prolific architect Edward Boardman is buried amongst his wealthy relatives in The Rosary his rival, George Skipper – who designed the city’s pops of Victorian genius, like the Royal Arcade, and the Marble Hall for Norwich Union [23] – is buried in far less prepossessing style at Earlham. Skipper’s (1856-1948) failed investments made for a poor retirement so at the age of 78 was still grinding out plans, like those for the roads and drains of the Christchurch Road extension [24]. A member of the Plymouth Brethren, Skipper married three times, lived to 93, and is buried with his first wife. It took some time for me to find George John Skipper’s grave for, in the five years since Françoise Donovan’s photograph, lead lettering had been lost from his name on the gravestone. “And there, sadly, lie the remains of this visionary architect who left us a unique legacy” [25].

Sources

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/43-44/41
Janet Lister (1993). Nine Nonconformists Burial Grounds 1750-1900. MA thesis UEA.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-20685778/census-2011-is-norwich-the-most-godless-city
Clyde Binfield (2004). Church and Chapel p412. In, ‘Norwich since 1550’, edited by Carole Rawcliffe. Pub: Hambledon and London.
Kathleen Wilson (1995). The sense of the people: politics, culture and imperialism in England, 17-15-1785. Pub: Cambridge University Press
http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/norwichoctagon/norwichoctagon.htm.
http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/88d35bcc-0261-4bba-95d7-70d628044a78
http://www.staugustinesnorwich.org.uk/History_-_The_Quakers.html and http://www.staugustinesnorwich.org.uk/History_-_Placenames.html
http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/monumentsandmemorials.htm See also: http://www.staugustinesnorwich.org.uk/History_-_The_Jewish_Cemetery.html
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1001568
Nick Williams (2012). Buried at the Rosary. Pub: Nick Williams.
John Evelyn. (1818) The Diary of John Evelyn vol 2 (1665-1702). Ed Wm Bray. Online: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42081/42081-h/42081-h.htm
Nick Williams, Jim Marriage and June Marriage (2005). The Rosary Cemetery, Norwich: A Place of Decent Interment. Pub: Friends of the Rosary.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/07/28/norwichs-pre-loved-buildings/
Jeremiah James Colman, a Memoir by One of his Daughters (1905). Available online as: https://archive.org/stream/jeremiahjamesco01colmgoog/jeremiahjamesco01colmgoog_djvu.txt
http://www.ludhamarchive.org.uk/bdmstori.htm
The House of Jarrolds, 1823-1923 (established 1770). Pub 1924 by The Empire Press, Norwich. Online: https://archive.org/stream/houseofjarrolds100jarr/houseofjarrolds100jarr_djvu.txt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Galsworthy
https://norfolkrecordofficeblog.org/2016/11/10/norwich-shoemaking-from-howlett-and-white-to-norvic/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2018/07/15/the-bridges-of-norwich-1-the-blood-red-river/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earlham_Road_Cemetery,_Norwich
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/09/15/bullards-brewery/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/02/15/the-flamboyant-mr-skipper/
Clive Lloyd (2017). Colonel Unthank and the Golden Triangle. See: https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/unthank-book/
Françoise Donovan (2013). Norwich Lives: Selected Graves from Earlham Cemetery. Pub: Elysé Publications.

Thanks to: Alan Theobald, my guide around The Rosary and Earlham cemeteries; Stuart McClaren local historian in the St Augustine’s/Gildencroft area http://www.staugustinesnorwich.org.uk/index.html; Peter Cox of Broadsnet http://www.broadsnet.co.uk/waterways/; Nigel Pope of the Ludham Community Archive http://www.ludhamarchive.org.uk/ ; Jonathan Plunkett of www.georgeplunkett.co.uk; and the staff of the Norfolk Heritage Centre at the Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library.

Norwich: City of Trees

15 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Heavenly Gardens, Norwich churches, Norwich silk, Norwich trees, trees

On his ‘tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain’, 1724-6 Daniel Defoe came to Norwich and wrote: “The walls of this city are reckoned three miles in circumference, taking in more ground than the city of London; but much of that ground lying open in pasture-fields and gardens [1].”

Daniel Defoe, novelist and journalist, on Norfolk Daily Standard Offices (now ‘Fired Earth’) by George Skipper

As well as open spaces the walled city was characterised by its trees for in 1662 the historian Thomas Fuller described Norwich as, “either a city in an orchard, or an orchard in a city, so equal are houses and trees blended in it”. The city was still jam-packed with trees nearly a century later …

From, South-East Prospect of the City of Norwich. Samuel and Nathaniel Buck 1741. NWHCM: 1922.135.4:M

Identifying trees from such illustrations is, however, not easy for they are often drawn in artistic shorthand. Even John Sell Cotman – who produced countless studies of trees – was criticised for making them, “as unintelligible to the virtuosi as to the public.” [2]

We can only guess what trees Defoe saw but he is likely to have seen the eponymous tree in Elm Hill.

Elm Hill elm tree prior to felling [5925] 1978-07-25.jpg

An elm in Elm Hill photographed in 1978, six months before it was felled due to Dutch Elm Disease. Courtesy of http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk.

The diseased elm cut down in the 1970s is unlikely to have been alive during Defoe’s visit. What we now see is a London Plane – a species that features prominently in the city’s urban landscape.

The London Plane planted in Elm Hill 1978

We know from a map of 1559 that Chapelfield Gardens was at one time an archery ground.

Chapel Field, used for archery practice. From Cuningham’s perspectival map of Norwich 1559.

In 1746, the gardens were leased by one-time mayor Thomas Churchman [3] whose mansion was to become the C20 Register Office in nearby Bethel Street.

He enclosed the gardens and planted three avenues of elms that would eventually be replaced with native limes and plane trees [4,5].

Three avenues of elm planted as a triangular walk in Chapel Field by Thomas Churchman. From Samuel King’s 1766 map NWHCM:1997.550.81:M

A century later, the waterworks company had a reservoir in the garden but after an outbreak of cholera they surrendered their interest to the Corporation on the condition that the gardens were to be, “Laid out in the style of London parks”. This was funded by public subscription and in 1880 Mayor Harry Bullard of the city’s brewing family formally opened Chapelfield as a public park [4,5].

By the early C20 there were few other public parks in Norwich but this was to change under the guidance of Parks Superintendent Captain Arnold Sandys-Winsch who, between 1919 and 1956, oversaw the creation of 600 acres of parks and open spaces [6].

Sandys-Winsch (second left) in lock-step with future abdicant Edward VIII at the opening of Eaton Park 1928.

‘The Captain’ planted 20,000 trees and is perhaps best known for the goblet-pruned London Plane trees that line some of the city’s major avenues.

Goblet-pruned London Plane trees along Earlham Road, planted by Sandys-Winsch

The London Plane – the most common tree in London – became an even more common sight in Paris [7,8]. The secret of its success in an urban environment seems to be its habit of discarding pollutants as it sheds large flakes of bark. P orientalis.jpg

One idea is that the London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) originated around 1650 as a cross between the Oriental Plane (P. orientalis) and the American Sycamore (P. occidentalis) in Southern France or Spain [8]. A more romantic suggestion is that the famous botanist and gardener John Tradescant the Younger (1608-1662) – who took three voyages to Virginia in 1637 – found it as an accidental hybrid in his nursery garden at Vauxhall, London [9]. Tradescant, like his father John Tradescant the Elder, was Keeper of Silkworms for Charles I – the importance of silkworms to the Norwich economy comes later.

Two examples of the parent species, the Oriental Plane, can be seen on Guildhall Hill [8].

According to the historian Herodotus, the Persian king Xerxes came upon an Oriental Plane that he admired so much he adorned it with chains of gold and set someone to guard the tree. In Handel’s opera Xerxes the king stands in the shade of the plane and sings to it the aria Ombra mai fu (Never was a shade) [10]. [Click link to hear Beniamino Gigli sing this courtesy of YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk_1R9UdIuY]

I remember the devastation caused by The Great Storm of 1987 to the city in general and Chapelfield Gardens in particular.

Balcony in Chapelfield Road damaged by a falling tree in the Great Storm of 1987

With 190 trees Chapelfield Gardens is a significant arboretum, comprised of 45 native and foreign species [5]. Below, the trunk of this London Plane, which occupies a prominent site in the centre of the Gardens, was split down the middle by the Great Storm …

… it was rescued by binding the trunk with metal bands (now removed) and bolting hawsers (still there) through the upper branches to draw them together.

Chestnut trees also provide avenues, as here on Newmarket Road.

But since the beginning of the millennium, browning foliage in the second part of summer shows the damage caused by a leaf-mining moth.

The effects of the horse-chestnut leaf miner, Cameraria ohridella

The oak (Quercus robur), which assumes the status of a national emblem, is said to spend ‘300 years growing, 300 resting and 300 declining’. It can achieve prodigious size: the ancient oak in Earlham Park, just behind UEA Porters’ Lodge, is about 22 feet in circumference [8]. According to The Woodland Trust’s ready-reckoner [11] it might have been an acorn when Henry VII was born (1491), 200 years before Charles I had need of a royal oak in which to hide.

The oldest living thing in Norwich, probably

In 1549, in order to meet the demands for wool for Norwich’s thriving weaving industry, some wealthy landowners from Wymondham – ten miles south-west of Norwich – began to enclose common land on which to graze their sheep. Rebels tore down the fences and so began the uprising led by Robert Kett – a ‘tanner of Windham’ [12]. The rebel army is said to have assembled at Kett’s Oak between Wymondham and Norwich [13].

Kett’s Oak, near Hethersett

But Gerry Barnes and Tom Williamson [14] noted that when measured in 1829 the oak’s girth was only seven feet seven inches. That is, just a third of the circumference of the ancient oak in Earlham Park. According to The Woodland Trust’s ready reckoner [11] it was only about 100 years old at that time, still in its growth phase. In 1933 the hollow tree was painted with bitumen, filled with concrete and corseted with iron bands [14]. Although this survivor commemorates Kett and his followers it seems unlikely to be the original Kett’s Oak.

Kett is also associated with another oak. By the time his army encamped on Mousehold Heath overlooking Norwich, their numbers had swelled to about 16,000. According to C18 historian Francis Blomefield [12] this is where Kett set up court, dispensing the king’s justice beneath the Oak of Reformation.

‘Robert Kett sitting under the Oak of Reformation assuming Regal Authority’ by Wale 1778. Courtesy of Norfolk Museums Service NWHCM: 1954.138.Todd5.Norwich.193

After skirmishes in and around the city the rebel army was drawn eastward into the Battle of Dussindale (near Boundary Lane, Thorpe St Andrews) where they were defeated by a superior army of 14,000 reinforced by German mercenaries [13]. Nine of Kett’s men were hanged from the Oak of Reformation [12]; Kett himself was hanged in chains from the walls of Norwich Castle but the same walls now bear a plaque declaring him a local hero.

In 1549 AD Robert Kett yeoman farmer of Wymondham was executed by hanging in this castle after the defeat of the Norfolk Rebellion of which he was the leader
In 1949 AD – four hundred years later – this memorial was placed here by the citizens of Norwich in reparation and honour to a notable and courageous leader in the long struggle of the common people of England to escape from a servile life into the freedom of just conditions.

Oak Street in Norwich seems to have derived its name from the C15 church, St Martin at Oak. According to Blomefield [12] the church was named after, ” a famous image of the Virgin Mary, placed in the oak, which grew in the churchyard…” , making it a site of pilgrimage. The church was badly damaged in the Blitz and from 1976-2002 was in the care of St Martins Housing Trust – a charity for the homeless.

Norwich takes pride in having the greatest density of medieval churches “north of the Alps” (for those who might confuse us with Rome). Of the 58 pre-Reformation churches built within its city walls, more than 30 still stand [15]. In the Heavenly Gardens project, George Ishmael and colleagues plan to interconnect the often underused churchyards into a publicly accessible botanical garden[16]. Trails involving 28 medieval churchyards are covered in the first five (of six) downloadable PDFs (http://www.heavenlygardens.org.uk/churchyard-trails/).

Screen Shot 2018-08-29 at 12.jpg

On my visit to one of George’s churchyards, St Stephens, this rare Himalayan Euodia fraxinifolia was in flower.

Chiming with the Heavenly Gardens project, a Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) grows outside St Peter Hungate at the top of Elm Hill. This is the church where, in 1466, John Paston’s body rested for one night before his grandiose funeral in Bromholm Priory [17]. The Tree of Heaven was introduced into Britain from Western China in 1751. Its leaves are used in silkworm culture although I can find no record of it being used for that purpose in Norwich.

The Stuarts, like the Elizabethans before them, were often portrayed in fine silk clothing. Not long after coming to the English throne (1609) King James I tried to invigorate the domestic silk trade, and to compete with the French, by offering mulberry saplings to his Lord Lieutenants at ‘six shillings the hundred‘. These were not, however, the preferred White Mulberry (Morus alba) grown in China but the Persian Black Mulberry (Morus nigra). Silkworms can feed on the Black Mulberry but – in a surprising example of ‘you are what you eat’ – the larvae then produce coarser silk and less of it, causing King James’ experiment to fail [18]. Over two centuries later, Norwich silk mills (e.g., St Mary’s Silk Mills in Oak Street and the Albion Yarn Mills in King Street) were using raw silk imported from China. Once more, there was an attempt to produce English silk: a “silk company established in 1835 planted upwards of 1500 mulberry trees on two acres of land in Thorpe Hamlet, stocked with 40,000 silkworms” [19] but this, too, failed.

The mulberry tree growing in St Augustine’s churchyard has a particular relevance since it celebrates the life and work of silk weaver Thomas Clabburn, buried in its shadow.

Mulberry in St Augustine’s churchyard; left, the Clabburn family burial plot

Norwich shawls were hugely popular in the mid-C19, due largely to Queen Victoria’s patronage [20]. The firm of Clabburn, Sons and Crisp were prominent members of this industry; they patented a method for producing the same pattern on both sides and sent examples to the royal family. Thomas was evidently a benevolent employer: upwards of 600 Norwich weavers and assistants subscribed to a memorial plaque inside the church extolling him as, “a kind good man.”

Jacquard silk shawl c1850 woven by Clabburn, Sons and Crisp

Norwich and the Tree of Life. Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is famed for his method of classifying plants and animals in hierarchical groups according to shared family characteristics. This paved the way for Darwin’s Tree of Life in which such groupings are not seen as fixed but related through time by evolution. When Linnaeus died, James Edward Smith (1759-1828), the son of a wool merchant and Norwich mayor, used his father’s wealth to buy the Linnean collection of books and – more importantly – his herbarium of dried plants containing examples of ‘standard types’ (see a previous post [21]). When this collection came to Norwich it was visited by naturalists from around the scientific world. Smith’s wonderful garden once contained many rare species but now lies beneath the Surrey Street bus station. He is commemorated by the West Himalayan Spruce, Picea smithiana, named after “the late immortal President of the Linnean Society.”

Sources

Daniel Defoe (1722). A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722, available as an e-book: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/983/983-h/983-h.htm
From, The Norwich Mercury. Quoted by Josephine Walpole (1993) in ‘Leonard Squirrell: The Last of the Norwich School?’ Pub. Antique Collectors’ Club, Woodbridge, Suffolk.
http://www.norwich-heritage.co.uk/monuments/Thomas%20Churchman/Thomas_Churchman.shtmhttp:/
/www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/parksandgardens.htm
http://www.chapelfieldsociety.org.uk/arboretum/
http://friendsofeatonpark.co.uk/captain-sandys-winsch/
https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/environment/parks-green-spaces-and-biodiversity/trees-and-woodlands/london-tree-map#acc-i-44112
Rex Hancey (2005). Notable Trees of Norwich. Pub: Norfolk & Norwich Naturalists’ Society.
https://londonist.com/2015/03/the-secret-history-of-the-london-plane-tree
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platanus_orientalis
http://www.wbrc.org.uk/atp/Estimating%20Age%20of%20Oaks%20-%20Woodland%20Trust.pdf
Francis Blomefield (1806). https://www.british-history.ac.uk/topographical-hist-norfolk/vol3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kett%27s_Rebellion
Gerry Barnes and Tom Williamson (2011). Ancient Trees in the Landscape: Norfolk’s Arboreal Heritage. Pub: Windgather Press.
https://norwichmedievalchurches.org/
http://www.heavenlygardens.org.uk/
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/12/15/the-pastons-in-norwich/
https://www.moruslondinium.org/research/faq
William White (1836). History, Gazetteer, and Directory of Norfolk, and the City and County of Norwich. Pub: William White, Sheffield.
Caroline Goldthorpe (1989). From Queen to Empress: Victorian Dress 1837-1877. Pub: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/01/15/when-norwich-was-the-centre-of-the-world/

Thank you: George Ishmael of Heavenly Gardens (and Olly Ishmael); James Emerson, Secretary, Norfolk & Norwich Naturalists Society; Clare Haynes of UEA History; Hazel Harrison of the Chapel Field Society; Kerrie Jenkins of The Woodland Trust; Paris Agar, Norfolk Museums Service; Lesley Cunneen, garden historian; Joy Evitt, Norwich silk historian.

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Norwich: City of Trees

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