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COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH

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COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH

Tag Archives: Colonel Unthank

New book: Colonel Unthank and the Golden Triangle

15 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich history

≈ 8 Comments

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Colonel Unthank, Colonel Unthank and the Golden Triangle, Unthank book, Unthank Road

Cover Ping.png

Running through  a triangular district of Norwich’s Victorian terraced housing is Unthank Road; it took its name from the family who owned a large estate there in the nineteenth century. When I moved to the road I was intrigued by the urban myth that a nearby stretch of very tall wall was the last remnant of the Unthank estate. In researching this story (and finding an unexpected answer) I uncovered more about the history of the Golden Triangle. This book describes how the Triangle developed and how many of the street names originated. Newly discovered photographs of the Unthanks bring to life the founding fathers of this neighbourhood. Published December 15th 2017. 56 pages £10.

Stockists

City Books, Davey Place Norwich.  PRESS HERE to Order online

Jarrold’s book department, Exchange Street, Norwich  https://www.jarrold.co.uk/departments/books

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Colonel Unthank rides again

15 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Colonel Unthank, the golden triangle, Unthank Road Norwich

One man’s tireless search for his namesake.unthank2.jpg

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

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

Wiggett2.jpg

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

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

William Unthank Fosters Solicitors1.jpg

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

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

unthank letter.jpg

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

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

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

The Wall.JPG

The Wall, reputedly opposite Wm Unthank’s Heigham House

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

HH Duo2.jpg

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

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

Steward map+sig2.jpg

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

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

The Unthanks 7.jpg

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

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

MAPs overlay.jpg

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

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

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

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

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

Marrowbone + line.jpg

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

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

St Bartholomews.JPG

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

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

Heigham Hall.JPG

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

Screen Shot 2017-03-28 at 13.16.43.png

©jnnp.bmj.com

In 1852, Heigham Hall was involved in a notorious scandal. To avoid being charged with the attempted rape of a minor a magistrate declared Reverend Edmund Holmes insane. Holmes was admitted to asylum but promptly regained his sanity and remained as the hospital’s chaplain. Local outrage led to a change in the law but the incident speaks of a time when being of ‘a good county family’ was sufficient qualification for the avoidance of justice [15].

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

The Retreat.jpg

Etching of Heigham Retreat by Henry Ninham ©Norfolk Record Office MC279/6

In 1859 The Retreat was bought out by Heigham Hall who closed it down. Heigham Hall itself was demolished to make way for the corporations social housing estate, Dolphin Grove, in the early 1960s.

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

Two maps final.jpg

Left, map of the parish of Heigham 1842 © Norfolk County Council. Right, overlaid with 2011 Ordnance Survey map using Norfolk Map Explorer [9] © Crown copyright and database rights Ordnance Survey 

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

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

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

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

This favours the ‘city end’ location of the wall but the second letter, dated 1934, from William Unthank’s grandson (Clement William Joseph, 1847 – 1936) contradicts that.

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

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

Unthank plus sig.jpg

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

We still don’t have smoking-gun evidence that William Unthank lived on the estate near present day Onley Street but it is the explanation I currently favour, even if it does orphan the wall at the other end of the road. But read the next post in this Unthank series ‘The End of the Unthank Mystery’.

Postscript added 14th August 2019: I have just come across Joseph Manning’s Plan of Norwich; it clearly shows that William Unthank owned the ‘Onley Street site’ (as it became) in 1834. Below, the name ‘Wm Unthank Esqr’ is underlined in red, Timothy Steward’s house is starred and ‘the wall’ opposite is lined in pale blue.

Plan of the City and County of Norwich 1834 by Joseph Manning. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council, Heritage Centre, Norwich Millennium Library

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

Thanks: We are fortunate in Norfolk to have the Norfolk Record Office and The Heritage Centre in Norwich Millennium Library – tremendous resources for historical research. The staff are unfailingly helpful and I couldn’t have written this article without them. I thank Eunice and Ron Shanahan for access to the CW Unthank letter and Fosters Solicitors for the portrait of William Unthank. I am indebted to Pamela Summers – a great great great great granddaughter of William Unthank – for alerting me to Manning’s 1834 map.

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

NorwichSocLogo.jpg

Sources

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

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Colonel Unthank and the Golden Triangle

30 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by reggie unthank in Decorative Arts

≈ 29 Comments

Tags

Colonel Unthank, Norwich buildings, Unthank Road

I have lived in Norwich for ages, mostly on or around the Unthank Road, and became fascinated by the name and the distinctive style of housing found in this area.

Unthank Road Norwich.jpg

“What’s in a name?” The name first occurs as William de Unthank (or Onthank) of Unthank Hall, Northumberland (ca 1231). Several explanations have been offered for the name [1]. 

  • Unthank = thankless or unthankfulness
  • the amount of land granted to a Saxon thane, or to a Scottish chieftain, each recipient holding “a thank” or one thane’s holding – about the size of a village or hamlet. A thane would be known as a “one thank man”  and un/on thank was originally confined to the borderland between England and Scotland [2].
  • Old English for land held without leave by squatters. Or common land annexed by outlaws, e.g., the border reivers.

Unthanks came down from the north to Norwich in the 17th century; others came in the 18th century [1] and became prosperous businessmen. In 1793 William Unthank moved outside the walls of the congested medieval city. He bought land in rural Heigham, just outside St Giles’ Gate, over a century before St John’s Catholic Cathedral was built (ca 1910).

Upper St Giles Norwich old_newPixlr.jpg

The houses at the end of Upper St Giles Street today (left) can be identified in  John Ninham’s engraving of 1792 (right). The catholic cathedral (left) now stands where open fields could once be glimpsed through St Giles’ Gate [2].

St Giles Gate.jpg

Open countryside could be seen through St Giles’ Gate in 1792

The family amassed about 2500 acres of land, including farmland to the south and west of Norwich as well as their Heigham Estate that stretched from St Giles’ Gate southwards to Eaton (aka Waitrose). This meant that when William’s son and heir, Clement William Unthank, went courting the heiress of the Intwood Estate, Mary Anne Muskett, he could ride for most of the journey without leaving family land [1,3, 4].

At first, Clement William and Mary Anne lived in Norwich at ‘Unthanks House’ near modern-day Bury and Onley Streets but in 1855 they moved to her childhood home, on the Intwood estate, at the outskirts of the city [3, 4]. (‘Onley’ was a family name of the Musketts).

Intwood Hall.jpg

Intwood Hall

Unthank Road and the New City   The Unthanks had already begun to sell off parcels of their Heigham Estate for housing but this was accelerated when Clement William moved out to Intwood in 1855. This helped the spread of the New City. The old city itself contained unsanitary medieval courts  or yards [5] that had to wait until the C20th for demolition or improvement but Clement William’s buildings were of a higher standard. As the New City continued to be developed it became subject to the more enlightened bye-laws and acts that arrived in the latter half of the C19th [6,7].

Originally, ‘Unthanks Road’ had been known as Back Road – a private sandy lane on the Unthank estate [1]. But between 1849-1870, when some of the early ‘Unthank’ streets (such as Essex, Cambridge and Trinity Streets) were built, Unthank Road became the main axis to which they were attached.

unthank road.jpg

Unthank Road when it was still little more than a lane. Looking up towards the city with the junction to Park Lane to the left, just beyond the pub sign. www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk

Norwich: “No place in England was further away from good building stone” Stefan Muthesius [8]

The Normans had to ferry stone for their cathedral from Caen in Normandy, much of the medieval city was built of flint, but the new city was to be built of brick and slate. This was helped by the arrival of the railways, which also allowed easier access to slate from North Wales. Clement William Unthank closely regulated the appearance of the estate and builders had to sign restrictive covenants stating how brick and other building materials were to be used [5, 6].

  • the building to be faced in good white brick and roofed in good slate or tiles
  • that doors should be arched in gauged brick
  • that no building be placed beyond the building line
  • that no gable peak be allowed to the front of the house
  • that no porch or projection should extend more than 18 inches from the building line unless agreed by Clement William Unthank

Uniform, flat-fronted terraces of a high standard were therefore assured across Unthank’s Heigham estate, as seen in Trinity Street below. Suffolk White bricks were known to have been used as were ‘Cossey Whites’ from the nearby village of Costessey.  I lived for some years in Cambridge with  its plain-fronted terraces of white brick and it was this that had drawn me to the Unthank estate.

Trinity St Norwich.jpg

Evidently, workers leaving the land for the city could be more economically housed in uniform terraces compared to the individuality of rural cottages. These modest houses may well have been a much diluted version of the Palladian houses and terraces seen by the upper classes on their Grand Tour. In Norwich, the use of white brick and arched doorways  are likely to have been influenced by the expensive white bricks used for country houses like William Kent’s Holkham Hall in north Norfolk and John Soane’s Shottesham Park, which was only five miles south of Norwich – a short horse ride from CW Unthank’s new home at Intwood [7,8].

The widespread use of arches made of ‘gauged’ bricks fired in specially-shaped concentric templates, and the fineness of their pointing, is thought to be characteristic of Norwich [8, 9]. Nowadays, generations of owners have personalised the houses by painting over the gauged brick and adding porches that would have been frowned on by Clement William Unthank. This British reaction against uniformity was celebrated in the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s ‘My pink half of the drainpipe’.

Newmarket St norwich.jpg

Newmarket Street where some degree of variation was allowed, with white gauged bricks alternating with red brick rarely seen on front elevations

Kimberley Arms gauged brick.jpg

The recessed inner arch gives variation without breaking the building line; seen here in the former Kimberley Arms being refurbished in 2016. Compare the fine pointing between the arched gauged bricks with the thicker mortar in the horizontal courses.

However, compared to the gentility of the front elevations the backs of buildings were generally constructed of cheaper materials.

earlham Rd.jpg

Earlham Road front: Recreation Road behind. The frontage is built from Suffolk White bricks and slate: the rear from Norfolk Red bricks and pantiles (based on 6).

The use of cruder materials to the back has been referred to as a Queen Anne front and a Mary Anne behind – as in the popular song: (6)

Queen Anne Front (lyric Robert Schmaltz)
When Great Grandfather was a gay young man
And Great Grandmother was his bride
They found a lot, a jolly little spot
Over on the old North Side
It sloped down toward the river, from River Avenue
Great Grandma said that it would give her
Such a lovely view
So they took a look in Godey's Ladies Book
To see what they could find
And they found a house, a jolly little house,
With a Queen Anne front
And a Mary Anne behind.

Larger houses for the middle classes were built along Unthank Road itself whereas the smaller houses for artisans were situated in the streets behind. As part of the Unthanks’ urban planning, trade was prohibited from the terraced houses so purpose-made public houses were confined to corner locations on back streets (e.g., York Tavern, Rose Tavern, Kimberley Arms and Unthank Arms).

Unthank Arms Norwich.jpg

The Unthank, formerly The Unthank Arms

So who was Colonel Unthank? Clement William Unthank sold much of the land his father had amassed on the Heigham Estate. His son, Clement William Joseph, continued to sell parts of the state for building but the effect is said to be less good [7]. CWJ is the first of two Colonel Unthanks in this article.  He was a captain in the 17th Lancers and Lieutenant Colonel of the 4th Volunteer Battalion of the Norfolk regiment [1, 4].

Cavalryman.jpg

CWJ Unthank hunting.jpg

Clement Wm Joseph Unthank with his hounds Ringwood, Domino and Fencer [from 1]

CWJ Unthank’s son was John Salusbury Unthank (below) who continued to develop the Heigham Estate into the C20th.  He served in The Boer War and World War I, where he fought at The Somme and Ypres. So John Salusbury Unthank is the second Colonel of this article. Anecdotal evidence of him survives into the C20th and there may be some who still remember him [1,3,4].

Col Unthank II.jpg

A hunting man [1]

Colonel Unthank would stride into Intwood church where the service would not start until he’d taken his place. Once, when he stood up in church to take off his mackintosh the congregation behind him also stood up, telling us something of his position in the community [3]. Imagine.

In addition to the Unthank family the area was also developed by others, notably the Eaton Glebe estate [7]. Their restrictive covenants also ensured quality and some uniformity e.g., all parts of buildings exposed to view to be faced in good red brick [7]. But in detail the different use of materials – not just red instead of white brick but different treatments of bays and porches – gave this area a different texture as can be seen along College Road.

The entire area to the south-west of the medieval city is now known as The Golden Triangle, beloved of estate agents. The borders of this vibrant area can be drawn in various ways but the Triangle’s online organ, The Lentil (“Our finger on your pulse”), [10] gives this authoritative version:

Golden Triangle.jpg

The Golden Triangle (http://the-lentil.com).

The Wall

I can’t remember who told me that this piece of tall wall was the last remnant of the Unthank Estate, but it has adopted the status of urban myth. The wall shelters No 38 Unthank Road from traffic and is at the junction with Clarendon Road.

the wall.jpg

‘The Wall’, at the junction of Clarendon and Unthank Roads

In the early C19th, according to Reverend Nixseaman [1], William Unthank lived in Heigham House and he places this directly opposite the stable wall above. However, it is claimed elsewhere [11] that the family estate was further down Unthank Road, too far away for ‘the wall’ to be part of their stables.

unthank road tithe map 1842.png

Tithe Map of Heigham 1842 (Norfolk Records Office). Red star = Heigham House/Lodge; blue star = ‘Unthanks House’; arrow = ‘the wall’ on Unthanks Road.

So who did live opposite the wall? Consulting the tithe records for 1842 reveals that the brewer Timothy Steward lived here; he is shown as the owner of Heigham House (sometimes called Lodge) while William’s heir, Clement William Unthank, is recorded as living with family and servants further down the road near modern-day Bury Street (blue star).

But back to Reverend Nixseaman, he wrote his book about the Unthanks [1] in 1972 with the assistance of William Unthank’s descendants and was familiar with minutiae such as the names of CWJ Unthank’s three dogs. In his authorised version he asserted that in 1792 Clement William’s father, William, moved into a newly-built and spacious home named Heigham House, set in its own parklands.

Heigham House 2.jpg

Heigham House (red) is bookended by today’s Clarendon and Grosvenor Roads with ‘the wall’ opposite (yellow). [6″ OS map 1887]

The OS map confirms that in 1887 there was indeed a Heigham House opposite the wall although by then the encroaching terraces left little room for the ‘parkland’ illustrated in Nixseaman’s book (below). So which version is correct?

Heigham House(1).jpg

Heigham House ca 1800 [1]

The search for the location of the Unthanks’ house continues with two further posts and a book that contains much material – and Unthank photos – not included in the blog posts. See:

https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/04/15/colonel-unthank-rides-again/

https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/07/15/the-end-of-the-unthank-mystery/

Cover Ping.png

Book available from Jarrolds book department and City Bookshop, Norwich. Price £10

©2017 Reggie Unthank

Sources

  1. Nixseaman, A.J. (1972). The Intwood Story.ISBN 0950274208, Norwich. (Available from the Heritage Centre, Norwich Library)
  2. Read the excellent article by Norwich City Council on St Giles Gate http://www.norwich.gov.uk/apps/citywalls/20/report.asp
  3. A History of Intwood and Keswick (1998), by Cringleford Historical Society. ISBN 0953011623. Held at The Heritage Centre, Norwich Library.
  4. Memories of Intwood and Keswick (2001) by Cringleford Historical Society. ISBN 0953011631.
  5. Holmes, Frances and Michael (2015). The Old Courts and Yards of Norwich. norwich-yards.co.uk
  6. Muthesius, Stefan. (1982). The English Terraced House. Yale University Press.
  7. O’Donoghue, Rosemary. (2014). Norwich, an Expanding City 1801-1900. Pub, Larks Press ISBN 9781904006718.
  8. Muthesius, Stefan. (1984). Norwich in the Nineteenth Century. Ed, C. Berringer. Chapter 4, pp94-117.
  9. www.norwich.gov.uk/Planning/documents/Heighamgrove.pdf – an excellent discussion of the Unthank/Heigham Estate.
  10. The Lentil. The Golden Triangle’s wittiest online magazine http://the-lentil.com
  11. heritage.norfolk.gov.uk

Thanks to: the staff of The Heritage Centre in Norwich Library and of the Norfolk Records Office for their cheerful help; Tom Tucker of The Lentil for drawing the Golden Triangle map; and Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk www.picture.norfolk.gov.uk for permissions.

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