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COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH

Tag Archives: Norwich history

Norwich Guides: Ancient and Modern

15 Tuesday Feb 2022

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

Norwich buildings, Norwich history

When browsing in the City Bookshop in Davey Place I came across Official Guides to Norwich for 1929 and 1935, in the reign of King George V. The contrast between ancient and modern was striking for while Ralph Hale Mottram was taking a backward look at the city’s rich history in the introductory section to the 1935 guide, businesses in the advertising section were gamely boosting their progressive credentials.

Cover of The Official Guide to the City of Norwich 1935 by John H Archer of Norwich. Published by the Norwich Publicity Association, with offices in the Bridewell

The rolling boundary between old and new is relentless and any marker of modernity quickly gets left behind as we see, not in an advert for Norwich, but in a puff for its distinguished neighbour, King’s Lynn. In the ‘Port for 1000 years‘ a passenger biplane is set against Henry Bell’s seventeenth century Customs House and the mid-twelfth century church of St Margaret.

Ancient and modern. Credit: The Official Guide to the City of Norwich 1935

Norwich had several firms making planes, such as Boulton and Paul at their Rose Lane Works where they manufactured more Sopwith Camels during World War I than any other company. B&P’s best known plane of World War II was the Defiant, with a rotating gun turret operated by the gunner seated behind the pilot. But in 1935, unconscious of the imminent descent into further conflict that would cause their factory to be bombed, they were advertising health-giving rotating ‘Sunshine Rooms’.

Credit: The Official Guide to the City of Norwich 1935

Mottram’s perspective on events from living memory is fascinating. About St Peter Mancroft, Norwich, he wrote: ‘The massive tower can be seen in any old picture of the marketplace to have had a much more homely appearance before the addition of the ornaments which … have been the object of some controversy.’ Controversy?

View of St Peter Mancroft, unknown artist. The hot air balloon suggests the work was made in the age of ‘balloon mania ‘ – late C18 to early C19. Norfolk Museums Collections NWHCM: 1894.76.1087

The sturdy tower overlooking the marketplace seems to have been designed to support a far more significant lantern stage for which the small spike was evidently judged to be a poor substitute. In the 1880s the Streets (father and son) were engaged to add a parapet with a stone pepperpot in each corner and in 1895 the son, AE Street, replaced the old spike with a lead-covered structure supported by crocketed flying buttresses. Not everyone liked it. Mortlock & Roberts [1] thought the old plain top and spike ‘infinitely preferable’, taking objection to the new model’s ‘cake icing effect’, while Pevsner & Wilson judged it ‘too playful to make a stand on this tower‘ [2].

The spirelet erected on St Peter Mancroft by the Streets in 1895 (left), thought to have been modelled on the fifteenth century structure topping SS Peter and Paul, East Harling, S Norfolk (right).

Born in the 1880s, Ralph Hale Mottram was a small boy when the Streets were at work so his opinions about the Mancroft controversy are likely to have been borrowed from the ‘members of the last generation‘ – the witnesses who could ‘remember desperate faction fights here at election times, with a great chain drawn across the centre (of the marketplace) to separate the combatants, who used to kick up the old kidney-shaped cobbles for missiles, and frequently had to be driven from the field by force.’ Violence had long been a feature of Norwich political life [3]; at election time the marketplace was set out like a tournament field with the Blue and White (Whig) tent occupying one side and the Orange and Purple (Tory) tent the other.

The Political Drama c1830. ‘The freedom of an English election or the drunken dragoons shooting old women and children at Wolverhampton by way of keeping their hand in.’ Norfolk Museums Collections THEHM: DS.384.91

As we saw in the post on Revolutionary Norwich [4], political meetings in eighteenth century Norwich were corrupt, drunken and highly adversarial. This continued well into the late nineteenth century. When Mottram was three, a 500-strong meeting attended by the unemployed turned violent. After shops were sacked and a ham stolen the rampage was remembered as the Battle of Ham Run [3].

Mottram said of the marketplace that ‘the roadway is pure twentieth century, public service and private vehicles driven by the internal combustion engine pass in a continuous stream.’ The air quotes shimmering around ‘internal combustion engine‘ betray someone born in the age of the horse-drawn carriage.

Credit: The Official Norwich Guide 1935

This photograph might be older than 1935 since the buildings at the back of the market were described as being ‘in course of demolition to make way for the New Town Hall’. The red arrow points to the tin hut that doubled as police offices and drill hall. Both the hut and the municipal offices on St Peter Street (top right) would be pulled down as part of the new City Hall project. In turn, these had replaced the old ‘butchery, spicery, Soper Lane, Worstead Row, herb market and Pudding Lane’ by which the medieval authorities had segregated the various trades. By May 1938 the old municipal buildings had been demolished to make way for the area to the back of the market containing the Garden of Remembrance, with the newly completed City Hall behind.

The Market 1938. Construction of the terrace at rear of Market Place on site of old Fish Market ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

Mottram also wrote about another landmark that is no longer with us. In a brief section on Mousehold Heath (‘”Mussel” in local dialect’) he mentions George Borrow’s poem The Wind on the Heath – the high ground above the city where local hero Robert Kett was defeated and where John Crome painted his windmill (‘and only recently burned down’). At one time the painting was titled ‘A Windmill on Mousehold Heath, near Norwich No. 926′ although, as we will see, the location was brought into question.

A Windmill near Norwich c.1816 John Crome 1768-1821 N00926 ©tate.org.uk (The vertical line is a gap between the boards)

Could ‘Old’ Crome’s windmill be one of the two depicted in Braun and Hogenberg’s (1581) prospect of Norwich?

Braun and Hogenberg’s prospect. Two windmills arrowed top left

The excellent Norfolk Mills website lists two mills for Mousehold Heath, one of which is the Sprowston postmill, sometimes thought to have been Crome’s windmill [5]. In 1933, two days before the mill was due to be handed over to the Norfolk Archaeological Society for preservation, sparks from a gorse fire set the sails alight and the windmill burned down.

Except, a paper in Norfolk Archaeology 1966 [6] turned this idea – and the map – on its head with a convincing argument that ‘Old Crome’s Mill’ was not situated on Mousehold Heath to the north of the city but in Trowse to the south.

Faden’s map of Norfolk 1797. The Mousehold/Sprowston mills are labelled in yellow, Trowse mill is circled in red, near Crown Point owned by ‘Money Esq’. Credit: http://www.historic-maps.norfolk.gov.uk

The fingerpost in Crome’s painting seems to carry no inscription but Miklos Rajnai [6] explained that the fingerpost on a very similar drawing of a mill by Norwich School artist George Vincent contains the words, ‘To Crown Point’. The clincher – revealed for the first time in Rajnai’s article of 1966 – was that an old label on the back of Crome’s painting stated: ‘Trowse Mill/near Norwich/painted by/Old Crome’. The windmill at Trowse (see map) is near Crown Point, then owned by intrepid balloonist Major John Money (1752-1817) and subsequently re-built by the banker Sir Robert Harvey.

Trowse Windmill 1818 by George Vincent. Before having to reduce resolution for publication, the lettering on the fingerpost could be discerned as ‘To Crown Point’ (circled). Wikimedia Commons

In a suggested tour of the city, Mottram describes walking towards St Andrews Hall down ‘the new street made for the trams which here descend the hill‘. By the time Mottram wrote his article the ‘new’ street was 35 years old. The tramway had cut a swath through mainly Tudor buildings: the City Arms was demolished and another Tudor building, purportedly made from timbers salvaged from the Spanish Armada, was neatly bisected. (Read Frances and Michael Holmes’ recent book for a fascinating account of the Norwich trams [7]).

Looking eastwards along St Andrews Street in 1897. Around the corner (arrow) is St Andrew’s Hall and Plain; directly ahead is the City Arms, which would be demolished in order for the electric trams of 1900 to descend the hill more easily. The star marks the C16 Armada/Garsett House, the obscured right-hand side of which was demolished to accommodate the tramway. © Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

Across the road from Armada House was another Tudor building, now exposed to the new street – the home of 1572 mayor Robert Suckling whose kneeler monument is next door, in St Andrew’s church [8].

Sir Robert Suckling (1520-1589) with his third wife and 10 children. St Andrew’s Church.

Ralph Mottram wrote that Suckling House ‘was lately purchased by the Misses Colman who opened it as a public Assembly Hall.’

The restored hall-house, Suckling House, the right-hand part of which was refronted in the Georgian period. St Andrew’s Church is off to the right. Photographed by George Plunkett in the year that Ralph Mottram wrote his guide (1935). © georgeplunkett.co.uk

Ethel and Helen Colman, of the Colman’s Mustard family, bought this merchant hall-house in 1923, the year that Ethel became Mayor of Norwich and the first female mayor in the country. The philanthropic sisters had the building restored by their brother-in-law E.T. Boardman (son of architect Edward Boardman) and presented it to the city in 1925 as a place for public assembly. The complex is now Cinema City, housing an arts cinema and restaurant.

Ethel Colman, the country’s first female mayor. Credit: Public domain via Wikipedia

To the left of Suckling House (not in frame in the photo above) is the Boardman-designed Stuart Hall, named after the husband of Ethel and Helen’s sister, Laura Elizabeth Stuart. I hope to write about James Stuart in greater depth but he deserves a brief mention here. A fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, Stuart had been a Liberal MP concerned about the lot of ordinary people. He championed education for all and as a director of Colmans promoted their pension scheme for workers. After James Stuart’s death in 1913, his wife and her family commemorated his name with the almshouse-style Stuart Court apartments (1914). He is also remembered by Stuart Garden in Recorder Road, opposite the Court, but this wasn’t officially opened until after the war, making this year (2022) the centenary of the garden’s opening [9].

IMG_1945.jpeg
One hundred years old. The James Stuart Garden (1922) in Recorder Road, off the bottom of Prince of Wales Road.

In another excursion, Mottram went to Norwich-over-the-Water and – foreshadowing the psychogeographers – took what he called a ‘wander’ off Oak Street, down Jenkin(s) Lane. Only 26 inches wide, the narrowness of this passageway was acknowledged in the rueful local alternative, Chafe Lug Alley [10]. Although he wrote that this led to the first Quaker meeting house in Norwich, the first such place of worship was built in Goat Lane in the city centre in 1676, replaced in 1826 by the chapel that stands there today [11]. The Goat Lane site of a quarter of an acre left no room for the Quakers to bury their dead, for which purpose they used an acre of land across the river (where Amelia Opie and the Gurneys were interred). It was here in 1700 that the Society of Friends built their second meeting house.

Jenkins Lane (arrowed) off Oak Street led to the Friends’ Meeting House (circled). The dotted line approximates the path of the C20 inner ring road. 1907 OS map courtesy of National Library of Scotland

Because Quaker Lane (underlined red) was too narrow for funeral processions, land was rented so that the cortege could travel from St Martin Lane (now inside the ring road) up to a turning circle adjacent to the burial ground [10].

The Second Quaker Meeting House, built in 1700, destroyed by enemy action in 1942. Credit: The Official Guide to the City of Norwich 1935

The advertisements are as fascinating as anything. In an older trade book (1910), the hatters and capmakers, T Wells & Son (estd. 1849) were enhancing their pedigree with an armorial plate. The hatmakers adopted three wells and a rising sun as their rebus, echoing the golden well used by the fifteenth century Bishop of Norwich, James Goldwell.

Accompanying this were photographs of the white-bearded father, Thomas Wells (b 1841) and the son, Herbert Rumsey Wells (b 1877). In Rumsey’s portrait, he sports a waxed moustache and that little patch of hair beneath his lower lip that might have once been called an imperial (in the fashion of Napoleon III) but now seems to be called a soul patch, demonstrating that even though you may change the name there is nothing new under the (rising) sun.

Herbert Rumsey Wells ca 1910. Credit: [12]

A quarter of a century later, in the Official Norwich Guide of 1935, Rumsey Wells was sporting the full goatee, flamboyantly advertising himself as ‘The most expensive Capmaker in the World’.

Credit: Norwich Publicity Association 1937

Famed for his ‘Doggie’ cap (modelled above in the ‘Watton’ shape), Rumsey Wells made headgear, like ‘The Brundall’ for men and the ‘Rumishanter’ for women. He died in 1937 but his shop – leased from the brewers Lacons – is now home to the Rumsey Wells pub in St Andrews Street.

Finally, I had occasionally wondered about the origin of the street name ‘Westlegate’ and Mottram provided the answer. 

Westlegate 1890 copy.jpg
Westlegate in 1890, decades before the street was widened and most of the buildings demolished. Photo: courtesy of David Vincent

The name of the city street ‘Westlegate’ remains although, of its ancient fabric, only All Saints church and the adjacent thatched building still stand. In this Viking town we are familiar with ‘gate’ being derived from the Old Norse ‘gata’ for street or road, as in Fishergate, Colegate etc. According to Mottram the ‘westle’ bit derives from the fine wastel bread that used to be made there.

Wastel bread has its verbal root, guastel, from old French which is now gateau meaning cake, so it seems to have been a cake-like bread made from fine white flour [13]. Jacob Grimm of the German Brothers Grimm knew the word Gastel for ‘a finer kind of bread‘ which was also known as Wastel in Upper Germany i.e. Bavaria and Austria. In Italy, the guastella (guastedda in Sicily) has survived the times in different shapes, mostly flat, always white, and often sweet.

© Reggie Unthank 2022

Sources

  1. DP Mortlock and CV Roberts (1985). The Popular Guide to Norfolk Churches. No 2 Norwich, Central and South Norfolk. Pub: Acorn Editions.
  2. Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson (1997). The Buildings of England. Norfolk 1: Norwich and North-East. Pub: Yale University Press.
  3. Mark Knights (2004). Politics, 1660-1835. In, Norwich since 1550 (eds Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson). Pub: Hambledon and London.
  4. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2021/03/15/revolutionary-norwich/
  5. http://www.norfolkmills.co.uk/WindmillsN/thorpe-mousehold-postmill.html
  6. Miklos Rajnai (1966). John Crome’s Windmill’ Norfolk Archaeology https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/archiveDownload?t=arch-3749-1/dissemination/pdf/vol_34/NorfolkArchaeology34_P86_P87.pdf
  7. Frances and Michael Holmes (2021). The Days of the Norwich Trams. Pub: Norwich Heritage Projects.
  8. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2021/08/15/sculptured-monuments/
  9. https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/history-of-james-stuart-norwich-8627120
  10. http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/oak.htm#Oakst
  11. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2017/08/15/post-medieval-norwich-churches/
  12. ‘Citizens of No Mean City’ (1910), a trade book published by Jarrold & Sons
  13. http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/wastelbread.htm

Thanks

I am grateful to Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk for permissions.

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Entrances and Exits (Doors II)

16 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by reggie unthank in Decorative Arts

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Art Nouveau, Georgian doors, Norwich architecture, Norwich buildings, Norwich history

In the previous post I covered Kent and Stephenson’s [1] selection of twenty Tudor-to-Georgian doorways still standing after the war (1948). In walking around Norwich I photographed many more doorways; here is my own selection of twenty (plus one from Great Yarmouth).

In 1871 Thomas Jeckyll, a leading light in the Japanese-influenced Aesthetic Movement, designed an extension for High House, Thorpe St Andrew. The brackets supporting the canopy were carved in a loose Jacobean Revival style [2] but perhaps of greater interest to Jeckyllites are the terracotta panels above the door – probably of Cosseyware from Gunton’s Brickyard in nearby Costessey (covered in a recent post).  The rectangular panel contains the initials of client Thomas Birkbeck while Jeckyll’s own initials are transformed in a Chinese-inspired roundel to the right.

High HouseThorpe_A.jpg

No 1 High House, Thorpe St Andrew, Norwich

This house below was designed in Queen Anne Revival style around the turn of the C19th/20th.  Like other Arts and Crafts houses in the city built in the QAR style this house has characteristic smaller panes at the tops of the windows. However, this house is distinguished by the quality of its doorway with hooded canopy carried on carved brackets and slim columns.

34NewmarketRd_A.jpg

34 St Stephens Road, Norwich

Until recently, the magnificent shop front in Upper St Giles belonged to an unmodernised chemist’s. It dwarfs the small Georgian-style doorway to the side whose mystery is enhanced by the purple paintwork  (Purpleheart 188 by Little Greene).

UpperStGiles_A.jpg

76A Upper St Giles, Norwich

The frontage for the Salvation Army on St Giles Street may appear to be hewn from granite but in reality is composed of Coade Stone – a weather-proof ceramic invented by Eleanor Coade (b 1733). The rusticated appearance is produced by cut-back joints and the worm-like tracks on the vermiculated surface (vermiculi = little worms; vermicelli = tastes like little worms). The head on the keystone is thought to be “classically-inspired”; suggestions include Bacchus or perhaps a Greek philosopher.

SalvnArmyStGiles_A.jpg

Salvation Army. 36 St Giles Street, Norwich

The frontage of the Citadel was originally built in 1892 as Mortimer’s Hotel. Around 1900 it was known as the Opera House Hotel probably because it was used by performers from the Grand Opera House opposite (now the site of St Giles car park).

St Giles' St 34 former Mortimer's Hotel [5278] 1969-08-16.jpg

34-36 St Giles Street, Norwich (c) George Plunkett Archive. Photographed 1969. The gates beneath the white-painted single bay to the left were the entrance to their Citadel before the Salvation Army also bought the five-bayed Mortimer’s Hotel .

Princes Street is full of gems. At first glance Numbers 16 and 18 appear to be identical twins but 18 is slimmer. The alternating blocks on the architrave to the sides of the doors, and the blockiness of the wedge-shaped voussoirs and keystone above, are typical of the so-called Gibbs surround.

Hungate_B.jpg

16-18 Princes Street, Norwich.

This fine, painted house is at the bottom of Cow Hill at the junction with Pottergate. The Georgian doorway, with its simple triangular pediment supported on scrolled brackets, is – in Norfolk dialect – seriously ‘on the huh‘. Of course, this is part of its considerable charm.

Pottergate_A.jpg

95 Pottergate

Number 168 King Street is part of a row of C17 houses that formerly contained the Ship Inn. Above the partly blocked alleyway is a lintel on which is carved ‘Princes In’. It is thought this was re-cycled from the inn of that name that once stood in Princes Street, off Tombland.

KingSt_A.jpg

168 King Street

The building below was once the home of John Harvey who, over the late 18th/early 19th centuries, became Sheriff, Mayor and High Sheriff. Norwich was famed for its shawl weaving, which is said to have been introduced to the city by Harvey in 1791. The rear of the building has a fine central bay whose three floors are rhythmically related. The ‘blind’ arch of the three-part Venetian door on the ground floor is mirrored in the Venetian window above (where the arched central light is typically the taller of three), and is topped by the semi-circular Diocletian window on the third floor.

HarveyHouseStGiles_A.jpg

Gladstone House (rear), 28 St Giles Street

The rear doorway of Gladstone House (above) is – with the exception of the Venetian lights – relatively plain, with scrolled Ionic capitals supporting an open pediment. The Georgian front door, opening onto St Giles Street, is more imposing (below). The open base of the triangular pediment allows the intrusion of a nine-petalled fanlight of identical design to the one illustrated in the previous post for Thomas Ivory’s 13 All Saints’ Green. The break in the base of the open pediment leaves two floating parts to the cornice, which are carried on consoles; these console cornices are, in turn, supported by two fluted and banded columns, the whole being more decorative than the door to the rear.

GladstoneHseStGilesFront_A.jpg

Gladstone House (front), 28 St Giles Street

IvoryFanlight2.jpg

13 All Saints’ Green. Identical to the fanlight on Gladstone House

In about 1330, John Page built a hall house in King Street; one hundred years later the wool merchant Robert Toppes remodelled it to make the entire first floor his trading hall [3]. Then it was known as Splytts, now we know it as Dragon Hall. Toppes became a man of influence in the city. To ensure his spiritual wellbeing, or perhaps to celebrate his status as mayor and member of parliament, Toppes sponsored the stained glass ‘Toppes Window’ in the east end of St Peter Mancroft. My first post showed Toppes and female members of his family depicted in the donor panel of this medieval masterpiece. Part of Toppes’ C15th remodelling of Page’s house involved adding an “expensive stone surround” to the C14th ogee doorway [3], explaining the ‘door-within-a-door’ below.

DragonHall_A.jpg

Dragon Hall, Norwich

The fanlight at 25 St George’s Street is a reminder of times when the word ‘cosie’ could be used unironically. The lettering, sentiment and use of stained glass suggest a date in the early part of the C20th.

CosieCafe_A.jpg

25 St George’s Street, Norwich

Jenny Lind (‘The Swedish Nightingale’) was enormously popular in the mid C19th. The profits from three concerts she gave in Norwich helped provide for an infirmary for sick children. The original playground in Pottergate was bombed in the Second World War while children were in the bomb shelter yards away. In 1972 the 70-year-old gate was moved to a new playground in Union Street near the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. The owner  of the nearby Littlehaven Coffee Co remembers being one of a line of children recovering in bed after having their adenoids taken out in the Jenny Lind Wing. But the re-siting of the hospital from Newmarket Road to Colney in 2001 left the gateway marooned.  Still, it is a fine monument. The classically-influenced stone arch is decorated with blue and green mosaic; the Art Nouveau gates, complete with ‘spade’ cut-outs, were made by Boulton and Paul of Norwich – another target of German bombs.

JennyLindPlygrnd_A.jpg

Jenny Lind gateway 2016

Jenny Lind Pottergate.jpg

The Jenny Lind gate when in Pottergate 1902-1972. (c) Picture Norfolk

Another commemorative arch is at the entrance to the James Stuart Garden at Recorder Road/St Faith’s Lane, off the bottom of Prince of Wales Road. The gardens were laid out by the Norwich architect Edward Boardman in 1922 in memory of James Stuart, Privy Councillor, of Carrow Abbey (d 1913). It would have been built sooner but for the First World War.  The coat of arms on the fascia of the memorial gate is that of the Stewart clan; the Scottish connection is underlined by the thistle in the left-hand spandrel, echoed by the English rose on the opposite side. The renaissance style and use of botanical swags suggests this to be a late example of the English Domestic Revival style.

JamesStuartGarden_A.jpg

Politics aside, this is one of my favourite doorways, not for the door itself – which is unexceptional – but for the Art Nouveau surround which elides into the magnificent Royal Arcade around the corner, designed by George Skipper. The Parian Ware tiles were designed by W J Neatby at Doulton’s Lambeth Pottery.

Neatby ConClubNorwich_A.jpg

Royal Arcade, Norwich

Despite stumbling around Norwich for many years I had never come across Crown Road, behind the Agricultural Hall, off Market Avenue. The proximity to the former major cereal trading house seems to account for the name – Cereal House – emblazoned on the door itself and, hammering home the point, the sculpture of three wheat-sheaves above the door. This sculpture, apparently cast in bronze, is notable but appears at the expense of the heavily-carved Georgian doorcase that was still present in the 1960s (see further below).

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Cereal House, 33-34 Crown Road

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34 Crown Road 1962 (c) georgeplunkett.co.uk

Number 2 Cathedral Close was built by Thornagh Gurdon who wrote a history of Norwich Castle. The house is set inside the cathedral precincts on Almary Green. The ‘Mary’ part of this name could be misleading since it is a corruption of Almonry Green, a reference to the place where the almoner once doled out bread and alms. The entrance to this mid-C18th house is imposing since you have to ascend the stone staircase required to rise above the basement. Given the size of the doorway overall the scrolled Ionic columns are rather slim, set against a rusticated surround. According to Pevsner and Wilson [4] the rounded segmental pediment is “a rarity in Norwich”. (‘Segmental’ in this context means based on a segment of a circle).

CathedralClose_x.jpg

No 2 Cathedral Close, Norwich

Numbers 2 and 3 Cow Hill were built in the late C17th as a single range beneath six gables [4]. The architectural detailing and decoration are unified, except for the key  features of the front elevation – the doors. The differences in door style are relatively minor (e.g., one has fluted columns, the other fluted pilasters) but it is the size of No 3’s doorway that stands out. Yes, it is further down the hill, requiring extra steps up to the threshold but then the doorway shoots up beyond its neighbour so that the triangular pediment breaches the string course.  From the base of the first step to the apex of the pediment the door is less than half the total height.

2_3Cow Hill_latest.jpg

Numbers 2 and 3 Cow Hill, Norwich

Samson and Hercules House in Tombland is thought to have been built in 1657 [4] on the site of an earlier building made for Sir John Fastolf (the presumed inspiration for Shakespeare’s Falstaff).  The Georgian-style porch is supported by the two heroes, Samson (left) and Hercules (right). Samson holds the jawbone of an ass in one hand and in the other a small animal, which looks like a lamb or a kid although closer inspection reveals a bushy tail that could not have belonged to either. The animal is a fox and alludes to the biblical story that Samson caught 300 foxes (probably jackals) and tied their tails together in pairs so that they could trail a burning torch between them (Judges 15:4). Those of us concerned about advertising a lobster restaurant by painting historical figures lobster red can extract some consolation from knowing that the figures are replicas – the original C17th figures having been replaced in 1999. Even so …

samson and hercules_A.jpg

Samson and Hercules House, Tombland, Norwich

Showing one Falstaffian house provides the excuse for showing another – a favourite of mine. In a previous blog I mentioned Fastolff House in Great Yarmouth, a striking art nouveau building designed by the local architect ‘Concrete’ Cockrill. The patina’ed bronze door does look like the entrance to a mausoleum.

Fastolffs House_A.jpg

Fastolff House, Regent Street, Great Yarmouth

Norwich is so rich in historic buildings that I could have selected many other ancient doorways. Most are prized and well-maintained but a significant number are unloved. For example, 41 All Saints’ Green is a large five-bayed merchant’s house built in the late C18th [4]. In 2010 the Norwich Evening News reported that this building had been empty for some time since last used as a dental practice. It is still empty and the fine Doric doorcase is showing signs of neglect. In 2016 the building appears on the Norwich City Council’s Heritage at Risk Register.  The Norwich Preservation Trust, who have a fine record of intervention in such cases, is also keeping a watchful eye.

41 All Saints Green.jpg

41 All Saints’ Green, Norwich

Number 33 Bethel Street has one of the city’s finest Georgian doorways with an impressive Doric entablature containing martial arms on the frieze. Unfortunately, there appear to be no plans to restore this building, which is described on the council’s at-risk register as “Poor condition. Long-term vacant building”. Shame!

BethelStreet.jpg

 33 Bethel Street, Norwich

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Sources

  1. Kent, Arnold and Stephenson, Andrew (1948). Norwich Inheritance. Pub: Jarrold and Sons Ltd., Norwich
  2. Susan Weber Soros and Catherine Arbuthnott (2003). Thomas Jeckyll, Architect and Designer, 1827-1881. The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, New York. Pub: Yale University Press.
  3.  Matthews, Richard.(2013). Robert Toppes. Medieval Mercer of Norwich. Pub: The Norfolk and Norwich Heritage Trust.
  4. Pevsner, Nikloaus and Wilson, Bill (1997 ). The Buildings of England. Norfolk I: Norwich and North-East.Pub: Yale University Press.

I thank Jonathan Plunkett for permission to reproduce three images from the George Plunkett archive.  I am also grateful to  Clare Everitt for permission to reproduce the image from Picture Norfolk. Thanks, also, to Richard Matthew for information about the Dragon Hall doorway.

 

 

 

 

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  • The angel’s bonnet
  • After the Norwich School
  • A few of my favourite buildings
  • James Minns, carver
  • The Norwich Banking Circle
  • Behind Mrs Opie’s medallion
  • Norwich: shaped by fire
  • Street Names #2
  • Street names
  • The Norwich School of Painters
  • Going Dutch: The Norwich Strangers
  • The Captain’s Parks
  • Norfolk’s Napoleonic Telegraph
  • Catherine Maude Nichols
  • The Norfolk Botanical Network
  • City Hall Doors # 2
  • City Hall Doors # 1
  • Late Extra: The Norwich Pantheon
  • Pleasure Gardens
  • The absent Dukes of Norfolk
  • Nairn on Norwich
  • The Norwich Way of Death
  • Norwich: City of Trees
  • The Bridges of Norwich Part 2: Around the bend
  • The Bridges of Norwich 1: The blood red river
  • Norwich knowledge (libraries)
  • Street furniture: palimpsests
  • Putting Norwich on the map
  • Clocks
  • Faces
  • The Norwich coat of arms
  • New book: Colonel Unthank and the Golden Triangle
  • The Pastons in Norwich
  • Reggie through the underpass
  • Gildencroft and Psychogeography
  • Bullards’ Brewery
  • Post-medieval Norwich churches
  • The end of the Unthank mystery?
  • Barnard Bishop and Barnards
  • Public art, private meanings
  • Colonel Unthank rides again
  • Three Norwich Women
  • The flamboyant Mr Skipper
  • When Norwich was the centre of the world*
  • Arts & Crafts pubs in the C20th
  • Entertainment Victorian style
  • Jeckyll and the Japanese wave

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