Drayton Rd factory: mystery solved

THEY’RE a clever lot on the Norfolk Broads Forum. Earlier this week I asked what the strange objects were on this photo showing the old Edwards & Holmes shoe factory on Drayton Road. The answer? Animal skins.

Read these comments posted on the NBF website and you can almost smell them drying in the breeze. Stale urine baths? Nice.

“Being outside a shoe factory, my guess would be animal skins being prepared, perhaps oiled to make them waterproof. The racking at the back looks like it is a drier.Tanned leather is usually a pasty grey white colour before it is dyed ready for production.”          

Dylly

“Could well be 'greenhides' drying. We used  to have a proper tannery in Canterbury (and boy did it stink) and the hides after the basic tanning are a slightly greenish tinged cream colour. (we used to buy the rejects up at £10 a hide for making leather stuff for re-enactment). The tanning was done the proper way using oak galls and stale urine baths, and proper messy it was too.”

Grendel

“Totally agree with the previous posters. In the late 60’s I used to work in the east end of London. In the road that I worked there was a traditional tannery, I think it was called Braybrooks. On a summers day the smell was overpowering and boy the liquid that ran out into the road (no pavement or proper drains) used to rot the bottom of your car out while you watched. None the less it was a fascinating process to watch although doing it looked hard work.”

Still-Cruising

After the Finishers finished

THIS view across the Wensum in the northern suburbs of Norwich might shock anyone who’s moved in over the last decade or so. It shows the old Edwards & Holmes shoe factory on Drayton Road, once a big employer, now long gone.

In its place (just upstream of Wensum Park) is a new housing development featuring streets with names like Clickers Road and Finishers Road. Both are terms, you’ll be glad to hear, that mean something to the average cobbler. A Clicker cut the leather for the uppers of shoes using a machine which made, you guessed it, a clicking sound. Finishers water-proofed, blackened and waxed the shoe at the end of the production line.

Edwards and Holmes was clearly a big factory, but I have no idea what the long light-coloured objects are at the water’s edge. Something to do with rowing or something to do with the shoe industry? Give us a shout if you know the answer.

* Thanks to StuMcP for his help on this one.

Heigham: a text from the 1920s

EBAY has come up trumps again. This photo shows a loop of the Wensum around what is now the Heigham waterworks. Except that in 1922 the works had yet to be visible along this stretch at least. (If I’ve got it right we’re looking east, so it’s Hellesdon on the left and Heigham on the right. Do let me know if you disagree.)

As ever when you go back in time, it takes a while to tune into the different lingo. Put an ebay search out for “Norwich” and “Wensum” for example and you wouldn’t have found this one. In those days it was simply “The Back River” as opposed I guess, to the busy commercial Yare.

And you won’t find “Horse Shoe Bend” on any modern map either. It’s only a reference to Horse Shoe Reach on a 1767 map in the Norfolk Record Office that means I can be sure I know what I’m looking at. Mind you its horseshoe shape is clear enough on the modern OS Explorer map.

The other thing that initially bugged me about these postcards was who on earth would go on holiday and send this sort of card to friends? But again it was because I hadn’t tuned into the times properly.

Read the other side and you realise that these were quick missives scribbled out in much the same way as we would text or email. “Shall be back on Monday by bus if the roads are slippery. If not shall drive from Rugby” is the straightforward message on this one.

It is of course rather bizarre to be eavesdropping on a conversation 90 years on. But thanks to the late Mrs F Basson of Appendix Road, Rugby, another small piece of my book has fallen into place.

Boudicca Way: part two

JUST a few miles west from the wide, flat Yare Valley, lies the tighter, narrower vale of the River Tas. The rolling countryside here feels very different: as though you’ve crossed a county border rather than just a small watershed. I was picking up where I left off last August, taking the Boudicca Way footpath off Caistor Lane and heading towards Chandler Road across typically High Ash Farm country: broad grassy field edges planted with wildlife-friendly flowers. Then, climbing up Valley Farm Lane, you look back at field upon field of  rape. (pictured above).

Confusingly, at the junction of Valley Farm Lane and Chandler Road, the Boudicca Way signs point in both directions. Turn left and you’re on the  proper route south to Shotesham, right takes you on a diversion to the wonderful Roman remains at Caistor St Edmund.

I turned right for a simple circular, but  spent a good hour exploring the environs of the old Venta Icenorum first. I haven’t been here for years and I’d forgotten quite how close the old walls are to the River Tas – although of course that’s the reason the Romans settled here in the first place. Many a family trooped around the walls, sheep grazed alongside and a wheatear perched obligingly on a fence post. Does a separate Tas Valley walk head into the distance along the left bank of this photo (right)? I leave that one for another time.

From there it’s a quick walk down to the Caistor Hall Hotel and then up Caistor Lane along some more wildlife- and pedestrian-friendly fields full of dancing orange-tip butterflies. The hum of the southern bypass never quite leaves you on this walk. But in some ways that’s part of the attraction. So much countryside, so close to the city and some socking great Roman remains into the bargain. I just wonder what the ghost of Boudicca makes of her walk heading into the enemy’s HQ.

Oak Street: follow that wall

THIS picture is all about why the grass isn’t growing down that middle strip. It’s because the flints are actually the remains of the once substantial City Wall, built around Norwich in the middle ages. The wall once continued across the road and ran down to the river beyond Oak Street. The house directly opposite used to be The Dun Cow pub which directly abutted the wall. Its owner was kind enough to show me a great chunk of it in his basement today.

And this second photo is the best I can do of the remains of the round tower behind the old pub along an alley which still leads down to the river. From what remains, it seems that this was where the wall ended – although if it did, it would have left a good 50 yards undefended. Someone will have written a full history of Norwich City Walls. I need to track that down. It’s early days on the research, but Oak Street feels like a real victim of the inner ring road to me. Clearly it used to be a busy thoroughfare into the city. But it’s been cut in half and lost a bit of its soul as a result.

Incidentally what am I going to call this chapter? We’re talking about the east side of the river Wensum, so it includes Mile Cross, St Martins and Oak Street, but I can’t think of a handy all-encompassing title.

There’s no shortage of material. I’ve done the Mile Cross estate and Wensum Park and now it’s time to get my head round the little-known Great Hall and the old shoe factory once run by Sexton, Son and Everard. But first, I need to follow that wall.

WW2 Norwich: every tag tells a story

LET me introduce you to the Norwich Bomb Map, an amazing piece of Second World War history with a big story to tell. It’s fully six-foot square, a yellowing chart set within a wooden frame showing the greater Norwich area in quite some detail. But it’s not the map itself which is important, it’s what’s on it. Because during the war it hung in the city council’s planning department in Ber Street. And every time a bomb went off, the location was recorded on a tiny tag which gave the weight of the explosive in kilogrammes and then the date. To my knowledge, even 70 years after the Baedeker raids, it remains the best geographical representation of the impact the war had on Norwich. At a glance you can see which parts were most affected, at a glance it pretty much confirmed my theory that the Heigham area of the city was particularly badly-hit.

For years this gem lay all but forgotten in the basement of City Hall. But these days it’s being much more carefully looked after by specialist staff at the Norfolk Record Office. You can get to see it, but only if you make an appointment a few days in advance. I did that last Friday and was guided through the building’s state of the art facilities to a conservation studio where the map had been wheeled out specially for me. There, senior conservator Nick Sellwood explained the problems  his team face when it comes to ensuring the map’s survival:
“The pins are ferrous, so they’re rusting,” he told me. “The cardboard tags are likely to be of pretty poor quality because most stuff was during the war and if you look closely you can see how dirty the map itself is – we’ve experimented a bit by just cleaning up the odd field on the outskirts. You can see they’re a lot lighter.
“Now we could change the pins, we could change the map, we could replace just about everything, but then it would no longer be what it is, so we’ve got this massive ethical dilemma about what to do with it.”

The other irony is that the more people want to look at the map, the more fragile it will become – even with much TLC from the NRO. Among the possible answers, detailed photos which could be accessed via the web. My mind immediately raced ahead to an online digital map where you could click onto a tag which could be cross-referenced to other surviving documents together with contemporary and modern photos. (Nick Stone and his Blitz Ghosts would love that wouldn’t he?) But in the current financial climate I suspect such an idea would be way too ambitious. So for now let’s appreciate what we’ve got. A complete overview of the Norwich as targeted by the Luftwaffe.
* A big thank you to Nick Sellwood for a great insight into the world of the conservator …and 1940s Norwich. Thanks also to the County Archivist of Norfolk for permission to reproduce the photos of the map. And for the record, the map is from the Norfolk Record Office, ACC 2007/195. Click on the individual maps to bring them up full-frame.

Where was the Waterworks Tavern?

THE SUBURB of Heigham is dominated by something we see hardly anything of – the waterworks along the road of the same name. Ok, there are these lovely old buildings at the city end, but the rest of this huge site is surrounded by high walls and fences. A manager from Anglian Water was kind enough to give me a guided tour earlier this week and I’m now getting my head around a mass of info. The tallest of these buildings for example, is the Chamberlain constructed in 1906 to house a huge beam engine. The rest of the site shows evidence of the water industry at every stage from 1850 to the present day. Why 1850? Because that was when the City of Norwich Waterworks Company was set up in a response to a deadly cholera epidemic. Drinking water in Norwich before that date appears to have been only slightly better than playing Russian roulette.

But the reason for my post is an appeal for info on the pub which all of the waterworks’ staff would have regarded as their local. It was called The Waterworks Tavern and it was apparently right next to the works on Heigham Street. But where exactly? And does anyone have a photo? Apparently it didn’t close until 1975 so someone, somewhere, surely?

* Please email sanddsilk@btinternet.com if you have any info or photos.