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.

Ancient rivers, modern pipes

SO how many rivers are there in Norwich? The Wensum of course and the Yare too. Those in the know might add the Tud at Costessey and the Tas near Lakenham. But how about the Dalymond and the Dallingfleet, the Great and the Little Cockey and the Muspole? These too were once well-known names to Norwich citizens. To a greater or lesser extent they still exist today. But hidden beneath concrete and contained within culverts they are Norwich’s secret rivers. Archaeologist Brian Ayers is the expert. Most of what I’ve written here relies on his book “Norwich: Archaeology of a Fine City”.

The Muspole ran into the north bank of the Wensum from small pool of the same name near the modern Muspole Street. Water from the Great Cockey still emerges from a pipe (main picture above, canoe-view of course) near the Art College having flowed through the city centre from the high ground near All Saints Green. The Little Cockey ran from Chapelfield down to the river at Westwick Street.

Downstream, the Dalymond rose in Old Catton and entered the Wensum off Fishergate at Hansard Lane. Again its outfall into the Wensum can only be seen by canoe (left). Lastly the Dallingfleet ran into the Wensum between the grounds of the cathedral and Foundry Bridge.

Utopia in a Norwich car park

WHEN Rory Macbeth started this artwork in 2006, the bricks and mortar which formed his canvas were due to demolished the following year. But six years later the old Eastern Electricity building is still standing. And so if you do find yourself wanting to read the entire text of Thomas More’s 16th century work Utopia without resorting to the library, just wander down to the car park off Westwick Street. At the time of the contemporary art exhibition, Macbeth said he’d done it because the work was “as valid now as it was when it was written”. An online article written at the time by Sarah Morley continued:

“Utopia is 100 pages long, so Rory worked out precisely where each line must be positioned for the entire 40,000 words to fit on the wall.

“I like expressing the text through graffiti,” he explained, “as most graffiti is utopian – the world would be perfect if this or that were different.”

The building, visible from across the river, is due to be demolished in about a year’s time, so there won’t be any need to wash the graffiti off if anyone objects to Rory’s style of art. On the contrary, he has had lots of positive support: “We’ve made lots of friends, everybody wants to know what we’re doing.”

How much longer can it survive I wonder?

The Jarrold: playing hard to get

SO how on earth do you get a decent photo of the new Jarrold Bridge across the Wensum then? It’s not that I don’t like this sinuous j-shaped structure, even the designer rust grows on you after a while.  It’s just that when you get your camera out, it fails to look enough like a bridge, which ever angle you tackle it from.

Bridge basics for photographers: frame your shot so that you can show us one river, two banks and a sense of A to B. Bonus points of course for a cathedral spire. Hmmm, very tricky to tick every box unless you’re in a helicopter or at the very least the top of Dragonfly House – the new Broads Authority HQ on the north side of the river.

These are the best of my efforts tonight, but I did get my timing wrong. Yes there was a lovely weak evening sunlight, but it had just sunk low enough below the law courts to be of very little use.

* See some much better work from the experts on flickr.

Sir Alfred and the Wensum

SOMETIMES this blog works perfectly – if you’re patient. It’s eight months since I took this picture as I kayaked down the river Wensum from Ringland to Costessey. It was a beautiful day and there was a decent photo everywhere you looked. I was quite pleased with this one: a freshly painted gypsy wagon, now serving as a summer house in the garden of one of Costessey’s many riverside properties. (Why do pictures taken on the river always look better for something small but man-made on the far bank?)

Anyway Sara Waterson from the Sir Alfred Munnings Museum Facebook page has been in touch to say could she use it on her site. Sir Alfred, for those who don’t know, was one of the most famous English painters of the first half of the 20th century. He excelled in painting horses but started off life as a commercial graphic artist. He’s a big part of my Costessey chapter and you can see my full entry here.

This photo is of use to Sara because Munnings loved the countryside around Ringland and Costessey. And he knocked around with the gypsies who wandered this area too, so it has a nice “back to the future” feel for her. But look what she has provided in return.

This is Munnings himself on the left of the picture with friends ..on the Wensum at Costessey. The perfect picture to tie a great artist to my river. Now I’ve just got to persuade her to let me include it in the book as well as this blog.

* The Munnings Museum, is at Dedham in err, Constable Country. It’s excellent. I’ve used it as a picturesque service station off the A12 when coming back up from London.