The Great Hospital, Pt.1

Hokay, it's time for another wander around the older and odder corners of Norwich.
As some of you know, Mike and I returned yesterday to one of our old haunts, The Great Hospital.

This is a small part of it; St.Helen's Church (as was).
Back in the 1100s, the Parish of St.Helen was having a bit of a sticky time with the arrogant Norman monks in the Cathedral next door.
This wasn't helped by the fact that the good folk of the city, and especially St.Helen's and neighbouring St.Giles' wards got so totally (and quite justifiably) pissed off with the Norman Yoke that they did what Norwich folk have been doing regularly ever since: they rioted, kicked out the monks and burned the monastery and its gates (as documented in a couple of earlier posts that show the late twelfth century gates that the twat-faced bloody Normans forced the people to build to replace the ones they'd trashed).

Anyhoo, by 1249, Bishop Walter Suffield of St.Giles wheedled St.Helen's church and the surrounding land away from its previous owner, William of Dunwich - who was glad to see the back of it - and moved St.Giles' hospital into it; where - as "The Great Hospital" it has been going strong ever since.

Poor old William of Dunwich didn't have much luck after that as not many years later Dunwich itself fell into the sea and was swallowed up in a great storm.
Hey ho.

The Great Hospital itself was originally meant to care for the clergy of Norwich who had become too old, sick or pervy for duty, but mutated over the centuries to become what it still remains: a care home for the city's old and weird (Hi, Mister Plumbly! Yes, you know I'm talking about you).

Here is another part of it, looking from Bishopgate toward the Chaplain's House.

Before we peer inside at some of the older, prettier and distinctly odder parts, please allow me to reminisce about the east window of St.Helen's; bane of my life for many years.

Back in the seventeenth century, a floor was inserted halfway up the church (you'll see the result tomorrow) and the east window got rather fucked up.

As you can see from yesterday's photo, the bottom of the window disappeared completely and the rest of it up to the floor level got infilled. To cap it all, they built a fucking great chimney all the way up the middle of it.

The infill has been painted over and awaits further repair but at least the stonework has been repaired now and the wall stabilised.

Here's what it looked like when I surveyed it. Sorry about the quality of the pictures but these things are A1 size and it would take me days to scan them in and stitch them together so I took some crappy and out of focus photos instead.

The whole east wall back then had rotted away to such an extent it had the consistency of a dunked biscuit and was peeling away from the rest of the building at an alarming rate.
We scaffolded it inside and out and shored it up (it took many years to get the whole lot repaired) and Old Dive clambered up there and measured every single piece of stone and flint and rotten brickwork for the stonemasons to work out what they had to do.

Here are a couple of views of the inside (sorry, but my stupid camera didn't want to focus on these).
This one shows where the floor got inserted, the stairs and the chimneybreast …

And this one shows the parlous state of the stonework behind the chimney.

Here's some of the restored stonework. You see the gap between the window and the chimney? I had to clamber in there with a torch and measure it all.
Sheesh!

The stainless steel bracing may not be pretty but it stops the whole of the end wall falling out.

So that's a brief introduction to a little part of the hospital and one of the many cold, cramped, uncomfortable and occasionally painful things Mike and I had to do to keep the place going.
Tomorrow we shall start looking at fun and pretty (and weird) stuff.

If any of you are remotely interested in the older and prettier parts of Norwich and its glorious history of revolutionary rioting, click on the "Norwich" link at the bottom of this post and have a good rummage in the archives.