More Boring Bricks

Fancy a quick wander?

Come on, then. Now that we've finished poking around The Great Hospital we shall venture just across the road to see some of the yummy old houses between the hospital and the Cathedral.

There are many more (and sunnier) photos of beautiful old Norwich buildings to be seen in this post and in this one but these are from last week when I was on my way to meet Mikey.

Contrasting styles.
Two fifteenth century houses and an early nineteenth century one.
The pink house has had a bizarre, seventeenth century front wall added and the middle one has had the original windows replaced with sashes on the upper floors.

Most houses of this period or earlier have been bashed about so much over the centuries that little of them is left.
Check this one out, however, for the real deal!
Dragon Hall Post 1
Dragon Hall Post 2

This is much earlier. The back end of The Deanery by the west door of the Cathedral. I am always torn between thinking this would be a fantastic place to live (especially as when I used to walk past it on my way in to my old office I could hear the Cathedral Choir rehearsing in the Choir School just across the way) or a total nightmare, as every quarter of an hour the bells from the Cathedral go apeshit, so perhaps I'll move here when I go deaf.

The Deanery from the garden side. Again with windows added in just about every century to make a charming mess.

Most of the houses around the Cathedral and The Great Hospital look like this. To say I want them all is an understatement.

Here is one of my favourites.
People actually live in these places. I want to kill them and steal their homes. Is that so wrong?
Don't answer that.

Some early Georgian houses from another part of Cathedral Close.
This one would make an ideal setting for Katie, Lynn, Petrea and Lucio to indulge in their Austenesqueries (yay! Another neologism for the Small Glass Planet)!
Kindly pass that sheep's-gut condom, Mister Darcy; I feel somewhat frisky!

I have always lusted after this house. The front of this one dates from the year before the pilgrim fathers set sail for the colonies (there's a date plaque) though it would have originally had leaded casement windows; these are late seventeenth century replacements.
The bulk of the house, however, is fourteenth century.

All of these houses are owned by the Cathedral and when I was working in Norwich my mate Gerry was surveyor for the Close and I managed to sneak inside several of these places with him and had a good rummage around in roofs and basements, dating the timbers and construction methods. I love stuff like that.

A trio of Elizabethan cottages belonging to The Great Hospital with later brick walls set in front of the original timber framing and sixteenth century Dutch gables added.
Quaint and beautiful in a vernacular fashion.
Again, this would have originally been timber framed with oak mullioned windows, then when the brick was added the windows would have been leaded casements. These are early Victorian windows, from the start of plate glass production when windows were no longer hand-blown glass and larger panes became possible.

This was originally the monks' brewhouse from the Cathedral monastery and the lower parts of it date back to the 1080s. Now one of my favourite houses in The Close.
It is the first house on Hook's Walk, leading down to The Great Hospital. The cream house beyond it is a fourteenth century timber framed house with fifteenth century additions and the original great hall inside.

We shall finish today's picturesque perambulation with another part of Hook's Walk.
The path turns left at the pink house (a nunnery) and if you follow it round you see those lovely Dutch gabled cottages and The Great Hospital in front of you.

In the spring, when the weather is warmer and sunnier I shall do more posts of Old Norwich.
If you find them boring, tough titty. I love old buildings, so there.