On 20th June 1837 the nation celebrated the accession to the throne of a small, tubby and exceedingly randy young woman.
There followed sixty-four years of rampant desecration of architectural elegance and its replacement with tacky bling and Puginesque kitsch, the degradation of pure Gothic that was "Victorian Gothick", the craze for fake "clan" tartan (thank you, Sir Walter Scott), the invention of the horror that is the modern Christmas (thank you, Albert), the exploitation of a third of the planet under the boot-heel of the British Empire and probably most importantly the re-naming of the common penis ring as "The Prince Albert" in honour of his impressive feats of keeping up with his queen's prodigious appetites.
You may get the impression that I've got it in for the Victorians and you'd be absolutely right. They ripped the heart out of our mediæval towns and cities, they desecrated our churches but above all they had terrible, TERRIBLE taste. Not a whit of elegance in the whole damned bunch of 'em. Least of all in the royal couple themselves. Over-ornamentation, kitsch, clutter and a fondness for the cheap and nasty. Sheesh!
Anyhoo … to Norwich Castle …
In the 1840s, Soane's multi-storey cell blocks were still standing in the keep but were fast falling to pieces, so the top storey was completely removed as unsafe. During archæological excavations under the rotunda the original, hypocaust-style heating ducts for Wilkin's panopticon gaol were rediscovered and which we are retaining to house our own services. There was one big boiler house and the heated air was ducted in two-foot square clay tunnels first to the governor's house, then the guardrooms and finally to the prison wings by which time it would have been of much diminished comfort. There was no heating in the keep cells.
An early photograph showing the remains of Soane's cell blocks within the keep (sans top floor) just prior to their demolition. Courtesy Norfolk Museum's Service.Then in 1869, those prudish spoilsport Victorians deprived the citizens of their most popular form of entertainment by banning public executions.
Public executions at Newgate (I couldn't find any of Norwich), via the interweb.Public executions at Norwich Castle (after they stopped burning folk at the stake in the Lollards' Pit and the Castle Ditches) were carried out on a gallows erected across the lower end of the bridge between the two gatehouses. They were hugely popular, with thousands attending, pushing past the guards to grab souvenirs from the corpses as they were cut down, be it a hank of hair, a scrap of clothing or a fingernail.
Then everybody would retire to the nearest alehouses and celebrate a grand day out. Those pesky Victorians spoiled everbody's fun. They moved the executions to a private drop in the north-east of the prison yards.
Once the museum is open again, post-Covid, if you wander through our lovely new glazed atrium and on across the rotunda, you'll come to a large gallery straight ahead. Walk through this and you'll find yourself in a smaller, square room with side galleries leading off. Turn right and enter the east side gallery and you'll be standing where the execution yard was set up. Lots of ghosties in there for the supernaturally-minded visitor! Strangely, the museum folk don't tend to advertise the old gallows location. Shame on them as children would love it.
Victorian Britain saw the Industrial Revolution reach its zenith of capitalist inequality. Dickens' "Hard Times" gives a grim but accurate picture of the terrible poverty wreaked by a tiny minority of grasping industrial factory owners such as Bounderby of Coketown. The aristocracy and the 'new money', today's one-percenters, oppressed and exploited the poor into grinding poverty, workhouses, filth, squalor, disease and early graves.
What with pesky child-labour reforms restricting children to a ten-hour day of hard labour in the mills and mines and adult workers campaigning for a twelve-hour working day and a six-day week with a day off at Christmas it was becoming trickier to make obscene profits from the labour of the English poor.
The Victorians now outsourced their labour to where it was even cheaper, the far-flung outposts of Empire, taking over the East India Company in 1858 and leaving millions in our sceptred isle destitute, starving and yet breeding faster than cholera could kill them. The workhouses and debtors' prisons were overflowing and Norwich Castle's model prison bursting at the seams, especially after 1877 when the nationalisation of prisons shut down all the private gaols and bridewells, transferring their wretched inhabitants to the already overcrowded County Gaols.
What was to be done?
The crapitalists took off their top hats and scratched their heads …
(a) Economic reform and a fairer society? or …
(b) Keep on exploiting the underclass and build more prisons?
Well you can guess the answer to that one.
Fortunately for Norwich there was a huge tract of empty land behind Britannia Barracks up on St.James' Hill.
On this land a large, modern (for the 1880s) prison was built, relieving Norwich Castle of its near six centuries of gaol duty. After months of haggling, the City Corporation bought the castle and the old gaol from the county in 1884 for a discount price of £5,000 and decided that it was high time a new use was found for it.
Next time, Part the Tenth and … ENTER BOARDMAN! (Metallica fans, start your air guitars now).
Sources:
The Annual Register: A View of the History, Politicks and Literature of the Year: Edmund Burke (ed) and successors: 1758 to Present
Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society
East Anglian Archæology Vol. 132: Norwich Castle: Excavations and Historical Survey: 1978-1988: Part II: c.1345 to Modern: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2009
The Printed Plans of Norwich 1558-1840, A Carto-Bibliography: Raymond Frostick: 2002
Norwich Cathedral - Church, City and Diocese: 1096 - 1996: Various Eds. 1996
Norwich Since 1550: ed: Carole Rawcliffe & Richard Wilson: 2004
Norwich - The Growth of a City: Barbara Green & Rachel M R Young: Norfolk Museums Service: 1981
Norwich Houses Before 1700: Vernacular Architecture, Vol 14: 1983
5 comments:
I went looking for "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," and I even found out who coined it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Alphonse_Karr
I hadn't heard your take on the Victorians before. So refreshing! You and I should get together for Christmas sometime, apparently we feel the same about it.
Never a truer phrase than that one, Petrea.
Me and the Victorian Society go back decades. They are so petty and prissy and full of themselves and write the most pompous letters. As for Christmas … just another day but with worse TV.
Wow, I had no idea how awful the Victorians were. I should re-read "Hard Times." As for the architecture, I would go insane living in a place like Severs' House. Way too much going on! Mostly I think of Victorian architecture in terms of the Berkeley Victorians that I love. I just read that many of the Victorians built here in the late 1800s were by retired sea captains. I can't speak for the interiors, but it's always a treat to walk by one on my daily neighborhood perambulations. Sadly hundreds of these homes were destroyed in the Berkeley Fire of 1923.
Hi, Katie nineteenth century US architecture is great, especially those survivors around the Bay. You didn't have Vicky and Albert driving your country's taste into the sewer.
Denis Severs' House is the HQ of the Spitalfields Trust and has rooms decked out in all styles, the Victorian one being easily the most gruesome. I'll post on it later. The cellar is amazing and has featured in so many movies and TV historical dramas. They hold a Summer Ball each year (until Covid) where you get to wander the house in period cozzies and meditate on what it was like in the 1680s, while a soundtrack of horses, cabs and street folk plays quietly to add atmosphere. No electricity; just candles and open fires. It's a magical place.
Ah yes, we didn't have V&A's tastes dictating things. Lucky us! And wow I really want to visit Denis Severs' House now that I know more about it. That Summer Ball sounds like a blast! That's the kind of cosplay I would enjoy. Does Norwich Castle have an event like that? (Maybe without the smell of poo piped in.)
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