Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Tenth - From Gaol to Museum - Chapter I

Enter Edward Boardman sporting a superhero cape with his undercrackers worn outside his trousers.

Back in the days of drawing boards I did a seven year stint working in Boardman's old drawing office on Old Bank of England Court and I swear it hadn't been redecorated since the 1870s.

Brown … very brown.

I still have one of the massive, cast-iron framed drawing boards in my garage.  It was a leaving prezzie but I had to hire a truck and borrow some hefty lads to get it home.

Photo courtesy Old Dive.

When the city bought Norwich Castle from the county in 1884, Edward Boardman already had an idea of what to do with it. He was on the committee of the old and cramped Norwich Museum and had been busily sketching plans for a vastly larger Norwich Castle Museum before it was even envisaged by the city.

Anyhoo, once he heard of the sale Boardman bearded banker and Norwich mayor John Gurney and hassled him to take a look at his proposals.

Boardman's sand plans, courtesy Norfolk Museums Service.

Metallica fans can start playing Enter Sandman now …

This proved kind of tricky as the man was totally blind, so Boardman used his noggin and smeared glue all over the wall thicknesses on his floor plans, sprinkled sand over them and shook them clean. Not unlike the bottom of a budgie's cage but with feely walls.

It seemed to do the trick as - after a quick feel - Gurney supported Boardman's proposals and offered £5,000 toward the project. Just as well as the city had no other takers for the castle keep and intended to let it go to ruin if none could be found. Boardman and Gurney: heroes.

Some sixty years earlier, Norwich's first museum had been housed in a few small rooms on the Haymarket and was not open to the public, being more a place where the rich and leisured could show off their personal collection to subscription-paying "gentlemen members".

The Paston Treasures painting at the Castle Museum.

Photo courtesy Old Dive.

Local nobility like the Paston Family would have exhibited the results of their planet-wide looting sprees. A couple of years back the museum managed to track down most of the items in the Paston Treasures painting for an exhibition linked to it.

That first museum then moved to what is now Jarrold's Office Equipment store and opened to the 'better class' of paying public and thence to a new building constructed on the site of the ruined Duke's Palace (now St.Andrew's multi-storey car park). The public were allowed in for free to celebrate Victoria and Albert's wedding and the museum became a success.

In October 1886 a committee was formed for the new Castle Museum, consisting of twenty "gentlemen" chaired by Lord Walsingham and including John Gurney. Boardman was officially appointed as Architect and the future looked decidedly rosy.

We are fortunate enough to have a photographic record of Boardman's work on site.

Here you can see one of the last of Soane's internal prison walls about to be demolished.

All Boardman photographs courtesy Norfolk Museums Service.

While the committee bickered as committees do, Boardman's first task was to strip the keep of the last remains of Soane's internal prison cell blocks. These had been condemned shortly before the castle ceased to be a prison due to settlement cracks and fear of the castle mound itself collapsing.

Edward Boardman poses atop the remains of the spine wall.

The dark arched thing above him is the fireplace in the King's Chamber;

the keep floor is down where the foreground guys are standing.

Fortunately for all concerned, Boardman discovered that good old arrogant neo-classicist Sir John Soane had built his four storey high cell blocks with no foundations, the brickwork being laid straight onto planks placed on the ground. Classy …

Around eight feet of mediæval poo being excavated by hand.

Turns out Soane had not bothered to dig as he wanted to save money, simply placing his boards on top of the surface he found inside the keep. Boardman's workmen shifted around eight feet of filth before they found the original floor of the keep. They also discovered the well and cleared it out to incorporate into the new museum. The mound itself was not collapsing, merely the eight feet of mediæval poo under Soane's cell blocks.

The brickwork on the upper levels is from the 1707 repairs.

Demolition was well under way and Boardman also gutted the panopticon prison wings, making structural improvements and replacing the slate roofs with glazing to light the proposed galleries.

Some on the committee had objected to re-using the panopicon prison buildings as they considered the association with criminals and debtors to be in poor taste. Luckily Boardman slapped them down as the panopticon turned out to be the ideal layout for a multi-gallery museum. He also retained the heating ducts, just as we are re-using them today.

Some of Salvin's re-facing left a little to be desired.

The outside of the keep needed a little TLC, too, so Boardman's stonemasons did the necessary. All in all, things were going very well indeed.

Next time: a tragic death fucks things up royally, plus more of Boardman's lovely 1880s photographs, showing the new works under way.

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

Norwich Since 1550: ed: Carole Rawcliffe & Richard Wilson: 2004 

Norwich Mercury Archives.

Norwich Records Office: Slum Clearance Photograph Archive.

The Oxford History of England: Volume XIV:"England, 1870 to 1914" Sir Robert Ensor (ed): 1936

 

The Oxford History of England: Volume XV:"English History, 1914 to 1945" A.J.P.Taylor (ed): 1965