Old Dive's History of Norwich Castle - Part the Eleventh - 1121 Revisited - Chapter I

Our brief from the Norfolk Museums Service and Historic England was to complete Edward Boardman's vision of returning the keep at Norwich Castle to its 1121 incarnation but to make every part of it fully accessible to all people without damaging the remaining Norman fabric.

 A general view of our model of proposed works to the keep. All drawings copyright F+M.

We were also asked to replace the awful 1960s toilets in the basement with a new services building including LOTS of wcs for all sexes (Douglas Adams said that the nastiest trick God played on humans was to create the nine sexes but tell us there were only two) and sizes and wheelchair users, adult and baby changing facilities and goodness knows what else. This was to be built on the site of the old 1960s café but without touching the archæological remains of Edward Longhsanks' palace which lay just below the floor and without damaging the north face of the keep which it abuts.

Oh, and we were to provide two large lifts to all floors including the roof and three new fire escape stairs, two inside the keep and one just outside, bring the whole building up to current fire standards and yet make all of this completely invisible.

I do love impossible tasks, especially ones with impossible deadlines. Yay!

Fun with Building Information Modelling (BIM). Old Dive's working model.

 In case anyone misses the gratuitous grossness of my earlier posts we did manage to track down the "mystery pong" which haunts the prison area.

Turns out that during the works in the 1960s to form the central rotunda and new offices and wcs, the old Victorian wc behind the Benefactors' Room was disconnected. Only they forgot to reconnect it to the revised sewer system and for the past five-and-a-half decades everyone using it has had their pee and poo soak directly into the castle mound.

Needless to say the folk at the castle were horrified at the discovery but investigative works to the mound have revealed no structural damage or cavities full of poo, so now the thing is reconnected we just have to wait a few more decades for the no-longer-mystery pong to dissipate. At least it's an authentic mediæval type of smell …

While the powers-that-be were battling the planners, fighting for Scheduled Ancient Monument consent, slapping down the Victorian Society, desperately scrabbling around for workable business plans and eventually getting hold of a large chunk of the £13.5 million budget from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Old Dive was brought into the project to work on the BIM model and to make damned sure the historic structure was protected; an especially important task with the sad passing of period building conservation deity and personal mentor Hugh.

Leading our international team of annoying accents (of which my Norfolk accent is by far the most annoying), superwomen G (Architect - Dominican Republic) and E (Lead Partner - French Canadian) in London and Norwich work on all the bits outside the keep, replacing the crappy 1960s buildings and designing G's whizzy new glass wheelchair access bridge, while I get to play with the Norman keep itself and figure out how to stop the new works from harming the historic structure. It'll be my last big conservation job before I retire so I'm happy to go out on a good one.

Our little team has grown as works are now underway. C (posh Brit gal) has joined us to deal with the planners and project management and D (Hairy Viking) has been drafted in as a BIM and Scandi-folk-metal specialist. Mebbe if we're all still alive we'll have a group photo at the opening. It appears coincidental that all team members have ponytails though only D and me sprout grizzled beards as the token menfolk.

Our video meetings do tend to look and sound like a multi-cultural hippie convention. Hey ho.

Part of the archæological dig in the basement of the keep.

Note the black line of the burnt porpoise feast of Christmas 1121.

Photo, courtesy Old Dive.

We have not - repeat not - yet located the missing grizzly bear. Apparently back in the mid-1960s the museum took possession of a massive dead grizzly bear and the guys from the Skins Department (yup, that's what it's called) decided to bury it under the car park on top of the mound to de-flesh it. Meaning to dig it up after a couple of years and mount the skellington they promptly forgot where they had buried it and in the meantime the car park had been resurfaced.  Our works will come quite close to that area in the coming year so watch this space for ursine updates.

Here's a photo the contractor sent through showing a temporary crash deck at upper basement level and the first lifts of scaffolding within the keep. Taken during February 2021.

So … after years of prep work, what began life as "The Box On The Hill" and then became "Norwich Castle, Gateway to Mediæval England" before finally settling on "Norwich Castle - Royal Palace Reborn" has at long last started on site. I'll be posting more as the works progress so do pop in occasionally to see how we're getting on. I'll probably do a progress post once every few weeks unless anything startling or spiffy turns up.

For now, however, toodle pip from Merrie England!

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

As I've related a tedious number of times before (usually in a Monty Python cod North-Yorkshire accent), when I were a wee lad we 'ad no mains drainage and just a cold tap in't back yard. Mam cooked on't old black-leaded range, we 'ad a wood-fired copper in't corner for 'eating water an'a tin bath hung oop on a nail on't wall. Sundays were bath day an' we'd all tek turns in't tin bath in't middle o't back room floor.

Wust of all was th' outside privy … no light at night unless yer thought ter bring a candle, 'twas a haunt of darkness and spiders an' a terror to me wee self.

Mercifully the council came to the rescue in the early 1960s, putting in mains drainage on our street and building us a kitchen and bathroom extension, albeit in half-brick flettons and a metal framed window so the frost formed indoors and the walls ran with damp.

Conditions in Norwich before the slum clearance of the 1930s were far worse. Grasping landlords who had no intention of ever repairing their buildings crammed more and more poor families into what was a filthy, disease-ridden midden.

Mancroft Yard, prior to the 1930s slum clearance. Note the tower of St.Peter Mancroft in the background and the lovely touch of an oche drying in the yard.

From the late 1920s through the 1930s - right up to the the start of the war in 1939 - Norwich City Council compulsorily purchased the sadly neglected housing from the landowners / landlords, at the same time building the council estates that ring Norwich, the houses of which are still far and away of a higher standard than even today's private spec. developers' housing. Solid masonry walls, proper cut timber roofs, large gardens for growing fruit and veg and keeping small livestock. A paradise compared to their old slum housing. And of course the rents were set by the council at what folk could afford; nobody was going to get evicted after a rate hike. Yay Socialism.

The inevitable result of allowing private landlords.

Whole neighbourhoods were flattened. An old friend (hi, Lynne) spent her childhood in a warren of slum streets just down the hill from the Castle and the cattle market. They lived in a one-up/one-down back-to-back terrace but she remembers it as being idyllic. Her gang of kids could run down to the river for a paddle and just up the hill behind her house were the meadows where the cattle drovers would let their horses graze on market days and let the kids feed them apples and carrots. All long gone to office blocks and multi-storey car parks … Alas and alack.

Elm Hill as it was in the 1930s.

In 1923 the Norwich Society was formed as a pressure group to try to preserve as much of historical Norwich as they could. Founded by Architects and antiquarians, they managed to save the fourteenth century Bishop's Bridge, the Cathedral Close, the Castle and the Guildhall among others.

In the 1930s they somehow managed to rescue Elm Hill and get it removed from the slum clearance plans. See above and below. They carefully restored it and it is now one of the finest mediæval streets in Europe (though it's often closed down for filming some movie or TV show)

Elm Hill. Yes, I know it's a plane tree, but Dutch Elm disease killed all our elms when I was a kid.

Courtesy the interweb.

 

That's the Norwich Society's headquarters in the jettied building to the right.

They do a damned fine meal and some really boring conferences.

Courtesy the interweb.
 

More Elm Hill, this time courtesy Old Dive. Love that shadow.

If only there had been funds available to save more. Even with great chunks of its heart ripped out Norwich is still one of the finest mediæval cities on this or any other planet.

Other odd things happened here in the twentieth century … The yellow building in the first of the coloured Elm Hill pics above was where Mister and Mrs Beethoven lived with Chopper Mozart in Monty Python's Flying Circus.

"And now for something completely different."

Cleese on Norwich Castle mound.

 

A very young Michael Palin by the poop chutes at the castle, filming the

Queen's Own Kamikaze Highlanders sketch,

where they hurled bagpipe-wielding dummies from the battlements.

Both pics, courtesy the interweb.

Python was only one of many to film in Norwich and Norfolk. Basically, we were cheap and we have a LOT of stately homes for period dramas. We also had some weird location filming here … Full Metal Jacket's sequences of helicopter gunships shooting up Vietnamese villages were filmed on the Norfolk Broads, home of Old Dive. Ditto, lots of Red Dwarf episodes … Yay!

One last look at the 2000 Millennium works done at the castle to assist wheelchair access before we go.

"It's GLASS … I tell you it'll be completely invisible!"

Never trust an Architect. Mercifully this was not us, but a rival who shall remain nameless, bless 'em.

The Great Glass Elevator … That's how not to do it; next time we shall look at how to do it properly.

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 

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

During the twentieth century Norwich Castle Museum grew like Topsy as more exhibits were obtained and new collections donated. Of the many galleries, the most sacrosanct is the Ted Ellis Gallery, opened in the 1930s and consisting of "old-fashioned" yet utterly beautiful dioramas of all the divers types of habitat found around Norfolk and its coastlines, highlighting the plants, birds and animals in each. Ted Ellis was a much-loved naturalist - a precursor to David Attenborough and a national treasure, and worked all his life at the castle (crafting the tiniest flowers, grasses and insects out of wax) and at his own nature reserve.

Part of the Ted Ellis Gallery, courtesy Rob Cadd of ZooChat.com.

A haven of calm for old folk like me; the parties of schoolkids never stay in here, they hare off to the more exciting activities, like riding a replica of a Boudicca era chariot around a virtual landscape.

The ground floor of Norwich Castle Museum. 2000.

The keep is at the lower left. Over the decades, the spaces between the panopticon wings have been infilled to add more galleries.

We will look at our new plans later on. Courtesy Norfolk Museums Service.

 

Norwich Castle Museum roofscape. Courtesy Norfolk Museums Service.

While the museum was growing, the city outside was modernising, tearing down centuries of building heritage, first with the 1930s slum clearances, moving the poor out into satellite social housing, then with German bombs, lastly with the disastrous 1960s planning policies. This last desecration "invited" traffic into the heart of the mediæval city, bulldozing dozens of historic streets to form an "inner ring road" of hideous office blocks which quickly became a smog-laden car park where nothing moved.

Mercifully, the City Council came to its senses. Basically the Tories were kicked out and replaced by the Socialist Workers' Party (yes, America; real Socialists in power) and then the Greens, who have spent decades forcing traffic back out of the historic centre and restoring what it can. Like Austin in Texas, Norwich is a beacon of lefty sanity in an ocean of right-wing Tory farmland, we are still a defiantly left-wing city, a European cultural capital, UNESCO city of world literature, a haven for writers, artists and intellectuals with a superb university and a world-leading genome research centre as well as my lovely castle.

Bull Close off Cowgate was only a few yards from the church of St.James the Less by Pockthorpe Gate, which now houses Norwich's excellent Puppet Theatre. Courtesy Norwich Records Office.

By the end of Victoria's reign, industrial and manufacturing expansion and lack of investment in housing for the brutally exploited workers had left Norwich a warren of overcrowded, cholera-infested slum courtyards, Norfolk's hellish version of Dickens' St.Giles Rookeries or that squalid pismire that saw the miserable end of Bill Sikes: Jacob's Island.

All very picturesque but a darkly Dickensian place to live. Imagine coming home from the factory to a garret in the picture above, in driving rain and pitch darkness. Wages were still set at the lowest figures possible to sustain life so your lighting would be bits of candle end and your heating, a mean grate in which to burn scavenged branches or scrounged sea coal and dust.

A common pump provided the streets' water, often cholera-laden and if you were lucky a common privy in a nearby yard from where the gong-farmers came round nightly with their barrows to sell your shit as fertiliser.

Around this time, a (very) few enlightened employers were building social housing for their workers such as at Port Talbot or Bourneville but most capitalists just squeezed the workforce until it dropped and used its obscene profits not on upkeep of the workers' houses but on large country estates for themselves and townhouses in London for the social season.

Norwich City Council in the 1930s was forced to compulsorily purchase the neglected housing stock, demolish it and build new (and vastly improved) social housing on the outskirts of the city. This social housing (much mocked by the Tories as "council estates" or "sink estates") was designed and built to a far higher standard than private housing as the council had to maintain them and so sensibly made them as maintenance-free as possible.

Now after the catastrophic Thatcher years where the Tories sold off the council housing to private owners, Norwich is fighting back against the private landlords with their Rackrent habits. Council housing is back and Norwich's Goldsmith Street PassivHaus council estate recently won the Stirling Prize for Architecture and has woken up city councils across the nation.

We shall take a last look at twentieth century Norwich Castle next time before moving on to the Royal Palace Reborn project (complete with site progress photos as we take them).

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 

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

The archives at Norwich Castle contain much that is splendid including Boardman's working drawings for the museum. First up, however, these must be either the worst-located benches in the history of human beings needing a sit down or a very nicely located seating arrangement for an extremely niche type of fetishist …

Bench seating beneath the eight great poop chutes of Norwich Castle. 1962.

Courtesy Norfolk Museums Service.

Sure, the view across the Great Cockey valley toward the market place and City Hall is spectacular, but if anyone decides they need to use the garderobes … 

Good old gratuitous grossness; we've not had a lot since mediæval times so I couldn't resist that one.

Now we shall wander downhill from the castle to Old Bank of England Court and the architectural drawing offices of Edward Boardman (and later of Old Dive). How much prettier the old drawings were than our modern computer degenerated versions …

Here is Boardman's scheme for his new stair up to the Bigod Tower (I've just last week - end of Feb, 2021 - issued my own drawings to the stonemasons for correcting this back to the original alignment). All Boardman drawings courtesy of Norfolk Museums Service.

 

An enlargement from the previous picture showing - along with a lovely ink-spatter - it being signed off by the committee, including Lord Walsingham and John Gurney, before it all went wrong.

 

Boardman's signature and date on another of the working drawings.

Boardman's scheme for the great stone arcade, atop the remains of the Norman spine wall.

Note again that John Gurney signs this one off.

Ah, if only John Gurney hadn't toddled of the the south of France for his health and got earthquaked to death … At least Boardman got the roof and the arcade built before the penny-pinchers ruined his grand scheme.

The keep interior in 1932.

 

Late mediæval Snap Dragon carnival costume atop a large box. 1932.

As these two photos demonstrate, the walkway proved useless as a museum gallery space. In 1970, Boardman's grandson H. C. Boardman wrote to the Eastern Daily Press, describing his grandfather's intention to reconstruct the principal floor and the Great Hall in the keep to help visitors understand the keep as it existed in the mediæval period. The campaign slowly grew and by the time Old Dive returned to Norwich from the dreary wastes of Westminster the idea of Royal Palace Reborn was beginning to come together.

We have nearly come to the end of our nine-hundred-year journey through the history of Norwich Castle but there's still a little more to come before Part the Eleventh - Royal Palace Reborn.

 

In  the meantime, here's Norwich Castle and the whacking great crane taken at sunset from my office last Thursday (25th Feb 2021).

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 

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

Boardman's idea was pretty much what we are now doing inside the keep. He planned to re-insert the Great Hall, King's Chamber and Chapel, thus returning the keep to its original incarnation as Henry the First's Royal Palace of 1121.

Boardman's new stone arcading on top of the remains of the spine wall.

All Boardman photos, courtesy Norfolk Museums Service.

However, tragedy struck within months of the project getting under way. At the age of only forty-one, Boardman's strongest supporter John Gurney shuffled off this mortal coil, supposedly due to heart failure during an earthquake when on a trip to Cannes, ironically for his health.

Without Gurney's robust support, both financially and on the design of the new museum, Boardman was helpless against the penny-pinching squabbling of the committee. Out went the Great Hall. Out went the King's Chamber. Out went the Chapel …

Out indeed went the entire floor. The committee insisted that he instead put in a gallery around the walls. Boardman was furious; he argued that the grand main entrance through the magnificent Norman arch of the Bigod Tower needed to actually lead somewhere. Losing that argument he insisted that the gallery be at least fifteen feet wide to allow room for exhibits.

He lost that one, too, which is why we ended up with the paltry walkway around the keep at what should be the main floor level.

The paltry walkway where the main floor should be.

Committees … Arseholes!

At least by the time the committee overruled Boardman he had managed to erect the great stone arcade and a rather splendid (if Victorian in style) glazed roof.

He complained bitterly to John Gurney's widow that the cost-cutting had ruined both his and John's plan to return the keep to its 1121 arrangement when Henry the First and Adeliza of Louvain had spent their Christmas at the castle, feasting on swan, peacock and porpoise (see Part the First).

The Norman grand entrance now just led to a walkway.

Every large construction project has to have a fire at some point and Norwich Castle Museum wasn't going to miss out. In March 1892 builders' negligence led to a fire in the panopticon. By good fortune a passing Police Constable (sadly not named in the Mercury's report) saw the light of the fire, ran up the mound, shinned up the castle walls (no mean feat in itself, especially in starchy uniform and hobnail boots) and extinguished the blaze. A shame we do not know his name as he deserves at least a plaque at the museum.

The damage was limited to "tools and some bushels of coke" (not the drink … or for that matter the drug).

The future King Edward the Seventh and Queen Alexandra.

At last, on October 23rd 1894, Norwich Castle Museum was opened by the then Duke and Duchess of York in front of a great crowd of the "better sort" of Norwich society.

The total cost of the museum, including fixtures and fittings ran out at £26,474. Our partial refurbishment, the Royal Palace Reborn project will cost in the region of £13.5 million, a figure certain to have given dear Mister Boardman the screaming abdabs and which causes me stomach ulcers and anxiety attacks as work progresses.

Here's the interior of Norwich Castle keep as it was once the penny-pinchers had ruined Edward Boardman's vision, showing that paltry bloody walkway. Photo courtesy Old Dive.

 

And here's the view from that paltry walkway. Where's the bloody FLOOR?

Sure, it's an impressive space but utterly useless as a museum and bearing no relation at all to how it would have looked when completed in 1121.

Photo and bad Photoshop stitching courtesy Old Dive.
 

Next time, we'll look at some of Edward Boardman's working drawings and see the worst located benches in the history of human sitting-down.

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