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!