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