Archives

Lost in a landscape: Gunton

When I was at primary school in the 1970s one of my friends lived in one of a row of cottages in Suffield. It backed onto a farmyard full of interlocking hay bales, knackered cars, and a grain store with an egg-timer mountain of grain surrounded by rats nests. We...

Hidden History: The Great Halls – Oak Street

Hidden history

A medieval traders hall, which always seems all but forgotten. One of the few survivors of the blitz and the clearings on the whole of Oak Street it nestles between Moonraker cycles which used to be Slaughters backing on to Mitchell’s Reclamation Yard which...

The walled city 2: Berstrete gates

Walled city

Ber Street Gate or Berstrete Gate, sitting just on the edge of Foulgers opening off Ber a Street and Bracondale. Another Norwich city wall fragment, not the gate itself. The gate no longer exists, nor do any of the others, largely a result mainly of progress (or...

Through Glass: Norwich 1900

Through glass

A few years ago I was fortunate enough to have a box of glass slides come into my possession, here are a few of them, one day I’ll get the whole lot scanned in and shared. But for now here are a selection of Norwich through the glass from about 1890 to 1920. I...

Westlegate: The tall boy at the back

Collapsing new buildings, Hidden history

I first met Westlegate tower in the 1970s, I would have been about seven or eight. It was just part of the background noise in a city where I had yet to link up all the parts. In 1975 it was just a place where my brother-in-law worked. And on a couple of occasions I...

Football, Xmas, WW1 & misinformation

The Great War

This is a photo of Officers and men of 26th Divisional Ammunition Train playing football in Salonika, Greece on Christmas day 1915. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the Christmas Truce of 1914 at all, in any way whatsoever, so I’m sticking it on here...

Collapsing new buildings: Sheffield

Collapsing new buildings

I used to go to Sheffield a fair bit, less so now as one of the reasons we went as often as we did (one of my children) now lives in Slovakia, one of the estimated 2 million Britons living in Europe that handily get ignored by the hysterics burbling on about...