A Fine City: Local Secrets, Honest Stories & the Real Norwich
Four hundred years ago this city took in strangers with nothing. It is still singing about them.
In 1565 the wool trade was dying and Norwich was skint. The mayor stood up in front of the aldermen and said the answer was to invite foreigners in. Thirty master weavers from the Low Countries and their households. About three hundred people, off a boat, with a trade in their hands and not much else.
They got called the Strangers. By 1582 there were four and a half thousand of them, roughly a third of the city.
And they brought their birds. Little yellow things in cages, hung up beside the looms, because they would sing along to the rhythm of the weaving. So when a football club went looking for a nickname, it did not have to look far.
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This is not a list of the top ten things to do.
There is no council leaflet in here. No "why not stroll along the historic cobbles." What is in here is the stuff that makes people who have lived in Norwich their whole lives go quiet and say they never knew that.
Elm Hill, the street on every postcard, was a slum in the 1920s with swimming baths planned for the north side. It survived by one vote. One. Kett, a farmer out of Wymondham, was hanged from the castle walls in 1549, and four hundred years later the city put a plaque up at the castle entrance calling him courageous and using the word reparation. It is still there, and almost everyone walks straight past it.
Bank Plain. St Andrews Plain. Every other city calls them squares. Norwich calls them plains, because that is Dutch, and the Strangers are still sat in the street signs.
And the view.
There is one place where the whole city lays itself out in front of you at first light. Spires, flint, the cathedral, the lot, with almost nobody else there. It is completely free, and most people who live here have never stood on it at that hour.
You get the exact walk in, the exact spot and the exact timing, because turn up twenty minutes late and you have missed it.
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Who it is for
People born here who reckon they know it all. People who moved here and want to stop feeling like a visitor. People who left and still get a lump in their throat when the spire comes into view from the train. And anyone coming for a weekend who does not fancy spending it doing exactly what everybody else does.
Free updates for life
The city keeps changing. Openings, closures, prices, the things that quietly stop being true. Every time the book is updated you get the new edition, and you never pay for it again. Buy once, own every version.
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Published by Roots & Routes.