Great Yarmouth By Heart eBook
My mum paid into a club at Palmers all year so she could go mad in December and pretend she hadn't planned it.
That shop opened as a drapers on our market in 1837. It was the first building in Great Yarmouth to have electric light put in, back in 1902. It came through two fires and it came through the bombing, which is more than most of the Rows managed. Then it went under in 2020 and that was 183 years finished.
Walk in that building today and the P is still up there in the glass. They saved it.
That's the town I've written about. Not the one on the postcards and not the one in them worst seaside town lists either, written by people who never got out the car park.
This is Great Yarmouth as you get it when you've lived here, or when you grew up here and moved away and still think about it more than you'd admit.
It's the Rows and what happened to them. It's the herring years, when this was the biggest port of its kind in the world and the quay was full of women gutting fish faster than you could watch. It's the winter of 1953 and what the water did, told properly and not as a spooky story. It's the Hippodrome, a building from 1903 with a floor that still sinks into a pool of water, sat behind an arcade where most visitors walk straight past it.
It's the Iron Duke, boarded up for the best part of twenty years, with bars inside built out of teak taken off a battleship. It's the argument about why Britannia on the Monument faces the wrong way. It's why the chips taste like that and nowhere else does them right.
And there's a spot up the north end that I nearly left out of the book altogether. It's in there, with directions, and I'd ask you to keep it to yourself.
What's in it
Chapters on the market and the chip stalls, with my verdict on the best one, which will start a row.
The Rows themselves. How 145 of them worked, the troll carts, what the 1942 raids took and what's still standing if you know where to look.
The herring. The Scotch girls, the curing yards, the bloater, and what happened when it all stopped.
Palmers, the Regent end of the market, and the shops that made this town's Christmases.
The seafront the way locals use it, not the way it's advertised. Where to go in August when the Golden Mile is heaving.
The quiet coast. Caister, the lifeboat men who never turned back, the seals out on Scroby, and the bit of beach I still go to when I want my head straight.
A winter chapter, because anyone can love this place in July.
An honest chapter about how the town gets written about, the money that never quite lands, and what's actually being put back at the moment.
A Norfolk and Yarmouth word list for the young ones and for anyone marrying into it.
A few honest bits before you buy
It's a PDF. It lands in your email within a minute of paying. You can read it on a phone, on a tablet, on a computer, or print the whole thing off and stick it in a folder if that's more your thing.
It's not a tourist guide with opening times and prices in it, because that stuff is out of date by March. It's the other thing. The stuff you only know if this town made you.
Plenty of people buy this for someone else. A brother in Lincolnshire, a mum in a home, a dad who hasn't been back in thirty years and talks about it every Christmas. If that's you, it downloads straight away and you can forward the file on.
Free updates for life. When the Iron Duke opens its doors and the Winter Gardens finally comes back, I'll add it and you'll get the new version at no cost.
Written by someone from here. Every place, every name and every date in it is real.