Duke Street
Duke Street| Now largely covered by the St Andrew’s
multi-storey car park and the new Telephone Exchange,
across the Charing Cross end of Duke Street and
overlapping on to the adjoining sites, once stood the
Duke of Norfolk’s palace. It had been rebuilt in
1602 from a smaller structure, apparently making use of a
certain amount of material robbed from St Benet’s
abbey, in the marshes near Horning. In 1672 it was again
rebuilt or otherwise altered, only to be demolished in
1711 as a result of a quarrel three years earlier between
the Duke and the Mayor, Thomas Havers. Fortunately the
historian John Kirkpatrick had made drawings of it only
the previous year. From these it appears to have had a
large central courtyard, the main building standing to
the north and having a wing on either side extending
southward. Enclosing the court on the fourth side was a
raised terrace pieced by a central arched gateway.
Many will remember the Duke’s Palace inn (left), which stood midway between the old Public Library and the river. High up at the back a blocked window opening and the wall surrounding it had evidently originally formed part of the palace, but all was swept away when the inn was pulled down in 1968. All, that is, except for some foundations of the domestic wing, which were excavated and mapped in 1974 before being again covered by new development. The old Duke’s Palace Bridge (below), until 1972 carried the street over the Wensum. No previous bridge had occupied the site, but by early in the nineteenth century the need was felt for a more direct link between the north of the city and the market place. In September and October 1819, therefore, meetings presided over by the Mayor were held at the Guildhall to discuss the matter. There was a minor setback when a majority voted against the proposal, but at a further meeting at the end of November it was announced that £7,000 of the proposed £9,000 had been subscribed, raised by shares of £25 each, which left the way clear for promoting a Bill in Parliament. On 8th July 1820, the Bill had been passed by both Houses and on 28th August 1821, Alderman T. S. Day laid the foundation stone. The bridge, originally a toll bridge, was opened to traffic during the following year. The new road thus formed, built across the site of the old palace of the Dukes of Norfolk, linked Charing Cross and St John Maddermarket with Pitt Street and St Augustine’s. The bridge, adorned on either aide with the city’s coat of arms had a skew-span of approximately fifty feet. |
 In 1839 a Bill was
promoted in Parliament to provide, among other things,
for the freeing of this bridge and those at Carrow and
Thorpe (Foundry bridge). Four years later the local
inhabitants were still agitating for this to be done, and
it was not until 1855 that the tolls were lifted; a
celebratory dinner was held at the adjacent Duke’s
Palace inn to mark the event.By the 1930s the bridge was beginning to show its age, and a weight limit of twelve tons was imposed. At this time, too, with the city’s traffic becoming increasingly congested, plans were drawn up for a major road artery running from north to south through the centre of the city. This would have involved widening St Augustine’s, Pitt Street and Duke Street, with a new realigned bridge linking up with Exchange Street, the Market Place and St Stephen’s. Although apparently promoted by City Engineer Horace Rowley in the 1945 City of Norwich Plan, this arterial road idea was eventually superseded by the “ring and loop” scheme based on the inner link road, devised to preserve as much as possible of the city’s historic central area. In May 1972, it was found necessary to reduce the weight limit on the hundred-and-fifty-year-old bridge to three tons. A few months later Duke Street was temporarily closed, the old bridge dismantled, and a new and wider one erected in its place. Supported by fifteen concrete beams, each sixty-five feet in length, the new bridge is of utilitarian design. The ironwork from one side of the old bridge, which had been listed as a structure of historic interest, was re-erected after twenty years in storage, above the entrance to the Castle Mall car park in Market Avenue. |
 Further north on Duke
Street, what was built in 1888 by the Norwich School
Board as a higher grade or municipal secondary school
still stands at the corner of Colegate; it is now put to
other educational uses. Here until 1958 two stone “lions
couchant” (left) guarded the entrances, each one
perched high above the street on a brick and stone
plinth. They were not carved especially for the school,
however, but were considered to be of seventeenth-century
origin and to have come from the Duke of Norfolk’s
palace on the other side of the river. In between times
they had flanked the entrance to the Duke’s Head
inn, on the site of which the school was built.In 1958, because the brick piers on which they were mounted were showing signs of decay, the lions were taken down to be cleaned and put into store awaiting transfer to some other appropriate location. I have been unable to discover whether they are still in store or have been found another home. I am tempted to think of the fate threatened to the family portraits in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore, that if they didn’t behave themselves they would be given to the nation and “nobody would ever see them again”. Text and photographs Copyright © G.A.F.Plunkett 2001 |
One wing, the domestic
offices, was allowed to remain after all else had gone
and this was later leased to the Court of Guardians for
use as a workhouse. A drawing of this reproduced in the
book A Great Gothic Fane (published in 1913)
showed a building whose most remarkable feature was a
double row of dormer windows (eight in each row) giving
light to the roof space.