Scoles Green

Leading off King Street, Stepping Lane, which now ends at Rouen Road formerly led to Scoles Green. It was a small triangular-shaped plain of dilapidated Georgian houses noted in the Norwich Plan - 1945 as of minor interest but of good design. In one of them the artist Robert Ladbrooke died on 11th October 1842. The illustration shows one of them with a plain facade, the central doorway of modest proportions, and with two of the first floor windows blocked. An additional storey, apparently added at some later date, and unlit by windows on this side, gave the house a rather disproportionate appearance.

According to “Jonathan Mardle” (Eric Fowler), writing in 1968 about this area, which was soon to be dominated by Prospect House, the new offices of Eastern Counties Newspapers, “Scoles Green was originally Scholars’ Green, the playground of a school that was kept before the Reformation beside the church of St Martin in Balliva”. He was here quoting the historian Francis Blomefield, but on the other hand the historian John Kirkpatrick wrote: “Then another lane…turns of to the S.E. past the South side of the Churchyard of St Martin’s of the Bale into a void ground called Scolds Green... One Willm Scoles had Tenements here Anno 9 Edw. 4 from whom probably it took its Name”.

Text and photographs Copyright © G.A.F.Plunkett 2001

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