St Peter’s Street
St Peter’s Street
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The old
White Swan is a more interesting building than the casual
observer realises. It is a very substantial oak
timber-framed building, probably of about the same date
as the Strangers’ Club on Elm Hill... the frontage,
which is supposed to look like a brick wall, is simply a
covering of hanging tiles, shaped to look like bricks,
concealing the brown oak framework and plaster filling of
the Tudor house. This was due to a fashion for
modernising in late Georgian times. Underneath is one of
the best groined cellars in Norwich, belonging to an
earlier building on this site and dating from the
fifteenth century or thereabouts... It was not until 1961 that the site was finally cleared and a car park established in front of the Central Public Library. One feature considered worthy of preservation was a quaint little wooden figure forming a supporting bracket at one end of the first floor jetty. This is now an exhibit in the Bridewell museum, Norwich. |
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The houses affected were Nos 20-36 Bethel Street, together with Blazeby’s Yard and Jay’s Court at the rear. Most of the houses fronting the street were of the Tudor period, timber framed, plaster faced, with slightly jettied first floor and with one or more dormers lighting the attic. Except that No 36, next door to Lacey and Lincoln’s builders’ yard, had been a public house known as the Coachmakers’ Arms, their history seems to have been uneventful. All were in a very rundown condition at the time of their disappearance. The new Fire Station was opened on 8th November 1934, by the Lord Mayor, Mr F. C. Jex, and with little waste of time, work commenced in the following year on clearing the remainder of the site for the new City Hall. On the Bethel Street side this involved Nos 2-18 inclusive. Their sites would now be in the middle of the present carriageway, since the street formerly tapered to a single traffic lane at this end. The first few houses were nondescript nineteenth-century three-storeyed buildings of red brick, No 2 being the Mancroft Restaurant. At No 14 was latterly the Idolene Manufacturing Company, occupying premises formerly the Wheatsheaf inn and retaining its sign above the door, moulded in plaster. It has been suggested that this was intended for a sheaf of barley, for the old Barley Market dating back to the reign of Edward I was formerly held in an adjacent yard. One of the chief attractions here was the skittle alley, but the inn also afforded stabling on the opposite side of the road for the accommodation of carriers. These stables in fact outlasted the inn, surviving until 1960 as lock-up shops, including those of a tobacconist and a secondhand furniture dealer. The inn itself was a Tudor building of several gables, and it was reported at the time of its demolition that certain of its oak beams were to be preserved at one of the city’s museums. There is no record that this was ever done. |
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Round the corner in St Giles’ Street perhaps the saddest loss was occasioned by the demolition of No 12, a fine early Georgian mansion seen only on entering Low’s Yard - a yard which derived its name from the occupant of the mansion over many years, Frederick Low, a veterinary surgeon. During the 1920s the Norwich Education Committee also had its offices here. Now the City Hall tower stands near the site, but the central doorway of No 12 was saved and may now be seen, shorn of its side windows, in the courtyard of the Bridewell museum. |
Text and photographs Copyright © G.A.F.Plunkett 2001 |
Immediately within the shadow of St
Peter Mancroft’s tower stood No 31 St
Peter’s Street, formerly the White Swan. Records
show it to have been an inn as far back as the fifteenth
century, and although during the twentieth century it was
occupied by a firm of wholesale grocers and latterly by
motorcycle factors, many of the structural features of
the earlier period remained, including the bar parlour,
the cellars and a large assembly room. It was in this
room that plays were enacted by the Norwich Company of
Comedians before Thomas Ivory built his New Theatre in
1757-8, and as late as 1820 a “ballet of action and
dance” and a masquerade were being advertised as
taking place at the “Little Theatre, Swan inn”.
In addition to this it was, during the eighteenth
century, one of the city’s well-known coaching inns;
the journey to London was made in one day.
In 1936 when the future of the old inn
was first threatened, Sidney Glendenning wrote to the
Press as follows:
Mancroft Yard (left), which lay
behind the neighbouring Free Trade Tavern (below),
was pulled down at the beginning of the Second World War.
It had been described by Ian Hannah as “a good
example of fine old 15th century buildings converted into
squalid tenements”. There were in fact two yards
here, one behind the other, with the gabled timber-framed
building illustrated lying between the two. At the street
entrance (but now preserved in one of the Norwich
museums) was a small wooden arch bearing the
grocers’ arms and a merchant’s mark in one
spandrel and the initials “M.B.” in the other.
These could be the initials of Margaret Barnard, who
lived here in 1626, or those of Michael Beverley, Mayor
in 1692, to whom the property later belonged. He was a
grocer, but the character of the archway seems earlier
than the latter part of the seventeenth century. On the
other hand in 1626 it was certainly unusual, if not
unknown, for women to use such a mark and arms.
Undoubtedly the biggest development
affecting the heart of the city during the 1930s was the
construction of the City Hall and the consequent
remodelling of the market place. For many years Norwich
Corporation had been acquiring property in an area
bounded by Bethel Street, St Peter’s and St
Giles’ Streets with this in mind, and early in 1933
demolition commenced to permit the construction of the
Fire Station - the most urgently needed of the civic
buildings.
No 18 Bethel Street was a large
building of three storeys, its exterior wall cement
rendered and partly panelled. The doorway that formed its
main entrance, now transferred to the inner courtyard of
the Strangers’ Hall museum, is a lofty one of the
Adam period, with fluted pillars supporting an open
pediment below which, in place of a fanlight, is a plain
semi-circular tympanum. The building had been used for a
variety of purposes, having been divided up during its
latter years. In 1883 it was occupied by F. W.
Harmer’s clothing factory, but it was later taken
over be E. Pordage’s, the wholesale fruiterers.
Portions were also occupied by a billiard saloon and a
signwriter’s studio. In the past it had also been
used as a school for higher education and by
Forster’s mineral water works - a well was said to
have existed on or adjacent to the premises. Indeed when
excavation took place a number of wells were uncovered
scattered over the whole area.
In St Peter’s Street at Nos
15-17 was a half-timbered building worthy of note. At
one time a public house, its sign was changed during the
Great War in a burst of patriotism from the Wounded Hart
to the Kitchener’s Arms. White’s Norfolk
Directory of 1836, however, shows it was then the Wounded
Heart, with an “e”. A portion of the staircase
with its balustrade as well as a fireplace surround was
earmarked for preservation when the property was
demolished. Another half-timbered house stood just behind
in Wounded Hart Lane, its site now covered by the City
Hall steps.
Further along, No 7 was once the
Beehive public house. This was a late Georgian building
that retained to the last a shop front of that period.
Adjoining was Pope’s Head Yard with the inn
of that name, described by Walter Wicks as one of the
oldest in Norwich, since the sign no doubt pre-dated the
Reformation.
Returning to the Market Place, few
people regretted the passing of the old Municipal
Buildings, least of all those that worked there. Standing
on the west side of the square, the offices were housed
in a block largely made up of late nineteenth-century
public houses and hotel buildings. The little corner at
the south end, however, was much older. These were once
the Black Prince and the Waterloo taverns - the
former with its gabled roof, and the latter with its
balcony and wide bay windows, of which full use was made,
no doubt, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when
electioneering produced such lively scenes. Together
these buildings paired admirably in both age and
appearance with the nearby Sir Garnet Wolseley.