What do you think when someone says the word, Norwich? for people outside Norfolk, they may think of the city as they place were “Alan Partridge” comes from or see the city as some backwater. What they don’t understand is that the history of Norwich stretches back a long time as the city originally started off as a collection of small Anglo-Saxon settlements.
Because of the river Wensum, Norwich soon grew to become a sizeable town but would suffer a major setback in 1004 when the Danes ransacked and burned down the city.
Though, even having the city burnt down would not stop Norwich from quickly recovering as by 1086, the population of Norwich had grown to 6,000 people.
In 1194, King Richard I of England granted Norwich city status. The city status and the role of Norwich as a centre of trade of many products, especially wool, would contribute to the growth of the local economy.
The journey of Norwich becoming the second biggest city in England would not be the smoothest. As the city would see the city having; multiple outbreaks of Bubonic Plague, civil unrest (Including attempts to overthrow the king) and devastating fires.
The 1665-1666 Bubonic Plague outbreak in particular would lead to an uptick unemployment from rich residents leaving the city and would leave the city narrowly avoiding a severe food shortage (big catch of herrings from Great Yarmouth).
Norwich would also recover from the downturn caused by the 1665 outbreak and finally become the second biggest city in England and recover to its pre-English Civil war population of 25,000 people (1700 population).
However, this success was not to last as the reliance on the wool trade would come back to haunt the city as the industrial revolution sent the wool trade into decline.
Companies in Northern England were investing mechanised textile processing while Norwich was still using traditional weaving techniques, causing the city to lose business to the north.
Though, the British Agricultural Revolution would be a massive positive for the entire county and contribute to the rapid growth of the population of the city. The range of business would diversify afterwards (Shoemaking, food processing, and eventually engineering and insurance). The economy of Norwich would become based and services and tourism.
Nowadays, Norwich is seeing a booming professional services industry and with its more high-end apartments being built, meaning even though the city has many historic buildings, the city has a lot going for it.
The Cat & Fiddle was a classic “old-fashioned” pub, meaning it only served beer and basic bar snacks, but of cause over time the Cat and Fiddle developed a reputation with locals of being a pub where “undesirable” people would go to get themselves’ drunk, drinking Stella, who then would often go on to become an annoyance for the whole community. Signs of a lack of investment in the pub by its’ owners was present by the early 2000’s, with the pub switching owner at least once since the mid 2000’s and then finally closing in 2011.
As the 1990s came to the close, A relatively large part of the Norwich area went through a period of rapid redevelopment. That is not surprising as just like the rest of England, most of Norfolk benefited greatly from the influx of cash from the housing boom of the early to mid-2000s. Some of the building projects around Norwich in this time period had at least some degree of controversy and even worse, the 2007 to 2010 financial crisis led to some projects being delayed or outright cancelled.
If you live anywhere within Norfolk, then you probably know the city of Norwich pretty well. But for people outside of the county, the history of this fine city is very much an unknown. Norwich was granted city status in 1194, this means that the city is over 823 Years old. This means that Norwich has been a city for twice as long as America and Canada have been countries, combined.
Anglia Square is a brutalist shopping centre (formally multiuse) built in the early 1970’s. The centre itself is located just off Magdalen Street, with some of its’ storefronts being accessible from the street itself. Over the past two decades, Anglia Square has been through consistent decline, due to Sovereign House closing and the general deprivation of the local area.