This wasn’t the first square of my local map that didn’t have a lot of open space on it. It won't be the last. When I get to the outer edges there is a lot of rural to be explored, but I decided to spiral out from the centre and the centre of my map has a lot of city space.
It was this square that made me realise I can approach my local map differently from the guy who inspired the enterprise. For Humphreys* it was all about finding the wild space close to home, about a different kind of adventure. I’ve been gradually discovering that for me it isn’t just about the wild spaces close to home, it is about all the places close to home, wild and otherwise.
Some of mine is wild, surprisingly so. I have found patches of woodland and riverbank that I didn’t know about, but there’s also the semi-wild and the un-wild and I think that matters too. I don’t want to discount the semi- and un-wild, because they also have beauty and wisdom for us if we bother to look. Sometimes they just have quite interesting stories, which I feel also have a place. This was the map-square where I accepted that I didn’t have to be an adventurer; I could also choose to be a tourist.
Towns and cities are where most of us live, either by choice or necessity, so surely we should also look for beauty there and share what we find. That might well be natural beauty, there is a lot of greenery and mini-wilderness in our back yards, but also let’s look at…hmm…I was going to say “the un-natural beauty” by which I would have meant “the man-made” but that would undermine one of my central tenets, which is that we too are nature. If a termite mound is a phenomenon of nature, why isn’t a human city?
This was the square that reinforced the idea that I should not discriminate against the man-made. Instead, I should simply put it in its context. Perhaps I’d already been doing that in my rambles through suburban streets and the memory lanes they led me into, but this outing was leading me into the heart of the City and I could no longer fudge the issue. It is time to be explicit about it.
I want to know places, in all their wildness and all their timidity and constraint. I want to see what I can glean of histories. This was the square that made me realise I am not on a nature ramble. I’m just rambling. Exploring old, well-built-on, much-storied ground. And I am curious about the stories.
On a podcast today, I heard someone say: "We are all kin, therefore all of the ancestors are ours to call upon, if we do so with respect." **
For me respect begins in genuine, open, curiosity - in the simple wanting to know about what is, what was, who people are or were. It begins in wanting to know the stories.
This was also, then, the square that made me realise that I didn’t have to cram the whole richness of its boundaried space into one walk. It, perhaps belatedly, occurred to me that the depth of a one-kilometre square might be more than its width. It’s so obvious in retrospect. If I find more things that I want to spend time with, then I should give them the time they ask for.
This little write-up has taken a few weeks because, surprisingly, it also took a little while longer for me to realise that I could write about it the same way. If it took more than one visit on the ground, why not let it take more than one revisit on the page?
Why not just capture ‘enough’ for one day and go back again? I may be here some time.
The Dell
It sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? Romantic even. But there is nothing of either idyll or romance about the patch of wilderness known as The Dell. It is wild. In the sense of neglected, unloved. Perhaps feral would be a better word. It is a small space. Probably an old chalk quarry, left as amenity space because of the instability of the ground beneath it. I’m loving the unexpected green spaces I’m finding in my city, but there are green spaces and green spaces, and however we feel about our need for wildness and nature connection, the fact is that some of them need to be more closely managed.
Norwich is lucky in the extent of its wilder areas and in the number of its Victorian parks, and other public open space. It is an extremely green city. Most are well tended. The Dell has not been.
It is something of an orphan child that has been allowed to slip through the cracks. Occasionally efforts have been made, a bit of cutting here, a bench there. A rough-carved sculpture to commemorate the day in the Spring of 1988 when a mediaeval tunnel opened and attempted to swallow the number 26 bus. Mostly though, it feels like one of those places we would have been told not to go as children. It is a place where people who, to be fair, may have little other recourse, go to hide in the daylight-dark away from view, drinking their solace and doing their deals. It is a dark and unhappy place. A littered place. An overgrown place.
When I visit I do not venture into its depths. I’m well past the age of being told not to go into the old scrap lands, but some of them tell me clearly enough themselves that I would rather not venture in. This has long been one of them. I am pleased, therefore, to see the notice on the railing advertising a City Council consultation on what should be done to improve the place. By the time I get to logging on the consultation has closed, but the responses tended to support my own views, that an extra gate to make it through-way, not a dead-end, an opening up of the canopy to allow more ground-growing species, especially in the Spring. Bat and bird boxes. Benches for people. I wouldn’t want this turned into a garden – there is one of them right next door, more on which in a later posting – but it would respond to a little care.
St John’s Cathedral
The Roman Catholic Cathedral is hard by the Dell, which makes me wonder about its foundations. It is a long time since I have been inside, and this was not the day for it. I need to be in a church-mood for such things, and I suspect the desolation of the Dell had robbed me of it.
For all its pomposity and mediaeval appearance, the building is only a little over a hundred years old. Its construction was funded by Henry Fitzalan-Howard,15th Duke of Norfolk – ostensibly as a thanksgiving for his marriage. I can’t help feeling that it was something of a vanity-project, sitting awkwardly as it does on the cramped corner site where Earlham & Unthank roads join – a site previously occupied by the City Gaol. I find it hard to avoid the word pretentious.
On another day I will visit its interior and try to be kinder in my responses. On this idling walk though, I was more taken with the way the sun suddenly burst from behind its buttressed walls.
Pottergate Underpass
Walking in cities is no different to walking in the countryside in the sense that you need to allow yourself to be led. The best kind of plan amounts to no more than having a starting point and being open to what catches your eye. No matter how well we think we know our home space, we are so wrong. It changes. And it does not. There are things that are fleeting and things that are ancient. In looking for the one, we stumble into the other.
I’m slowly becoming a lover of street-art, in all its forms, from the formal statuary celebrating people that we need to remember, even if no longer celebrate, through the sponsored murals that cheer up city façades, to the informal beautifying of underpasses and flyovers and random bits of car parks.
Let me emphasise the word art. I’m into the pictures and the creativity. I am upset by random scrawling by people who have neither artistry nor sensibility and waste their aerosol paint destroying others’ work. That is just envy and anger, and it is sad. And it annoys me greatly.
Sometimes, I will stumble across a piece of old-fashioned graffiti that is witty enough to break my own rule on this. If it makes me smile, I’ll allow it.
None of that on this occasion. Instead, heading along my planned route down Grapes Hill, alongside the old city walls, mostly now vanished, I got diverted into the Pottergate underpass, led astray by bright and joyful paintings. Subsequent cyber-trawls suggest that this is an ongoing project, that such art has short lifespans, and maybe that is part of its point – an exuberance of being in the moment. On this occasion it was cartoon animals that took my fancy, a cat-like character, an owl. Bright colours in a dark space. Beautifying the world doesn’t have to be elegant. It can also be childlike and fun.
I also liked that my pausing to take pictures seemed to encourage a passing couple to do likewise. To stop and look more closely. The fact that they turned them into selfies kind of undermined the point, but at least they stopped and looked.
Hampshire Hog Yard and theThatched Cottage
I have lived in Norwich for all but two years of my adult life. How did I not know that there is a thatched cottage still in the heart of the city? Dating from the 17th century, painted in what is known locally as Suffolk pink, the cottage now labours under the unimaginative name of ‘the Thatched Cottage’. Accurate but somehow sad.
I wish it had taken on the name of the public house that once stood adjacent, the 19th century Hampshire Hog, but that’s possibly just because I have a long-languishing project to do with old inn names.
Many of the Norwich’s long-gone ale houses are remembered by their “yards” whose names are preserved in street addresses dotted around the city. A Hampshire Hog Yard sign is still there above an old gateway.
The licensee for the Hampshire Hog (to be distinguished from the Hog in Armour a very few streets away) was once the boxer John “Licker” Pratt. Pratt’s claim to fame was beating Jem Mace, future champion of England at various weights, in a bare-knuckle fight that lasted over two hours. This is sometimes claimed to be the first public boxing match in the country, by which I can only assume
they mean one with some semblance of rules of engagement as opposed to the prize-fighting that had gone on for centuries. Or maybe one that people paid to come and watch?
Pratt was not new to the game...
“It was reported that onTuesday 26th November 1850, `Liquor' Pratt and labourer John Pratt were called to give evidence at the inquest into the death, the day before, of 21-year-old Benjamin Ellis. The two named were seconds for Mr. Ellis in a fight against Robert Baker, which had arisen from a drunken quarrel. Fighting for stakes of £1 a side, each fighter had been accompanied by two seconds. After a lengthy conflict it was ended with Ellis being seriously injured whist he was on the
ground. Conveyed home he died of his beating. After the fight, Baker and his seconds absconded. Following an autopsy, on Thursday 28th November the Jury returned a verdict of manslaughter against Baker and all four seconds. Baker and his seconds had not been apprehended.” ***
Whether our John "Licker" Pratt was the Liquor Pratt or the labourer John in the above article, He was clearly a lover of the pugilist arts, whence “Licker” might derive as a nickname. But it may equally revert back to the trade and a tendency to sell out of hours, for which one or other of them was fined in 1885. Possibly not a first offence?
Delving into this snapshot of history in a haphazard romp round the internet, I’m led once again to think about class differences. Duelling was considered a noble response among the aristocracy to feeling they had been insulted. When the “lower” classes responded likewise, without the pretence of swordplay or other weaponry, it was simply brawling. I struggle to see the difference.
The public house licence for the Hampshire Hog was dropped in 1912. The thatched cottage itself narrowly escaped slum clearance, which speaks to its condition at the time, in the 1930s. Thatch is a rare survival in the city. It was banned during the Tudor years because of the risk of fire. Presumably the actual public house was duly cleared.
That house claims further posthumous fame as being reckoned to be possibly the last place in England where logats was played.
Logats, or loggats, was a precursor of modern bowls. I’ve not delved into the rules, but in essence a round ‘jack’ was thrown to one end of the field of play, and then the loggats (truncheon-like objects) were thrown towards it, the aim being to get as close as possible. As early as 1363 it was banned as a pastime for Sundays, when able-bodied men were expected to be practicing more useful sports, like archery. This order was reinforced in1526. Again in 1541. Throwing sticks at stones was clearly not as useful to the King as firing arrows at enemies.
Legal or otherwise, Norwich citizens clearly continued at their sport. The Norfolk Mercury of 29th October 1887 has this:
The game… still survives in Norwich, and it is said that it is the only place in the kingdom where it is
still to be found. The game is played with a jack and six loggats. The jack is made of lignum vitae, or other similar hardwood, and is wheel shaped, like that which is used in skittles. That at the Hampshire Hog, St. Swithin’s, is nine inches in diameter, and three of four inches thick. The loggat is made of applewood, is at truncated cone, very much after the fashion of a policeman’s baton,
though somewhat larger. They each measure 27 in. in length tapering from a girth of 8 ½ in. or 9 in. at one end to 3 ½ or 4 in. at the other. Each player has three loggats, which he throws, holding lightly at the thin end.
The object is to get as near as possible to the jack, which has been thrown out on the ground in the same manner as the jack in a game of bowls is thrown out at the commencement of a game.
It is deemed to be the proper and the most skilful play that the loggat should make but one turn in the air, and then touching the ground, glide up to the jack with its thick end foremost. ... The scoring board, which may be described as an enlarged cribbage board, still exists. Nailed to a wall in the yard, it is now much the worse by reason of its age and exposure.” ****
I’m happy to see that attempts to revive the game continue.
One of the things I really miss about Clive, is not being able to come home, or out of my internet delving, with a hoard of I-did-not-know treasure. One of the joys of the current age, is being able to do exactly the same thing with random strangers.
There is no purpose to this, other than sharing what I find that intrigues, interests or pleases me. But maybe, in support of the original “Local” idea, it will get you delving in your own wider back yard, whether for history or wildness or both or art or something entirely different. The deeper point to the “Local” project is to look again at where we are. Look closer, on our own terms. Appreciate what we’ve got, and celebrate it so that others might also want to look in their own city centres, back streets, memory lanes and unexplored ordinary roads.
