Origin The capital of the
Iceni tribe was a settlement located near the village of
Caistor St Edmund on the
River Tas about to the south of modern Norwich. After an uprising led by
Boudica in about 60 AD, the Caistor area became the
Roman capital of the Iceni ( in nowadays
East Anglia ) named
Venta Icenorum, literally "marketplace of the Iceni". This fell into disuse about 450 AD. The
Anglo-Saxons settled the site of the modern city some time between the 5th and 7th centuries, founding the towns of
Northwic ("North Harbour"), from which Norwich takes its name, and
Westwic (at
Norwich-over-the-Water) and a lesser settlement at Thorpe. Norwich became settled as a town in the 10th century and then became a prominent centre of East Anglian trade and commerce attested by the presence of a mint. The name Norvic is attested on pennies minted during the reign of Æthelstan.
Early English period and Norman conquest is one of the great Norman buildings of England. It is possible that three separate early Anglo-Saxon settlements, one north of the river and two either side on the south, joined as they grew; or that a single Anglo-Saxon settlement, north of the river Wensum-Yare, emerged in the mid-7th century after the abandonment of the previous three.
Mercian coins and shards of pottery from the
Rhineland dating from the 8th century suggest that long-distance trade was happening during this time. The Vikings were a strong cultural influence in Norwich for 40 to 50 years at the end of the 9th century, setting up an
Anglo-Scandinavian district near the north end of present-day King Street. Between 924 and 939, during the reign of
King Æthelstan, Norwich became fully established as a town, with its own mint. The word
Norvic appears on coins across Europe minted during this period. The ancient city was a thriving centre for trade and commerce in East Anglia in 1004 when it was raided and burnt by
Sweyn Forkbeard, the
Viking king of Denmark. At the time of the
Norman Conquest, in 1067, the city was one of the largest in England. The
Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, states that the city had approximately 25 churches and a population of between 5,000 and 10,000. It also records the site of an Anglo-Saxon church in Tombland, the site of the Saxon market place and the later
Norman cathedral. Norwich continued to be a major centre for trade, described officially as the
Port of Norwich.
Quern stones and other artefacts from
Scandinavia and the Rhineland have been found during excavations in Norwich city centre. These date from the 11th century onwards. 's 12th-century keep
Norwich Castle was founded soon after the Norman Conquest. The
Domesday Book records that 98 Saxon homes were demolished to make way for the castle. The
Normans established a new focus of settlement around the Castle and the area to the west of it: this became known as the "New" or "French" borough, centred on the Normans' own market place, which survives today as Norwich Market, the largest permanent undercover market in Europe. In 1144, the Jews of Norwich were falsely accused of
ritual murder after a boy (
William of Norwich) was found dead with stab wounds. A research paper from 30 August 2022 confirmed the remains were most likely Ashkenazi Jews. The paper found that many of the victims had certain
medical disorders most often seen in Ashkenazi communities, suggesting that a
population bottleneck had occurred among Ashkenazim before the 12th century. This challenged traditional views among historians that the bottleneck had happened between the 14th and 16th centuries.
Middle Ages In 1216, the castle fell to Louis, Dauphin of France, and Hildebrand's Hospital was founded, followed ten years later by the
Franciscan Friary and
Dominican Friary. The Great Hospital dates from 1249 and the College of St Mary in the Field from 1250. In 1256, Whitefriars was founded. In 1266 the city was sacked by the "Disinherited". It has the distinction of being the only English city ever to be excommunicated, following a riot between citizens and monks in 1274. From 1280 to 1340 the
city walls were built. At around , these walls, along with the river, enclosed a larger area than that of the
City of London. However, when the city walls were constructed it was made illegal to build outside them, inhibiting the expansion of the city. Part of these walls remains standing today. Around this time, the city was made a
county corporate and became the seat of one of the most densely populated and prosperous
counties of England. The engine of trade was
wool from Norfolk's
sheepwalks. Wool made England rich, and the
staple port of Norwich "in her state doth stand With towns of high'st regard the fourth of all the land", as
Michael Drayton noted in
Poly-Olbion (1612). The wealth generated by the
wool trade throughout the
Middle Ages financed the construction of many fine churches, so that Norwich still has more medieval churches than any other city in Western Europe north of the
Alps. Throughout this period Norwich established wide-ranging trading links with other parts of Europe, its markets stretching from Scandinavia to Spain and the city housing a
Hanseatic warehouse. To organise and control its exports to the
Low Countries, Great Yarmouth, as the port for Norwich, was designated one of the staple ports under the terms of the 1353
Statute of the Staple.
Early modern period (1485–1640) Hand-in-hand with the wool industry, this key religious centre experienced a Reformation significantly different from that in other parts of England. The magistracy in Tudor Norwich unusually found ways of managing religious discord whilst maintaining civic harmony. The summer of 1549 saw an unprecedented rebellion in Norfolk. Unlike popular challenges elsewhere in the Tudor period, it appears to have been
Protestant in nature. For several weeks, rebels led by
Robert Kett camped outside Norwich on
Mousehold Heath and took control of the city on 29 July 1549 with the support of many of its poorer inhabitants.
Kett's Rebellion was particularly in response to the enclosure of land by landlords, leaving peasants with nowhere to graze their animals, and the general abuses of power by the nobility. The uprising ended on 27 August when the rebels were defeated by an army. Kett was convicted of treason and hanged from the walls of Norwich Castle. Unusually in England, the rebellion divided the city and appears to have linked Protestantism with the plight of the urban poor. In the case of Norwich, this process was underscored later by the arrival of
Dutch and
Flemish "
Strangers" fleeing persecution from the Catholics and eventually numbering as many as one-third of the city's population. Large numbers of such exiles came to the city, especially Flemish Protestants from the Westkwartier ("Western Quarter"), a region in the
Southern Netherlands where the first
Calvinist fires of the
Dutch Revolt had spread. Inhabitants of
Ypres, in particular, chose Norwich above other destinations. Perhaps in response to Kett, Norwich became the first provincial city to initiate compulsory payments for a civic scheme of poor relief, which it has been claimed led to its wider introduction, forming the basis of the later Elizabethan Poor Law of 1597–1598. Norwich has traditionally been the home of various minorities, notably
Flemish and Belgian
Walloon communities in the 16th and 17th centuries. The great "stranger" immigration of 1567 brought a substantial Flemish and Walloon community of Protestant
weavers to Norwich, where they are said to have been made welcome. The merchant's house which was their earliest base in the city — now a museum — is still known as
Strangers' Hall. It seems that the strangers integrated into the local community without much animosity, at least among the business fraternity, who had the most to gain from their skills. Their arrival in Norwich boosted trade with mainland Europe and fostered a movement towards religious reform and radical politics in the city. By contrast, after being persecuted by the Anglican church for his
Puritan beliefs,
Michael Metcalf, a 17th-century Norwich weaver, fled the city and settled in
Dedham, Massachusetts. The
Norwich Canary was first introduced into England by Flemings fleeing from Spanish persecution in the 16th century. Along with their advanced techniques in textile working, they brought pet canaries, which they began to breed locally, eventually becoming in the 20th century a mascot of the city and the emblem of its football club,
Norwich City F.C.: "The Canaries". Printing was introduced to the city in 1567 by Anthony de Solempne, one of the strangers, but it did not take root and had died out by about 1572. Norwich's
coat of arms was first recorded in 1562. It is described as:
Gules a Castle triple-towered and domed Argent in base a Lion passant guardant [or Leopard] Or. The castle is supposed to represent Norwich Castle and the lion, taken from the
Royal Arms of England, may have been granted by King
Edward III.
Civil War to Victorian era In the
English Civil War, across the Eastern Counties,
Oliver Cromwell's powerful
Eastern Association was eventually dominant. However, to begin with, there had been a large element of Royalist sympathy within Norwich, which seems to have experienced a continuity of its two-sided political tradition throughout the period. Bishop
Matthew Wren was a forceful supporter of
Charles I. Nonetheless,
Parliamentary recruitment took hold. The strong Royalist party was stifled by a lack of commitment from the aldermen and isolation from Royalist-held regions. Serious inter-factional disturbances culminated in "The
Great Blow" of 1648 when Parliamentary forces tried to quell a Royalist riot. The latter's gunpowder was set off by accident in the city centre, causing mayhem. According to Hopper, the explosion "ranks among the largest of the century". Stoutly defended though East Anglia was by the Parliamentary army, there were said to have been pubs in Norwich where the king's health was still drunk and the name of the Protector sung to ribald verse. At the cost of some discomfort to the Mayor, the moderate
Joseph Hall was targeted because of his position as Bishop of Norwich. Norwich was marked in the period after the
Restoration of 1660 and the ensuing century by a golden age of its cloth industry, comparable only to those in the
West Country and Yorkshire, but unlike other cloth-manufacturing regions, Norwich weaving brought greater urbanisation, mainly concentrated in the surrounds of the city itself, creating an urban society, with features such as leisure time, alehouses and other public forums of debate and argument. cared for the city's poor and sick. It closed in 2003 after services were moved to the
Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. Norwich in the late 17th century was riven politically. Churchman
Humphrey Prideaux described "two factions,
Whig and
Tory, and both contend for their way with the utmost violence." Nor did the city accept the outcome of the 1688
Glorious Revolution with a unified voice. The pre-eminent citizen, Bishop William Lloyd, would not take the oaths of allegiance to the new monarchs. One report has it that in 1704 the landlord of Fowler's alehouse "with a glass of beer in hand, went down on his knees and drank a health to James the third, wishing the Crowne [sic] well and settled on his head." Writing of the early 18th century, Pound describes the city's rich cultural life, the winter theatre season, the festivities accompanying the summer assizes, and other popular entertainments. Norwich was the wealthiest town in England, with a sophisticated system of
poor relief, and a large influx of foreign refugees. Despite severe outbreaks of plague, the city had a population of almost 30,000. This made Norwich unique in England, although there were some 50 cities of similar size in Europe. In some, like Lyon and
Dresden, this was, as in the case of Norwich, linked to an important proto-industry, such as textiles or china pottery, in some, such as
Vienna,
Madrid and
Dublin, to the city's status as an administrative capital, and in some such as
Antwerp,
Marseille and
Cologne to a position on an important maritime or river trade route. In 1716, at a play at the
New Inn, the Pretender was cheered and the audience booed and hissed every time
King George's name was mentioned. In 1722 supporters of the king were said to be "hiss'd at and curst as they go in the streets," and in 1731 "a Tory mobb, in a great body, went through several parts of this city, in a riotous manner, cursing and abusing such as they knew to be friends of the government." However the Whigs gradually gained control and by the 1720s they had successfully petitioned Parliament to allow all adult males working in the textile industry to take up the freedom, on the correct assumption that they would vote Whig. But it had the effect of boosting the city's popular
Jacobitism, says Knights, and contests of the kind described continued in Norwich well into a period in which political stability had been discerned at a national level. The city's Jacobitism perhaps only ended with 1745, well after it had ceased to be a significant movement outside Scotland. Despite the Highlanders reaching
Derby and Norwich citizens mustering themselves into an association to protect the city, some Tories refused to join in, and the vestry of
St Peter Mancroft resolved that it would not ring its bells to summon the defence. Still, it was the end of the road for Norwich Jacobites, and the Whigs organised a notable celebration after the
Battle of Culloden. The events of this period illustrate how Norwich had a strong tradition of popular protest favouring Church and Stuarts and attached to the street and alehouse. Knights tells how in 1716 the mayoral election had ended in a riot, with both sides throwing "brick-ends and great paving stones" at each other. A renowned Jacobite watering-hole, the
Blue Bell Inn (nowadays
The Bell Hotel), owned in the early 18th century by the high-church Helwys family, became the central rendezvous of the Norwich Revolution Society in the 1790s. Britain's first provincial newspaper, the
Norwich Post, appeared in 1701. By 1726 there were rival Whig and Tory presses, and as early as mid-century, three-quarters of the males in some parishes were literate. The Norwich municipal library claims an excellent collection of these newspapers, also a folio collection of scrapbooks on 18th-century Norwich politics, which Knights says are "valuable and important". Norwich alehouses had 281 clubs and societies meeting in them in 1701, and at least 138 more were formed before 1758. The
Theatre Royal opened in 1758, alongside the city's stage productions in inns and puppet shows in rowdy alehouses. In 1750 Norwich could boast nine booksellers and after 1780 a "growing number of circulating and subscription libraries". says: "[All this] made for a lively political culture, in which independence from governmental lines was particularly strong, evident in campaigns against the
war with America and for reform... in which trade and the impact of war with
Revolutionary France were key ingredients. The open and contestable structure of local government, the press, the clubs and societies, and dissent all ensured that politics overlapped with communities bound by economics, religion, ideology and print in a world in which public opinion could not be ignored." Amid this metropolitan culture, the city burghers had built a sophisticated political structure. Freemen, who had the right to trade and to vote at elections, numbered about 2,000 in 1690, rising to over 3,300 by the mid-1730s. With growth partly the result of political manipulation, their numbers did at one point reach one-third of the adult male population. This was notoriously the age of
"rotten" and
"pocket" boroughs and Norwich was unusual in having such a high proportion of its citizens able to vote. "Of the political centres where the Jacobin propaganda had penetrated most deeply only Norwich and Nottingham had a franchise deep enough to allow radicals to make use of the electoral process." "Apart from London, Norwich was probably still the largest of those boroughs which were democratically governed," says , describing other towns under the control of a single
fiefdom. In Norwich, he says, a powerful Anglican establishment, symbolised by the Cathedral and the great church of St Peter Mancroft was matched by scarcely less powerful
congeries of Dissenters headed by the wealthy literate body [of Unitarians] worshipping at the
Octagon Chapel. In the middle of political disorders of the late 18th century, Norwich intellectual life flourished.
Harriet Martineau wrote of the city's
literati of the period, including such people as
William Taylor, one of England's first scholars of German. The city "boasted of her intellectual supper-parties, where, amidst a pedantry which would now make laughter hold both his sides, there was much that was pleasant and salutary: and finally she called herself
The Athens of England." Despite Norwich's longstanding industrial prosperity, by the 1790s its wool trade had begun facing intense competition, at first from Yorkshire woollens and then, increasingly, from
Lancashire cotton. The effects were aggravated by the loss of continental markets after Britain went to war with France in 1793. The early 19th century saw de-industrialisation accompanied by bitter squabbles. The 1820s were marked by wage cuts and personal recrimination against owners. So amid the rich commercial and cultural heritage of its recent past, Norwich suffered in the 1790s from incipient decline exacerbated by a serious trade recession. As early in the war as 1793, a major city manufacturer and government supporter, Robert Harvey, complained of low order books, languid trade and doubling of the poor rate. Like many of their Norwich forebears, the hungry poor took their complaints onto the streets. Hayes describes a meeting of 200 people in a Norwich public house, where "Citizen Stanhope" spoke. The gathering "[roared its] applause at Stanhope's declaration that the Ministers unless they changed their policy, deserved to have their heads brought to the block; – and if there was a people still in England, the event might turn out to be so." Hayes says that "the outbreak of war, in bringing the worsted manufacture almost to a standstill and so plunging the mass of the Norwich weavers into sudden distress made it almost inevitable that a crude appeal to working-class resentment should take the place of a temperate process of education which the earliest reformers had intended." At this period opposition to
Pitt's government and their war came – in their case almost unanimously – from a circle of radical Dissenting intellectuals of interest in their own right. They included the Rigby, Taylor, Aitkin, Barbold, and Alderson families – all Unitarians - and some of the Quaker Gurneys (one of whose girls,
Elizabeth, was later, under her married name of Fry, to become a noted campaigner for prison reform). Their activities included visits to revolutionary France (before the
execution of Louis XVI), the earliest British research into German literature, studies on medical science, petitioning for parliamentary reform, and publishing a highbrow literary magazine called "The Cabinet", in 1795. Their blend of politics, religion and social campaigning was seen by Pitt and Windham as suspicious, prompting Pitt to denounce Norwich as "the Jacobin city".
Edmund Burke attacked John Gurney in print for sponsoring anti-war protests. In the 1790s, Norwich was second only to London as an active intellectual centre in England, and that it did not regain that level of prominence until the
University of East Anglia was established in the late 20th century. By 1795, it was not just the Norwich rabble who were causing the government concern. In April of that year, the Norwich Patriotic Society was founded, its manifesto declaring "that the great end of civil society was general happiness; that every individual had a right to share in the government." In December the price of bread reached a new peak, and in May 1796, when William Windham was forced to seek re-election after his appointment as war secretary, he only just held his seat. Amid the disorder and violence that was such a common feature of Norwich election campaigns, it was only by the narrowest margin that the radical Bartlett Gurney ("Peace and Gurney – No More War – No more Barley Bread") failed to unseat him. Though informed by issues of recent national importance, the bipartisan political culture of Norwich in the 1790s cannot be divorced from local tradition. Two features stand out from a political continuum of three centuries. The first is a dichotomous power balance. From at least the time of the Reformation, Norwich was recorded as a "two-party city". In the mid-16th century, the weaving parishes fell under the control of opposition forces, as Kett's rebels held the north of the river, in support of poor clothworkers. Indeed there seems to be a case for saying that with this tradition of two-sided disputation, the city had steadily developed an infrastructure, evident in its many cultural and institutional networks of politics, religion, society, news media and the arts, whereby argument could be managed short of outright confrontation. Indeed, at a time of hunger and tension on the Norwich streets, with alehouse crowds ready to have "a Minister's head brought to the block", the Anglican and Dissenting clergy exerted themselves to conduct a collegial dialogue, seeking common ground and reinforcing the well-mannered civic tradition of earlier periods. , historic headquarters of the Norwich Union insurance company In 1797
Thomas Bignold, a 36-year-old wine merchant and banker founded the first
Norwich Union Society. Some years earlier, when he moved from Kent to Norwich, Bignold had been unable to find anyone willing to insure him against the threat from highwaymen. With the entrepreneurial thought that nothing was impossible, and aware that in a city built largely of wood the threat of fire was uppermost in people's minds, Bignold formed the "Norwich Union Society for the Insurance of Houses, Stock and Merchandise from Fire". The new business, which became known as the Norwich Union Fire Insurance Office, was a "mutual" enterprise.
Norwich Union would later become the country's largest insurance giant. From earliest times, Norwich was a textile centre. In the 1780s the manufacture of Norwich
shawls became an important industry and remained so for nearly a hundred years. The shawls were a high-quality fashion product and rivalled those of other towns such as
Paisley, which had entered shawl manufacturing in about 1805, some 20 or more years after Norwich. With changes in women's fashion in the later
Victorian period, the popularity of shawls declined and eventually manufacture ceased. Examples of Norwich shawls are now sought after by collectors of textiles. Norwich's geographical isolation was such that until 1845, when a railway link was established, it was often quicker to travel to
Amsterdam by boat than to London. The railway was introduced to Norwich by
Morton Peto, who also built a line to
Great Yarmouth. From 1808 to 1814, Norwich had a station in the
shutter telegraph chain that connected the
Admiralty in London to its naval ships in the port of
Great Yarmouth. A permanent military presence was established in the city with the completion of
Britannia Barracks in 1897. The
Bethel Street and
Cattle Market Street drill halls were built around the same time.
20th century In the early 20th century, Norwich still had several major manufacturing industries. Among them were the large-scale and bespoke manufacture of shoes (for example the
Start-rite and Van Dal brands, Bowhill & Elliott and Cheney & Sons Ltd respectively), clothing, joinery (including the cabinet makers and furniture retailer
Arthur Brett and Sons, which continues in business in the 21st century), structural engineering, and aircraft design and manufacture. Notable employers included
Boulton & Paul, Barnards (iron founders and inventors of machine-produced
wire netting), and the electrical engineers Laurence Scott and Electromotors. Norwich also has a long association with chocolate making, mainly through the local firm of Caley's, which began as a manufacturer and bottler of mineral water and later diversified into chocolate and
Christmas crackers. The Caley's cracker-manufacturing business was taken over by Tom Smith in 1953, and the Norwich factory in Salhouse Road closed in 1998. Caley's was acquired by Mackintosh in the 1930s and merged with
Rowntree's in 1969 to become Rowntree-Mackintosh. Finally, it was bought by
Nestlé and closed in 1996, with all operations moving to
York after a Norwich association of 120 years. The demolished factory stood where the Chapelfield development is now. Caley's chocolate has since reappeared as a brand in the city, though it is no longer made there.
HMSO, once the official publishing and stationery arm of the British government and one of the largest print buyers, printers and suppliers of office equipment in the UK, moved most of its operations from London to Norwich in the 1970s. It occupied the purpose-built 1968 Sovereign House building, near Anglia Square, which in 2017 stood empty and due for demolition if a long-postponed redevelopment of Anglia Square went ahead. department store has been based in Norwich since 1823.
Jarrolds, established in 1810, was a nationally well-known printer and publisher. In 2004, after nearly 200 years, the printing and publishing businesses were sold. Today, the company remains privately owned and the Jarrold name is best recognised as being that of Norwich's only independent
department store. The company is also active in property development in Norwich and has a business training division.
Pubs and brewing The city had a long tradition of brewing. Several large
breweries continued into the second half of the 20th century, notably Morgans,
Steward & Patteson, Youngs Crawshay and Youngs, Bullard and Son, and the Norwich Brewery. Despite takeovers and consolidation in the 1950s and 1960s, only the Norwich Brewery (owned by
Watney Mann and on the site of Morgans) remained by the 1970s. That too closed in 1985 and was then demolished. Only
microbreweries remain today. It was stated by Walter Wicks in his book that Norwich once had "a pub for every day of the year and a church for every Sunday". This was in fact significantly under the actual amount: the highest number of pubs in the city was in the year 1870, with over 780 beer-houses. A "Drink Map" produced in 1892 by the Norwich and Norfolk Gospel Temperance Union showed 631 pubs in and around the city centre. By 1900, the number had dropped to 441 pubs within the City Walls. The title of a pub for every day of the year survived until 1966, when the Chief Constable informed the Licensing Justices that only 355 licences were still operative, with the number still shrinking: over 25 had closed in the last decade. In 2018, about 100 pubs remained open around the city centre.
Second World War Norwich suffered extensive bomb damage during
World War II, affecting large parts of the old city centre and Victorian terrace housing around the centre. Industry and the rail infrastructure also suffered. The heaviest raids occurred on the nights of 27/28 and 29/30 April 1942; as part of the
Baedeker raids (so-called because Baedeker's series of tourist guides to the
British Isles were used to select propaganda-rich targets of cultural and historic significance rather than strategic importance).
Lord Haw-Haw made reference to the imminent destruction of Norwich's new
City Hall (completed in 1938), although in the event it survived unscathed. Significant targets hit included the Morgan's Brewery building,
Colman's Wincarnis works,
City Station, the Mackintosh chocolate factory, and shopping areas including St Stephen's St and St Benedict's St, the site of Bond's
department store (now
John Lewis) and Curl's (later Debenhams) department store. 229 citizens were killed in the two Baedeker raids with 1,000 others injured, and 340 by bombing throughout the war — giving Norwich the highest air raid casualties in Eastern England. Out of the 35,000 domestic dwellings in Norwich, 2,000 were destroyed, and another 27,000 suffered some damage. In 1945 the city was also the intended target of a brief
V-2 rocket campaign, though all these missed the city itself.
Post-war redevelopment , which opened in 1963 As the war ended, the city council revealed what it had been working on before the war. It was published as a book –
The City of Norwich Plan 1945 or commonly known as "The '45 Plan" – a grandiose scheme of massive redevelopment which never properly materialised. However, throughout the 1960s to early 1970, the city was completely altered and large areas of Norwich were cleared to make way for modern redevelopment. In 1960, the inner-city district of Richmond, between Ber Street and King Street, locally known as "the Village on the Hill", was condemned as slums and many residents were forced to leave by
compulsory purchase orders on the old terraces and lanes. The whole borough demolished consisted of some 56 acres of existing streets, including 833 dwellings (612 classed as unfit for human habitation), 42 shops, four offices, 22 public houses and two schools. Communities were moved to high-rise buildings such as Normandie Tower and new housing estates such as Tuckswood, which were being built at the time. A new road, Rouen Road, was developed instead, consisting mainly of light industrial units and council flats.
Ber Street, a once historic main road into the city, had its whole eastern side demolished. About this time, the final part of St Peters Street, opposite
St Peter Mancroft Church, were demolished along with large Georgian townhouses at the top of Bethel Street, to make way for the new City Library in 1961. To accommodate the road, many more buildings were demolished, including an ancient road junction – Stump Cross. Magdalen Street, Botolph Street, St George's Street, Calvert Street and notably Pitt Street, all lined with Tudor and Georgian buildings, were cleared to make way for a fly-over and a
Brutalist concrete shopping centre –
Anglia Square – as well as office blocks such as an
HMSO building, Sovereign House. Other areas affected were Grapes Hill, a once narrow lane lined with 19th-century Georgian cottages, which was cleared and widened into a dual carriageway leading to a roundabout. Shortly before construction of the roundabout, the city's old
Drill Hall was demolished, along with sections of the original city wall and other large townhouses along the start of Unthank Road (named after the Unthank family, local landowners). The roundabout also required the north-west corner of
Chapelfield Gardens to be demolished. About a mile of Georgian and Victorian terrace houses along Chapelfield Road and Queens Road, including many houses built into the city walls, was bulldozed in 1964. This included the surrounding district off Vauxhall Street, consisting of swathes of terrace housing that were condemned as slums. This also included the whole West Pottergate district, which contained a mix of 18th and 19th-century cottages and terraced housing, pubs and shops. Post-war housing and maisonettes flats now stand where the
Rookery slums once did. Some aspects of The '45 Plan were put into action, which saw large three-story Edwardian houses in Grove Avenue and Grove Road, and other large properties on Southwell Road, demolished in 1962 to make way for flat-roofed single-story style maisonettes that still stand today.
Heigham Hall, (Heigham is correctly pronounced "Hayum") a large Victorian manor house off Old Palace Road was also demolished in 1963, to build Dolphin Grove flats, which housed many Norwich families displaced by
slum clearance. Other housing developments in the private and public sector took place after the Second World War, partly to accommodate the growing population of the city and to replace condemned and bomb-damaged areas, such as the
Heigham Grove (Heigham is correctly pronounced "Hayum" (built 1858, demolished 1972) was pulled down, as well as the tall Presbyterian church in Theatre Street, built in 1874 and designed by local architect
Edward Boardman. It has been said that more of Norwich's architecture was destroyed by the council in post-war redevelopment schemes than during the Second World War.
Other events In 1976 the city's pioneering spirit was on show when Motum Road in Norwich, allegedly the scene of "a number of accidents over the years", became the third road in Britain to be equipped with
sleeping policemen, intended to encourage adherence to the road's speed limit. The bumps, installed at intervals of , stretched across the width of the road and their curved profile was, at its highest point, high. ==Governance==