Cromer

• 1. Introduction

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  Cromer is a small coastal town on the north Norfolk shore, and its road signs carry a bold claim: Gem of the Norfolk Coast. With a population recorded at 7,683 in the 2011 census, it is not large. Yet its reach into history, literature, science, and popular culture is remarkable for its size. A medieval village called Shipden once stood where the sea now rolls. A railway opened a floodgate of Victorian tourists. A lifeboatman named Henry Blogg won more RNLI medals than anyone before or after him. A journalist in 1883 named a stretch of this coastline after its flowers, and the name stuck. What is it about this place on the North Sea that has drawn kings, novelists, film crews, and fossil hunters for centuries?

• 2. The Drowned Village

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  Before Cromer existed, there was Shipden. The place-name Cromer itself first appears in a will dated 1262 and may derive from the words for a crow's mere, or lake. A legal record from 1422, in the first year of Henry VI's reign, refers to Crowemere Shipden as the home of one John Gees. By that point, the town around the parish church of Saints Peter and Paul had already taken the name Cromer, but the original Shipden lay a quarter of a mile to the northeast of what is now Cromer Pier, beneath the sea.

  The site of that sunken settlement is marked by a feature called Church Rock, a remnant of the medieval church tower. By the late 19th century, the rock had become a hazard for vessels. In 1888 a small pleasure steamer named Victoria struck the remains of the tower. The rock was subsequently blown up for safety. In more recent times, members of Great Yarmouth's sub-aqua club dived the site and recovered artefacts from both the medieval church and the wreck of Victoria itself, a quiet reunion of two shipwrecks separated by centuries.

  The geology here tells an even older story. Palaeontologist Dr James Neenan, from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, describes the cliffs east of the town as part of a Norfolk coastline rich in Pleistocene fossils. In 2017 a prehistoric rhinoceros was found at West Runton, dated to roughly 700,000 years ago, placing it in the Cromerian Interglacial, the very period that gave the town its name in the scientific record.

• 3. Poppyland and the Victorian Resort

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  In 1883 a London journalist named Clement Scott arrived in Cromer and found a coastline carpeted in wild poppies. He named the stretch, particularly around Overstrand and Sidestrand, Poppyland, and his writing in the national press combined with the new railway to send visitors streaming in. The railway had reached Cromer in 1877, when Cromer High station opened under the Great Eastern Railway. A second station, Cromer Beach, followed ten years later under the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway, pulling in passengers from the East Midlands. Direct services ran from London, Manchester, Leicester, Birmingham, Leeds, Peterborough, and Sheffield.

  Among the early visitors was the future King Edward VII, who played golf at the Royal Cromer Golf Club. That club had been founded in 1888 and received royal status from the Prince of Wales, who was a founding member, in the same year. The course was originally designed by Old Tom Morris. In 1905 it hosted the British Ladies Amateur Golf Championship, before which an unofficial contest between British and American women took place, the first international golf match ever played.

  The rich Norwich banking families, who had been making Cromer a summer retreat since the early 19th century, helped shape its character as a genteel resort. The Hotel de Paris began its life in 1820 as a coastal residence for Lord Suffield. It was converted into a hotel in 1830 by Pierre le Francois, and architect George Skipper extensively remodelled it between 1895 and 1896. Cromer Pier, dating from 1901, gave the seafront its most distinctive feature, housing the Pavilion Theatre at its far end. Cromer Museum, which opened in 1978 in former fishermen's cottages on Church Street, preserves two permanent galleries dedicated to Olive Edis, identified as Britain's first female war photographer.

• 4. Henry Blogg and the Lifeboat Tradition

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  Cromer Lifeboat Station was founded in 1804, making it the first lifeboat station in Norfolk. For most of the 19th century, rowing lifeboats were stationed there, launched directly from the beach into some of the North Sea's most demanding coastal conditions. The station covers a particularly exposed stretch of coastline: Great Yarmouth lies 40 miles to the southeast by sea, and the nearest harbour to the west, Wells next the Sea, is 25 miles away.

  Henry Blogg stands at the centre of the station's history. He received the RNLI gold medal for heroism three times, and the silver medal four times, a record of decoration unmatched in the institution. Notable rescues carried out between 1917 and 1941 brought the Cromer lifeboat national and international recognition. In the 1920s a new station was built at the end of the pier, allowing a motor lifeboat to be launched beyond the breakers and reach casualties further offshore.

  The RNLI Henry Blogg Museum, now housed inside the early 21st-century Rocket House close to the pier, holds the Cromer Lifeboat H F Bailey III, designated ON 777, as its centrepiece. The museum documents Blogg's most famous rescues. Today the offshore lifeboat performs about a dozen rescues a year, with a similar number handled by the inshore lifeboat stationed on the beach. The Duke of Kent officially named the town's new lifeboat Lester in a ceremony on the 8th of September 2008.

• 5. Crabs, Cod, and a Changing Fishery

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  Before tourism, Cromer was a fishing station. Its fishery ran year-round: crabs and lobsters in summer, herring drifted longshore in autumn, and cod taken by long-line through the winter. That seasonal breadth persisted well into the 20th century. Since the 1980s, however, the pattern has narrowed almost completely to crabs and lobsters.

  The Cromer crab is now the primary income source for the town's remaining fishermen. In 2016, roughly ten boats worked from the foot of the gangway on the east beach, with shops in the town selling fresh crab whenever the fleet went to sea. By 2018, experienced crabmen were finding it difficult to attract young people to the trade, in part because of the long working hours the season demands. Lobster trapping continued alongside crabbing.

  The Cromer shoal chalk beds, lying offshore, were officially designated a Marine Conservation Zone in 2016. They are thought to be Europe's largest chalk reef, a designation that adds a further layer of protection to the waters where the town's fishermen have worked for generations.

• 6. On Screen and in Print

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  Cromer Hall, located to the south of the town on Hall Road, was rebuilt in 1829 in a Gothic Revival style by Norfolk architect William John Donthorne after the original hall was destroyed by fire. Henry Baring, of the Baring banking family, acquired the estate around the time of rebuilding. In 1901, Arthur Conan Doyle was a guest there. He heard the local legend of the Black Shuck, a ghostly black dog, and is thought to have drawn on it when writing The Hound of the Baskervilles.

  The town appears in two Victorian novels: Emma by Jane Austen and North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. Edward Lear included a limerick about Cromer in his Book of Nonsense. On screen, the final scenes of the 2013 film Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa were shot on Cromer Pier. Actor Nicholas Courtney, playing Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart in the 1972-1973 Doctor Who serial The Three Doctors, improvised the line "I'm fairly sure that's Cromer" when his character mistakes an alien planet's surface for the town. Courtney had got his first professional acting job in Cromer.

  During the Second World War, Cromer featured in a radio drama written by Norman Corwin titled An American In England. The play first aired in the United States on the 1st of December 1942 on the CBS/Columbia Workshop programme and starred Joe Julian. The narrator stays at the Red Lion Hotel and recounts local accounts of wartime life. The town was also used as a filming location during November 2014 for the BBC series Partners in Crime, and several scenes from the 2018 television series Angry Birds on the Run were shot there as well. The Divine Comedy name the town in their song Norman and Norma, with the lyric noting that Norman and Norma got married in Cromer in April 1983.