Norwich

• 1. Introduction

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  Norwich sits about 100 miles north-east of London, and for much of the second millennium it was the second most prosperous city in England. Today it claims to be the most complete medieval city in the United Kingdom, with cobbled streets, half-timbered houses, and more medieval churches than any other city in Western Europe north of the Alps. How does a cathedral city in the flat county of Norfolk earn that distinction? How did it come to be called "the Jacobin city" by the Prime Minister, excommunicated by the Pope, and designated England's first UNESCO City of Literature? The answers reach back past the Norman Conquest, through Viking raids and a textile empire, to a weaver's rebellion that may have planted the seeds of the modern welfare state.

• 2. Before the Normans

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  The capital of the Iceni tribe stood near the village of Caistor St Edmund, on the River Tas about five miles south of modern Norwich. After the uprising led by Boudica around 60 AD, the Romans rebuilt the site as Venta Icenorum, meaning "marketplace of the Iceni". That settlement fell out of use around 450 AD.

  Anglo-Saxon settlers arrived between the fifth and seventh centuries and founded a cluster of small towns, including Northwic, meaning "North Harbour", the direct ancestor of the name Norwich. The name Norvic appears on pennies minted during the reign of King Æthelstan, who ruled between 924 and 939, when Norwich became fully established as a town with its own mint. Coins bearing that name circulated across Europe.

  The Vikings held cultural sway in Norwich for roughly forty to fifty years at the end of the ninth century, leaving an Anglo-Scandinavian district near the north end of what is now King Street. Long before their arrival, pottery from the Rhineland and Mercian coins dating from the eighth century show that Norwich was already pulling in trade from far afield. When the Viking king of Denmark, Sweyn Forkbeard, raided and burnt the city in 1004, it was already a thriving commercial centre.

• 3. Castle, Cathedral, and the Normans

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  By the time of the Norman Conquest in 1067, Norwich ranked among the largest cities in England. The Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, counted roughly twenty-five churches and a population of between five thousand and ten thousand people.

  Norwich Castle was founded shortly after the Conquest. The same Domesday survey records that ninety-eight Saxon homes were demolished to make way for it. The Normans also created a new borough to the west of the castle, centred on their own market place. That market survives today as Norwich Market, described as the largest permanent undercover market in Europe.

  In 1096, Herbert de Losinga, Bishop of Thetford, began building Norwich Cathedral. The primary building material was limestone imported from Caen in Normandy. To move the stone from the river to the building site, workers cut a canal from what is now Pulls Ferry up to the east wall. The city received a royal charter from Henry II in 1158, and another from Richard the Lionheart in 1194. Then, after a riot in 1274 between citizens and monks, Norwich earned the unique distinction of being the only complete English city ever excommunicated by the Pope.

• 4. Wool, Wealth, and the Strangers

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  From about 1280 to 1340, Norwich built its city walls. At their full extent, those walls and the river together enclosed a larger area than the City of London. The engine behind that ambition was wool from Norfolk's sheep pastures. Wool generated the wealth that funded the construction of dozens of fine churches, and Norwich established trading links stretching from Scandinavia to Spain, including a Hanseatic warehouse within the city itself.

  In the summer of 1549, a rebellion unlike anything elsewhere in Tudor England broke out. A tanner named Robert Kett led thousands of rebels who camped on Mousehold Heath outside the city and took control of Norwich on the 29th of July. Kett's Rebellion was rooted in anger at the enclosure of common grazing land by landlords. The uprising ended on the 27th of August when an army defeated the rebels, and Kett was convicted of treason and hanged from the walls of Norwich Castle. Perhaps partly in response to that upheaval, Norwich became the first provincial city to introduce compulsory payments for poor relief, a scheme historians have argued laid the groundwork for the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1597-1598.

  The great "stranger" immigration of 1567 brought a substantial community of Flemish and Walloon Protestant weavers to the city, fleeing Catholic persecution in the Southern Netherlands. Inhabitants of Ypres in particular chose Norwich above other destinations. Those newcomers eventually numbered as many as one-third of the city's population. Printing arrived that same year, introduced by Anthony de Solempne, one of the strangers. The Flemings also brought the Norwich canary, which became the emblem of the city's football club in the twentieth century. The merchant's house that served as the strangers' earliest base is still known as Strangers' Hall and operates today as a museum.

• 5. Jacobins, Insurance, and the Press

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  In 1701 the Norwich Post became the first provincial newspaper published outside London. By 1726 the city had rival Whig and Tory presses, and by mid-century roughly three-quarters of men in some parishes were literate. Norwich alehouses hosted two hundred and eighty-one clubs and societies in that same year of 1701, with at least a hundred and thirty-eight more formed before 1758. The Theatre Royal opened in 1758, and by 1750 the city could count nine booksellers.

  Prime Minister William Pitt denounced Norwich as "the Jacobin city". The label came from a circle of radical Dissenting intellectuals, many of them Unitarians from families such as the Rigbys, Taylors, and Gurneys, who visited revolutionary France, petitioned for parliamentary reform, and in 1795 published a literary magazine called The Cabinet. One of the Gurney daughters, Elizabeth, later became famous under her married name of Fry as a campaigner for prison reform.

  In 1797, a thirty-six-year-old wine merchant and banker named Thomas Bignold had a more commercial inspiration. Having moved from Kent to Norwich and been unable to find anyone willing to insure him against highwaymen, Bignold founded the Norwich Union Society for the Insurance of Houses, Stock and Merchandise from Fire. The new business was structured as a mutual enterprise. Norwich Union would eventually grow into the country's largest insurance company.

  The city's wool trade began facing stiff competition from Yorkshire woollens in the 1790s, and then from Lancashire cotton. The loss of continental markets after Britain went to war with France in 1793 deepened the damage. As late as 1793, a major city manufacturer named Robert Harvey was already complaining of low order books and a doubling of the poor rate. Norwich's geographical isolation meant that until 1845, when a railway link was established by Morton Peto, it was often faster to reach Amsterdam by boat than to travel to London.

• 6. War, Rebuilding, and Loss

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  The heaviest air raids of the Second World War fell on Norwich on the nights of the 27th-28th and 29th-the 30th of April 1942. Known as the Baedeker raids because German planners used Baedeker tourist guides to select targets of cultural significance rather than strategic importance, the attacks killed two hundred and twenty-nine citizens and injured a thousand more in just those two nights. A total of three hundred and forty citizens died from bombing across the entire war, giving Norwich the highest air raid casualties in eastern England. Out of thirty-five thousand domestic dwellings, two thousand were destroyed and another twenty-seven thousand suffered some damage.

  The City of Norwich Plan 1945, commonly called "The '45 Plan", was a sweeping scheme of redevelopment that was published as a book but never fully materialised. Throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s, however, large areas of the city were cleared. The inner-city district of Richmond, locally known as "the Village on the Hill", was condemned in 1960. That single clearance removed fifty-six acres of streets including eight hundred and thirty-three dwellings, forty-two shops, four offices, twenty-two public houses, and two schools. Streets lined with Tudor and Georgian buildings, including Magdalen Street, Botolph Street, and notably Pitt Street, were demolished to make way for a flyover and a Brutalist shopping centre called Anglia Square. Observers have noted that more of Norwich's architecture was destroyed by the post-war council than by the Luftwaffe.

• 7. Culture, Firsts, and the Living City

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  Norwich holds a remarkable string of national firsts. England's first provincial library opened there in 1608. Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, published in 1395, was the first book written in English by a woman. The first poem in blank verse was composed by Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, in the sixteenth century. The Norfolk and Norwich Festival, first held in 1772, was the first arts festival in Britain.

  The University of East Anglia was founded in 1963 on the outskirts of the city. Its creative writing programme, established by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson, produced graduates including Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan. The Norwich University of the Arts traces its origins to 1845 as the Norwich School of Design and achieved university status in 2013.

  In May 2012, Norwich was designated England's first UNESCO City of Literature. The city's medieval fabric draws visitors to Dragon Hall, a trading hall mostly dating from about 1430 that is unique in Western Europe. The Forum, designed by Michael Hopkins and Partners and opened in 2002, replaced the Central Library that burned down in 1994 and served as the most visited library in the UK from 2006 to 2013, recording one point three million visits in 2013 alone. That building also houses a memorial library dedicated to the United States 2nd Air Division, whose collections document the American presence at British airbases during the Second World War and Cold War. Much of that collection was lost in the 1994 fire but was restored through contributions from veterans on both sides of the Atlantic.