A Fine City

A love affair with a Fine City

I first visited Norwich in 1992. I have only realised recently that that is a long time ago – a different century, in fact. There is something about the feeling of returning to a place that you knew so well after a long time, and how some of it is reassuringly similar, but some is completely alien.

1992 was from a pre-internet, pre-techie age.

My thoughts of Norwich have been triggered by the fact that the student accommodation in which I first stayed in currently being bulldozed. No one can complain. It had a good innings. It was oldish when I arrived, and had no en-suite facilities then, iron bath tubs, and a rather jaded sixties feel. I understand that twenty-first century students are more demanding and prefer their own showers and toilets, and plaster on walls. I can’t imagine how the students’ services coped with installing WiFi through the breezeblock walls and other luxuries deemed vital for student survival like washing machines.

What it means for me is that I can no longer walk past with my children and bore them with the story of how I first met their mother there, and anecdotes of long autumn evenings spent trying to eke out fun on a budget of £20 a week.

When a building is pulled down, though, something else goes. It renders my few photographs from the time historically more interesting. Here I was, except now I never can be again because these walls and windows are gone. When I asked her this, I was standing right there – but there is not there anymore.

Romantics will be pleased by the fact that just prior to leaving in 1996 I lay underneath the fixed wooden windowsill and wrote in pencil on the underside ‘Jim and Clare met here and fell in love, 1996’. I thought it would be there forever for some post-historic nerd to uncover.

Norwich, too, has changed – but not beyond recognition. Walking around now it seems that the physical structure of the city is playing a personal joke on me. The roads, bridges and churches are unchanged. I navigate, though, by pubs, and knew many. Most have had a name change, and many have been remodelled and gentrified, some beyond recognition. There is an alarming number of coffee shops. I wonder around half-recognising places, and trying to recall if my first kiss was here, or there, or even over there. My wife is quite patient and has a better memory than me. I am beginning to wish that I paid more attention.

This new year I decided to spend some time reacquainting myself with this Fine City. I first knew it on foot – the only other transport was bus – so to re-learn it was straightforward. The more I walked, the easier it became to slot things back into place in my memory. I began to surprise myself with the things that jumped back into my head. The past is a foreign land, but not too foreign. They still speak my language.

In 1992 the city guide boasted more than 52 churches (one for every Sunday of the year) and more than 365 pubs. This has changed remarkably. Without an extensive survey, with which even TripAdvisor cannot assist, it’s impossible to tell how many pubs are left. Many of the churches had already fallen out of use and stood empty in the nineties. There is a whole other debate about whether a church should remain a church or be re-used for another purpose. There are many fine church buildings in the city centre that are well used for other purposes and would otherwise have crumbled and not been saved.

The city centre shops have been through many incarnations in the last twenty-five years. Like everywhere else, the chain record shops have vanished, along with video rental shops, purveyors of baked potatoes and places to develop your camera film. However, many places have moved a few times and, on my walks, I found myself standing outside where Waterstone’s should be, but wasn’t any longer because it had moved twice since.

Do you ever get the feeling of anticipation that you will return to a place after so long and meet an old friend by chance? I have to accept that this will not happen to me in Norwich. Even if I did meet someone I knew, I would struggle to recognise him or her. Buildings age little, but people do. I’d have to be able to see through twenty-five years of extra layers to see the face I once knew.

I know this because the same applies to me.

Having completed a few walks I arrived at a list of places that I miss, and some for which I mourn. If you know Norwich, you’ll understand all of these.

I miss The Scientific Anglian. It was a second-hand bookshop of the greatest eccentricity. The owner was an old communist called Mr Peake. The shop was stocked from floor to ceiling with yellowing books and papers. There was little attempt at order. Repairs were cursory and ineffective, and there was an all-encompassing dampness to the place. I loved it. The proprietor didn’t mind one bit if you did not buy anything, so for poor students it was a way of filling a quiet half hour. I don’t think I really found anything worth buying, but that wasn’t the point. I miss the fact that there was space for such a shop in the city.

Another loss is the cigar shop. On the corner of Bridewell Alley and St Andrew’s Road was a tobacconist and sweet shop that seemed to be from another age entirely. It was called Churchill’s as the former PM had ordered cigars from the establishment at some point and not paid his bill [can’t prove this legend] and when you walked in it had the most amazing smell. At nineteen I was not a cigar smoker, but used to soak up the atmosphere and linger because it was the only place I knew that sold Caramac chocolate bars. In the same way that patrons of The Scientific Anglian simply melted away, I imagine its demise was hastened by the demographic curve and passage of time. How many pipe and cigar smokers are still around?

The famous Norwich market has not changed greatly. About ten years ago more permanent, uniformed stalls were put in place, and it is more weather-proof now. I preferred the random old stalls and awnings. It is the sort of renewal that can go badly wrong, but whoever thought it through did an excellent job. The atmosphere is still the same as it always was. There is also something about the smell of the market that is unchanged. It has a savoury twang that I have never been able to identify.

I do miss certain old stall-holders though, purveyors on unloved music on cassette and CD. I was quite a fan of the CD single. There was also a healthy show of paperback books of varying quality, most of which have been swept away by progress and e-readers.

We have lost the urge to browse, not in the certainty of finding what you are looking for, but in the hope of uncovering something unexpected. It’s not the same to be suggested to by the Amazon algorithm.

I fondly remember a stockist of hats and gloves, who as a sideline had a large selection of foreign football shirts. Quite where he got them I don’t know, but I developed a collection of unwanted and very obscure shirts from Germany and France that would otherwise have been impossible on my budget.

There are many things in Norwich that are unchanged. It remains un-linked to the rest of the UK by motorway, which is unique.

It is also still very much a market town. Each Saturday Norfolk people travel from miles around to come into the city.

Norwich Cathedral is a jewel of a building. I have visited dozens of cathedrals across Europe and I can be completely honest when I say that none of them hold a candle to Norwich. I prefer it to Köln, Albi and Chartres. The way that the winter light falls on it is mesmerising. Inside it contains many simple treasures. My favourite is a message on a memorial to a freeman of the city called Thomas Gooding. Above it is a grinning skeleton. It reads:

All you that do this Place pass by

 Remember Death for you must die

As you are now, so once was I

As I am now so shall you be,

Thomas Gooding here doth stay,

Waiting for God's Judgement Day

It used to chill my bones on dreary Sundays and does even more today.

There is something about the steeple of Norwich Cathedral that draws the eyes towards it. Even though it is vast, somehow it can all be seen in one look. There is probably a very clever architectural term for that, but I don’t know it.

My favourite bookshop is also still there, facing the Cathedral. It is called the Tombland Bookshop and is probably my favourite shop in Britain. Tombland refers not to the deceased, but to the tomes sold in the area over hundreds of years. Downstairs is a collection of beautiful old books, still out of my price range. Upstairs is a brilliantly curated collection of every kind of quirky book any English eccentric could ever need. I used to spend quiet hours wishing I had the money to buy every Observer’s book, and all the poetry collections. Military histories were always a strongpoint, and I did once spend a rainy Saturday morning (before the internet) unashamedly reading about Bosworth Field, with no intention of buying the book. The owners were patient and helpful, and still are.

The finest chip shop in Christendom is also in Norwich. In the 90s I was very basic, and has since been quite gentrified. The most important element is unchanged: brilliant chips. It is grandly called The Grosvenor Fish Bar. It now has such twenty-first century developments as curry sauce and vegetarian fritters. When I first went you could have fish and chips, or a sausage. Citizens form a long and orderly queue every Saturday lunchtime, and I love it.

I can’t write about what is left of the Norwich I remember without mentioning my favourite pub. Tucked down a lane called Dove Street just a step from the market is The Vine. The old glass above the door proudly proclaims it to be the smallest pub in East Anglia. It is little larger than a front room. I was so fortunate that when I arrived as an awkward eighteen year old I was welcomed by tolerant city people. I made friends with the landlord, the peerless Mike Blackmore. There was a quiz, which they indulgently let us win one week, so we were allowed to set the questions for the next week. On Sunday evenings there were wind-up toy dinosaur races along the bar. There was a resident alcoholic who would dispense wisdom for the price of a drink. And there was a brilliant jukebox. I long for the days when the music in a pub was chosen by the drinkers, and not from an playlist.

The Vine closed down as a pub a dozen years ago and I thought all was lost. However, and enterprising businesswoman called Ms Allen decided to make a go of it and opened a Thai restaurant upstairs, in what had been the landlord’s quarters. Quite where everything fits and how they produce food I don’t know. But her enterprise means that I can still sit in the corner of the pub downstairs and cast myself adrift in nostalgia. The bar is not where it was, and there is very little of the old pub intact, but the walls harbour the stories of what is fast becoming a bygone age. It used to be so smoky that I would need to bath after every visit. Instead I now leave tinged with lemongrass.

Norwich City FC is largely unchanged. I did not realise at the time, but I watched them in the most successful period in their history. I saw them defeat Bayern Munich in 1993 when the Germans had the World Cup winning captain Lotthar Matthäus in the team. I would dearly love to have a season ticket, even today, and love the feeling around the club.

I don’t think it is wrong to give in to nostalgia from time to time. By going back to Norwich I have been able to put my early experiences into context. I didn’t want this to read like a tourist brochure and hopefully it doesn’t. But I did want to summon up a little of the past and record it before the years erase it further. I miss this Fine City and enjoying going back to her. If you have never visited, make the effort, and say Jim sent you. They won’t remember me.