Norwich Audio Tour: At Work

Norwich was rich long before England had factories. Six centuries of worsted weaving, a third of the population speaking Dutch, a 1583 'house of correction' that put women to spin and men to grind malt, a Wensum canal that floated Caen stone to the cathedral works yard, fifteen per cent of the city in shoe factories by 1900, an insurance giant born above a wine merchant's vaults, and an Edwardian architect who built the offices, arcades and department stores where the new clerks and shop-girls worked: it all happened inside one square mile. This self-guided audio tour walks that mile. From Strangers' Hall — the merchant's house where Mayor Sotherton lodged refugee Dutch weavers in 1565 — through a 1670 weaver's cottage, the friary where the Strangers worshipped in Dutch until 1929, the Elizabethan Bridewell that 'set the poor on work', the Norman market that has traded since 1086, the medieval Guildhall, a bespoke shoemaker still hand-stitching on the same shopfront since 1874, the only independent department store in the city, George Skipper's Art Nouveau arcade, the Marble Hall of Norwich Union, the keep where Robert Kett was hanged, the Anglo-Scandinavian first marketplace, the cathedral gate built by Agincourt's Sir Thomas Erpingham, the medieval water-gate that delivered the cathedral stone — and ending at the seven-bay medieval trading hall of merchant Robert Toppes, who exported the Norwich worsted that built it all. Walk slowly. The buildings still hold their shape, and the working lives still hold their names.