My second of three walks in the ‘fine city’, this trail of medieval churches north of the Wensum is a collaboration between the Diocese, the Churches Conservation Trust, Norwich Historic Churches Trust, and the Medieval Parish Churches of Norwich Research Project at UEA.
This was also the second walk I have done en famille. We last walked together in a Walsingham bathed in beautiful sunshine on the early May bank holiday weekend. On this Saturday of the Whitsun bank holiday, it felt more like Norwich under-the-water than over-the-water, such was the constant and heavy rain we endured.
We joined the circular route half-way through so we could start at Blue Bear Coffee in Tombland. This is a not-for-profit social enterprise, the proceeds of which are reinvested into eradicating modern-day slavery and human trafficking. Beans are ethically sourced, and this little hub opposite the Cathedral’s Erpingham Gate is effortlessly cool. And the coffee is delicious.
The Wensum from Fyebridge, with the Cathedral in the background
Onto the churches. Walking alongside the Wensum, and then crossing the bridge onto Whitefriars, our first stop was St James Pockthorpe. Eight of the nine medieval churches on this route are redundant, this one in the care of the Norwich Historic Churches Trust. With its funny little octagonal tower a familiar sight to motorists, this church has been Norwich Puppet Theatre since 1978. The doors were locked with no one around. Having prayed my usual prayer in redundant churches, we headed back down Whitefriars, so-called because of the Carmelite Friary which occupied this site.
Most of the churches in this part of Norwich are quite small. They look like village churches which have been swallowed up by urban development. That’s true of St Edmund Fishergate, another NHCT building, which has a new tenant in Echo Youth Theatre. I tried the door, which to my surprise was open. There appeared to be no one inside, until a man appeared from the loos behind us. He gave an odd response to whether or not we could look round. ‘It’s a private space, but I suppose so.’ There is, I think, a tension in these buildings. They have new, independent uses, but still feel part of the public realm.
St Edmund Fishergate
Magdalen Street in the main street which heads due north out of the city centre, and typifies this part of Norwich, with a cosmopolitan mix of shops, grungy cafes, old-fashioned pubs and studenty take-aways. It’s a world away from the tranquillity of the Cathedral Close, or the quaint cobbled lanes around Elm Hill. It feels more Brighton than Norwich. Looses Emporium is a seemingly never-ending warehouse of antiques, bric-a-brac and collectibles. (I write sitting at and on and surrounded by furniture purchased here.)
St Saviour
Just before Magdalen Street passes under the flyover is St Saviour, its tower shortened to the height of the nave in the 1850s. Yet again in the care of NHCT, this church is used by St Giles Trust as a community pantry and advice centre, also closed today.
The otherwise excellent leaflet for this walk describes the descent into the underpass to cross the ring-road as ‘the only unlovely part of this walk’. As the incessant rain found its way through my trainers, this assertion seemed a bold one. Perhaps it was written on the assumption that plans to redevelop the eyesore which is Anglia Square would be coming to fruition by publication. This is one of those vast, concrete shopping centres which 1970s town-planners imagined would transform underperforming city centres. History has not judged them well. What sort of madness conceived of a building like this is in a city so rich with built heritage and beauty? It is now vacant and derelict. The developers, after years of negotiation and million of pounds of investment, have pulled the plug. Its future remains uncertain.
We navigated our way round it to get to the red-brick tower of St Augustine, from which parishioners here were historically referred to as ‘Red Steeplers’. This church is in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. Our leaflet directed us to the optician across the road for the key. Alas, like most establishments round here, it's closed on Saturdays. Whereas a Saturday was the perfect day for the Julian trail last month, with the city centre brimming with busy-ness, we got the impression that a weekday may have yielded access to more of these buildings. Although redundant, the noticeboard advertises 'contemplative worship' in the church hall on the otherside on the churchyard. It is not a building which looks well suited to contemplation.
St Mary Coslany is another church which appears to have been lifted flint by flint from a Norfolk village. It has a round tower, and St Mary’s Plain, the broad street in front of it, was used as a market place in past centuries. If you stand in Rosemary Lane opposite, with the thatched, Tudor house to your left, it’s possible to imagine the modern buildings vanished. The guide suggests St Mary's used to store books, but a newspaper cutting on the noticeboard heralds plans to convert it into artists’ studios, including an exhibition space. Uses which include public access must surely be welcomed.
St Mary Coslany
Also of interest here is the little Zoar Baptist Chapel of 1886, which is the home of Norwich's Strict Baptists. I had a friend at school who was a Strict Baptist. They are ‘Strict’ insofar that they restrict the Lord’s Supper to those who have been baptised by full immersion ('believers' baptism') after a public confession of faith. As it happens, they are pretty strict about everything else!
It’s almost next door to Norwich Central Baptist Church (not Strict), which has a much larger 1950s building. I’d love to know the history of the relationship – or lack thereof? – between these two church communities.
St Martin-at-Oak looks the most unused of all of these buildings. Even the squirrel next to the church path had expired. This church has been used as a homeless shelter, and, according to our leaflet, most recently as music academy. A check on the NHCT website reveals it is currently vacant. A planning notice implied that its hall is used by Men’s Sheds, a brilliant charity which uses DIY and carpentry to combat isolation and improve mental health among men.
The introduction to the leaflet says that Norwich-over-the-Water ‘has always been a kind of somewhere-else, not quite Norwich proper…. It still has the air of a place apart.’ A perhaps more honest assessment is found in the history section of the St Augustine’s Residents’ Association website: ‘For centuries it has been a place where activities and people found inconvenient or intolerable south of the river have found the space to take root and grow.’
Inside St Michael Coslany
That’s certainly true at St Michael Coslany, a big, town church, with stunning flushwork in the east and south walls. Inside it’s a circus! Rented by NHCT to the Oak Circus Centre, a children’s class had just finished, and we were welcomed by the staff to look round. ‘Go up to the mezzanine,’ we were encouraged, ‘it’s the best view’. This must be an ideal venue for circus, big enough for a trapeze, and plenty of room to swing around. Behind the bar in the tower hang the ropes more customarily found in such a building. I wonder when these bells last rung out.
St Michael Coslany
In the nave a rainbow-coloured sign proclaims ‘God loves the Gays’. The breadth of the CofE is such that you might find this sign in plenty of churches which aren’t redundant. Here it feels subversive, in a subversive part of the city; a fingers-up to an Established Church which appears morally conservative and no longer able to sustain and support its own infrastructure. I am acutely conscious of the tension inherent in a church which can’t articulate a consistent and clear message on issues of sexuality. This felt like an uncomfortable reminder – made more uncomfortable by being on the seemingly familiar territory of a church building – of how so many people are beyond disenfranchised with organised religion.
By now I didn’t need to use my prayer card for my redundant church prayer – I knew it by heart. It was a joy, then, to find the only active CofE church of the route open. St George Colegate is elegant and uncluttered, beautifully kept, and a gem of Georgian furnishings. It has the feel of a middle-of-the-road Anglicanism which doesn’t really exist anymore. It was a relief and pleasure to pray a living church, asking God ‘to grant to this parish all things needful for its spiritual welfare’. I suspect it takes some confidence to keep it open, so hats off to the PCC.
St George Colegate
One of the things I noticed wandering around this area ultra aquam is that this is where Norwich shelters its vulnerable. Advice centres, drop-ins, housing charities, a (now derelict) foster home, sheltered accommodation, social housing and a myriad of projects abound here. Most of these churches have been used at some point in their more recent history to house the homeless. Was it ever thus? I think so, judging from the long row of sixteenth century almshouses in Gildencroft, and Doughty’s Hospital, built in 1687 for twenty-four poor men and eight poor women. (I don’t know why the gender disparity.)
It’s not hard to see, historically, how this happened. The river must have been a helpful demarcation for the salubrious city-types, wanting a boundary between them and those ‘people found inconvenient or intolerable’. You can almost imagine, in former centuries, a physician or a Justice of the Peace deciding the fate of a person with unstable mental health, or an impoverished widow. ‘It’s over-the-water for you, I’m afraid.’
It is no surprise, then, that there is a long and strong Dissenters’ presence in this part of the city. The Baptists on St Mary’s Plain are relative newcomers compared with the Presbyterians and Congregationalists on Colegate. The Octagon Chapel was built for the former, but taken over by the Unitarians in the nineteenth century. The Old Meeting House is home to Congregationalists. They are both important buildings of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively. The Octagon Chapel was locked, and the Old Meeting House looked to be so from the entrance to its loke. By now, dampness and hunger were deterrents from further exploration. Methodists were strong here once, and there are Quaker and Jewish cemeteries in this part of the city.
At the end of Colegate is St Clement-at-Fyebridge (again NHCT), used by stonemasons, and open next Saturday (sadly not this) for an exhibition. Probably the most strategically located church in the district, I wonder why it wasn’t chosen to be the continuing Christian presence here rather than St George’s. That’s what the Revd Jack Burton must have been thinking when he privately rented this building to keep it open for prayer and contemplation for the last quarter of the twentieth century.
St Clement-at-Fyebridge
This is an area rich in decent pubs, where the kingdom has come for the Campaign for Real Ales (CAMRA). The King’s Head is well known, but I think we passed at least half a dozen other pubs serving a range of locally produced ales. Indeed, Norwich prides itself on being the City of Ale, and there is a month-long programme of that name, with dedicated ale trails across the city. I think you’d need the whole month just to get through Over-the-Water’s offerings.
This was not the most stellar walk of the sabbatical so far. We only accessed four of the thirteen churches (including non-medieval, non-Anglican buildings) on the route. I kept telling my wife that it would have been improved with better weather and on a weekday, and I’m resolved to give it another go under those conditions on another occasion.
Whereas my first walk in Norwich (the Julian Trail) filled me with hope and optimism, this walk left me a little despondent. Perhaps that’s because of an overriding feeling that the Church of England has largely abandoned this gritty, creative, bohemian neighbourhood in favour of more salubrious parts of the city. Tellingly, the only church building still functioning is in the smartest street of Norwich-over-the-Water.
Admittedly complicit, we returned to the comfort and conformity of Norwich south of the Wensum for lunch in Carberry’s and Choral Evensong in the Cathedral. We had a good excuse: the visiting choir was St Martin’s, Hindringham (see Evensong in a Country Church). It was the first Evensong of Trinity Sunday, the Cathedral’s Feast of Title.
The quire of Norwich Cathedral, built for the Benedictines who lived and worshipped here, is one of those cathedral quires which feels like a church within a church, enveloping the congregation, protecting it from the outside world. There are positives and negatives sides of this, but these three rain-soaked pilgrims were glad of its shelter and protection. I can’t think of a better space to worship the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity. The words of the anthem, set to music by Stainer, were written around the same time these venerable stones were built:
O Trinity! O Unity!
Be present as we worship thee;
And with the songs that angels sing
Unite the hymns of praise we bring.
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