Barn Road
Barn Road| Once lined with nineteenth-century brick and tiled
terraced houses, Barn Road is now almost unrecognisable
since being more than doubled in width to become part of
the inner link road. Perhaps the only familiar landmark
from earlier days is Cushion’s timber yard, although
even this has changed and one misses the sight of those
massive tree trunks and the overhead travelling crane.
On the night of 27th April 1942, a heavy bomb fell near St Benedict’s Gates, wrecking these houses and creating so much havoc in the vicinity that no sign of the lane could be seen among the debris. Later, when the site was cleared, the city wall was allowed to remain and subsequent excavation revealed among other things the foundations (long lost) of one of its bastions. At the corner of Barn Road and St Benedict’s Street stood a “free house” familiarly known as Harcourt’s, but more correctly (from an inscribed stone built into its south wall) as The Omnibus. This name was derived from its being the stopping place on one of the routes of the Norwich Omnibus Company which ran a series of horse ‘buses in the city before the introduction of the electric tramways at the commencement of the twentieth century. Text and photographs Copyright © G.A.F.Plunkett 2004 |
On the opposite side of
the road there still stand reduced and mutilated
fragments of the city wall, which before the war were
incorporated in the rear wall of Nos 4-8 Barn Road
(left). This was a terrace of three-storeyed houses,
their front wall constructed of knapped flints with brick
dressings around the casement windows. The lower part of
their rear wall which abutted upon St Benedict’s
Back Lane, was contrived out of the city wall, but arched
recesses which originally opened towards the lane were
unblocked and reversed to add a little more space to the
back rooms of the houses. First built along the site of
the city ditch between 1779 and 1789, the row was
redeveloped in the mid-nineteenth century.