Bethel Street
Bethel Street Bethel Street, which leads
from Upper St Giles’ to the Market Place, was in the
early eighteenth century known as Committee Street, from
the Committee House which formerly stood on the site of
the Bethel Hospital and which was blown up in 1648 by the
accidental firing of ninety-eight barrels of gunpowder. A
much more recent disaster was the destruction by
incendiary bombs of Nos 53-57 Bethel Street during the
night of 27th June 1942.Nos 55-57 (left) were three-storeyed houses faced with plaster, having sash windows and pantiled roofs. Of the two, No 57 appeared to be the older, its first floor projecting slightly over the pavement. Between the two was the entrance to Watts’ Court, spanned by a carved wooden archway of Tudor origin. Happily saved from the burned-out wreckage, it was later moved to one of the Norwich museums. It bears neither date nor initials, which are often featured on similar doorways of this period, but it has in its spandrels carvings of a lizard (left) and fern leaves (right). No 55 was at one time the residence of Charles Burton Daveney, a solicitor, who died about 1880. He was a member of the well-known family of Daveney of Colton. Watts’ Court takes its name from John Langley Watts, a merchant, who resided during the eighteenth century at No 61, a little further to the west of these houses. He was Sheriff in 1771 and Mayor in 1774, dying during his term of office. He is notable as being the first Norwich Mayor to have two Christian names. |
 No 53 (right) was a
spacious mansion built during the latter half of the
Georgian period. Three storeys high, with sash windows
and a central pillared doorway, it had a wing to the east
having two main storeys, with an attic lit by two
dormers, each crowned by a small pediment. This had been
the residence of a number of local notabilities. In
mid-nineteenth-century directories, for instance, we find
mention of Mr James Cuddon, solicitor, who was the
founder of the Law Union Assurance Society, established
in 1854. Then came Dr Edward Copeman, a physician to the
Norfolk and Norwich Hospital from 1851 to 1878, who as
well as being a noted obstetrician and gynaecologist was
an excellent musician and performer on the violin and
violoncello, playing at several of the Norwich Musical
Festivals.Mr F. C. Bailey lived here in 1886. He was a surgeon and as well as being Medical Officer for the Seventh District was also Medical Officer of the Asylum for the Blind in Magdalen Street. Coming to recent times, Dr G. S. B. Long lived here shortly before the Second World War, and finally in 1940 the house was taken over by the Diocesan Refuge (St Augustine’s Lodge), who were the occupiers at the time of its destruction. Next door at No 1 the picturesque Coach and Horses public house still stands, as does, a few yards further on, the building from which the street obtained its name. Built in 1713, the Bethel is one of the oldest mental hospitals in the country. Although no longer housing inmates, it is still in use as a psychiatric outpatients’ department and so adheres to the instructions carved on its foundation stone that it “is not to be alienated or employ’d to any other use or purpose whatsoever”. Its foundress was Mary Chapman, the widow of the Reverend Samuel Chapman, rector of Thorpe St Andrew. Both of them had relations afflicted with mental illness and it was no doubt this, and the fact that many such sufferers – particularly the poor and destitute – were treated like rogues and vagabonds, that gave Mary and her husband the idea of building such a refuge. Much of the Queen Anne building remains. It is best seen from the garden at the back, the Bethel Street frontage being a modern addition erected in 1899 during the chairmanship of John Youngs. |
 Eastwards of the Bethel
Hospital, the new Central Public Library rises on the
sites occupied by the previous library (left),
built 1963 and destroyed by fire in 1994, and a surface
car park. Between the old library and car park ran
Esperanto Way, which itself took the line of Lady Lane.Tucked away behind buildings on its north side of Bethel Street is a row of town houses known as St Giles’ Terrace, built during the early part of the nineteenth century. Facing west, its grey brick facade was designed with a series of five pilasters supporting a shallow stone pediment above a plain architrave. A survival from the past which I photographed in 1955 was an old gas lamp (below) lighting the pathway flanking the front gardens here; it has since been converted to electricity, although retaining its original lantern. |
 The history of street
lighting in Norwich is an interesting one. In August
1807, the Paving Commissioners advertised for tenders for
lighting the city by oil, stating that the number of
lamps required would be between 1,200 and 1,400. Late in
1819 a Bill was promoted in Parliament for lighting the
city with oil gas and “on January 31st, 1820, the
first of the iron gas pipes were laid in the Market
Place”, where by May the gas was producing “a
strong and steady light as far as it extended”. The
works were in St Stephen’s Back Street (now
Malthouse Road), but in 1825 they were purchased by the
British Gas Light Company, who had bought land near St
Martin-at-Palace Plain in order to build works for the
production of coal gas. In 1830 these were augmented by
others at Bishopbridge Road, and from this time gas
lighting was gradually extended throughout the city.Twenty-one years later, when Norwich was the subject of an inquiry by the General Board of Health into its sanitary condition, the Superintendent Inspector, W. Lee, commented on the evidence of Mr Tadman, the gas works manager, and considering the cost of the coals, “the citizens of Norwich had great reason to be satisfied with the company’s prices for gas”. Unfortunately this happy state of affairs was not to last; in 1880 because of the “unjust and unnecessary burdens imposed upon the citizens through the extravagant charge made for gas” the city council was asked to consider the question of electric lighting. A year later two electric lights had been put up in the Market Place and it was decided to extend the system experimentally to a few other main streets. The first permanent installations were made in 1904, when arc lamps were placed on top of the tram standards in the Market Place, Bank Plain and Prince of Wales Road, to be followed in 1910-13 by the conversion of all the gas lamps to electricity except for a few isolated lamps in unadopted thoroughfares. Norwich, it was claimed, thus became the first town in England to be entirely lit by electricity. Text and photographs Copyright © G.A.F.Plunkett 2004 |