Orford Hill
Orford Hill Red Lion Street, which
links St Stephen’s with Castle Meadow, passes Orford
Place to Orford Hill. Here at No 16, now occupied by a
branch of Marks and Spencers, stood the Livingstone
hotel. Starting life about 1720 as a Georgian mansion
and once occupied by the Crosse family of medical
practitioners, it became during the nineteenth century a
temperance and commercial hotel, although after about
1921 it was largely used as stockrooms.This and adjoining property, cleared away in 1961 for Littlewood’s new store, occupied an historical site. George Green’s tailor’s and outfitter’s shop, for instance, built facing the Haymarket in 1893, replaced the Star, known to have been a coaching inn as far back as 1684. Walter Wicks in his book on the inns and taverns of Norwich gave details of some of its more colourful characters, one of whom, James Farmer, was licensed in 1677 to “make show” of an elephant there. To go back even further, it is believed to include part of the site of the city’s old Jewry; although the Jews were expelled at the end of the thirteenth century, the last remnants of their quarters here were said to have been swept away only when Green’s shop was built. |
 Perhaps better known is
the fact that hereabouts stood the residence of Sir
Thomas Brown, MD, whose statue graces the adjacent open
square of the Haymarket. Here he lived from 1650 until
his death in 1682; a nineteenth century building, 3 and 5
Orford Place, demolished early in 1956 to make way for a
new shoe shop, had an inscribed stone above a first-floor
window to commemorate this. Ralph Mottram has related how
it was probably this stone that led to the 1929 edition
of Kelly’s Street Directory recording “Browne,
Thomas, M.D.”, as if he were still residing there.Although Sir Thomas’s house had long since disappeared, what is believed to have been his “garden house” stood almost completely hidden from view between the Livingstone and Green’s shop. This was a timber-framed building dating from about 1600, only the peak of its tall attic gable visible above the roof of the adjacent Lamb inn. A plaster ceiling enriched with a geometrical design in high relief was carefully removed and stored when the property was taken down. Orford Place from the Castle battlements 1938 (right). Text and photographs Copyright © G.A.F.Plunkett 2004 |