St Andrew’s Hill
St Andrew’s Hill Descending St
Andrew’s Hill from London Street, there is about
halfway down on the left a wooden doorway thought to date
from about 1490, the former entrance to the Bridewell.
Its spandrels, carved to resemble foliage, support a
large wooden grille enclosed within the doorframe. This
grille, which in unglazed, is of Gothic design and
consists of two large lights, each divided into four
smaller ones by slender mullions which interlace at the
top like tracery in a church window. Sadly two of these
mullions have gone since the 1930s; in view of the
extreme rarity of such a doorway one would like to see it
sympathetically repaired and conserved to prolong its
existence for a few more centuries.Just round the corner, facing the south side of St Andrew’s Church, stands the most remarkable surviving relic of the old Bridewell, a flint wall seventy-nine feet long and twenty-seven feet high, constructed of smooth black flints so well squared and put together “as scarcely to admit the edge of a knife between the joints”. The building of which this wall forms a part was once the home of the Appleyard family – Bartholomew, who built it in about 1370, and his son William, the first to be elected Mayor of Norwich under its great charter of 1403. Its use as a Bridewell commenced in 1583, when it was purchased by the city for that purpose from Baron Sotherton. |
 In 1751 a fire destroyed
all but the flint wall and the adjoining sequence
of groined crypts. At this time a notorious character,
Peter the wild boy, was incarcerated here. He, it is
said, was brought over to England from Germany, where he
had been found wandering in a wood in a naked and wild
condition, having been lost there since he was a young
child. The sign of a public house in nearby Bedford
Street perpetuates the association, and long may it
continue to do so.Sixty years later, in January 1811, so well behaved were the citizens that the Bridewell doors were thrown open for several days. This was the first time for many years that not one person was being confined there for any misdemeanour. Unfortunately by 1826 the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction, the justices reporting that due to recent new legislation the accommodation there was “insufficient, inconvenient and inadequate”: because of the increased number of commitments “a more commodious building should be erected or substituted”. Two years later the prisoners were moved to the newly built gaol at St Giles’ Gates (now the site of the Roman Catholic Cathedral), and in 1829 the Bridewell was sold to a Mr J. Curr for £1,140. It was then put to a number of different uses, including use as a tobacco warehouse, and in the twentieth century until 1923 as a shoe factory. In that year it was purchased by Henry N. Holmes (later Sir Henry), who, after having it restored, presented it to the city for use as a museum of local industries. It was opened as such by the Duke of York (later King George VI) in 1925. Text and photographs Copyright © G.A.F.Plunkett 2004 |