St Giles’ Street

Dominating St Giles’ Plain, as the western end of Bethel Street is known, is the magnificent tower of St Giles’ church. Battlemented and crowned with a small wooden bell-cot, it is quite the tallest of the city’s church towers, for it is over 112 feet high, and the ground on which it stands is some 85 feet above sea level. In 1549 it was selected as a suitable site for a cresset or fire beacon (the old wrought-iron basket is still carefully preserved in the church). In more recent times its favourable position rendered it convenient for semaphore signalling practice by soldiers from Britannia Barracks.

The porch is very fine and compares favourably with any other in Norwich. It is of two storeys, with fan tracery vaulting. The front, supported by diagonal buttresses, is of freestone, and the parapet and cornice are enriched with carving reproducing a series of crowns above the ancient form of the letter “G”.

The present chancel is modern, built in 1866. The original one was demolished by Dean Gardiner in 1581, when, it is said, a bell was purchased out of part of the money received from the sale of the old materials.

St Giles’ is particularly noted for its peal of eight bells, which I was able to photograph when they were lying in the churchyard in April 1932, before being rehung. They had been taken down for retuning when the bell frame was rebuilt; the original beams having been ravaged by the deathwatch beetle. It was indeed fortunate that they did not come crashing to the ground when an earth tremor shook the region a year earlier.

According to John L’Estrange, the three largest bells were the original peal put up shortly after the tower was built; they were cast by Richard Baxter, who lived in Norwich about 1410-20. The fourth bell was by William Brend, whose foundry was on All Saints’ Green. The fifth was one of Richard Brasyer’s of Norwich; the sixth has no inscription but was added about 1690, while the two trebles were added by subscription in 1738 and were cast by Thomas Newman of Norwich.

Inside the church are a number of monuments, many dating from the eighteenth century, but of particular interest is a brass to Robert Baxter, Sheriff of Norwich in 1418, and his wife. It was etched and published by John Sell Cotman in his book The Sepulchral Brasses of Norfolk and Suffolk.

Among the mural monuments are two to the Churchman family, who lived in the nearby mansion which bears their name and which narrowly escaped destruction by fire during the Second World War. Churchman House (pictured here from its rear garden) had a number of notable occupants. The original house seems to have been built some time before 1724 by Alderman Thomas Churchman, a prosperous worsted weaver. Corbridge’s map of Norwich, published in 1727, has around its margin a series of drawings depicting some of the city’s more important buildings, including the house of “Mr Tho. Churchman”. Of more modest dimensions than the existing house, the original building would appear to have been enlarged by his son, also Thomas, around the middle of the eighteenth century. It was in 1751 that he was permitted by the City Committee to extend the front of his house westwards; in doing so he retained part of the original building as the kitchen wing at the rear.

Alderman Churchman (the father) had died in 1742 aged seventy-two, as the monument by the London sculptor Sir Henry Cheere records. His son lived to be seventy-nine, dying in 1781. One of the high spots in his life must have been in 1761 when, as Mayor of Norwich, he presented personally the citizens’ address of congratulation to King George III on the occasion of his marriage. For this he was knighted.

Other occupants included Samuel Clayton and his son, the Rev. William Ray Clayton, during whose time here (c1830) the drawing room overlooking the garden was enlarged. Sir William Foster, Bart, lived here from about 1860 until his death in 1874. He was the senior partner in the nineteenth-century firm of solicitors, Foster, Unthank, Burroughs and Robberds, the site of whose offices is now covered by what used to be the Royal Hotel.

After Sir William’s death the Norwich High School for Girls first opened its doors here on 22nd February 1875, under the supervision of head mistress Miss Ada Benson, whose brother later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Two years later the school moved to the Assembly House, after which the property was purchased by Sir Peter (then Doctor) Eade. An honorary consultant physician to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, he became an Alderman of the city and member of the Board of Guardians, being made Sheriff in 1880-81 and Mayor in 1883, 1893 and 1895. He received a knighthood in 1885 from Queen Victoria in recognition of his public services. A member of the committee of the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, he published several important works on local matters, the chief, perhaps, being his History of the Parish of St Giles, Norwich, which ran to two editions, and a History of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. He died in 1915 aged ninety, and his wife Ellen two months later.

The house then remained empty until purchased in 1919 by Norwich Corporation, who opened it two years later as the headquarters of the city’s health department. In the late 1980s it underwent extensive restoration and conversion into offices for the city’s registrar of births, marriages and deaths.

Detailed accounts of the building and its occupants will be found in the pages of Norfolk Archaeology, and it is sufficient here to mention just one or two of its main features. The former library, lit by two windows, lies to the right of the hall upon entering from the street. Here a doubly-enriched plaster cornice around the ceiling, and in the centre of the wall facing the windows is an elaborate stone mantelpiece (pictured) described as follows: A band of marble veined in yellow and black outlines the inner edge; on either side long pendant bunches of grapes are carved in bold relief, while the frieze, divided into three panels, has rural scenes. On the left a boy riding a horse, a sheep in the foreground; in the centre panel a boy setting a trap for birds, with a second boy holding a cage in readiness; and on the right, two boys in a rowing boat with ducks in the foreground. These scenes are partly in high and partly low relief.

The one-time dining room to the left of the hall is lit by three windows, although the lower half of one was converted into a doorway before the Second World War. This is the special room of the house, handsomely decorated in the Rococo style. On its walls plaster mouldings form elaborate frames around five inlaid pictures and two pier glasses. The ceiling is similarly decorated; the centre having a picture in raised plaster, once coloured but now whitened over. Of the pictures, two appear to be landscapes; the largest one is an historical scene. Those flanking the chimneypiece however, are mythological. The left-hand one (Venus and Cupid with doves and a faun) has been attributed to the artist Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, who was working at Narford Hall, near Swaffham, about 1710.

The dining-room mantelpiece is a fine one of white and reddish-brown marble. A panel in the centre of its frieze depicts boys shearing a sheep, while on either side is a large raised figure of a goat. It is believed to be the work of Sir Henry Cheere, the eighteenth-century London sculptor, who was also responsible for the monument to Thomas Churchman senior in the church opposite. Mantelpieces differing only in their lesser details from this one and no doubt by the same sculptor are in the library at Langley Hall near Loddon and at Roche Castle in Dyfed, South Wales.

In the raid of 27th June 1942, buildings at Nos 70 and 72 St Giles’ Street were destroyed by fire. No 72, a Tudor house with a quaint array of gables whose roofing consisted of a patchwork of pantiles and old English pintiles, had its ground floor completely modernised at the beginning of the twentieth century by the use of steel girders and pillars. It was thus converted into a furniture showroom with large plate glass windows to give a completely uninterrupted view from the street. A photograph of Upper St Giles’ Street showing the house in its original state appeared in Sir Peter Eade’s history of the parish; it was then occupied by Mrs Nash, a stationer.

No 70 next door was a fine large house, much older than appeared at first sight. During the latter part of the Georgian period it had been “modernised” by covering its timber framework with plaster and replacing the casement windows with sashes. Its street doorway also dated from this period and was rather unusual for Norwich in that it possessed twin pillars on either side of the entrance. These supported a plain entablature, the top of which rested just beneath the first floor jetty. The pillars were hollow wooden cylinders of not more than three-quarters of an inch in thickness. After the raid the wall of the ground floor was revealed to be of knapped flints, a favourite local material in mediaeval times.

Sir Peter Eade (who lived next door at Churchman House) described in his history, published in 1886, a cellar here that extended beneath parts of the hall, dining room and kitchen. It had thick walls and was divided into two compartments, eight feet high, with groined arches placed endways to the street.

One of the most notable of its residents was Sir Frederic Bateman, who died here in 1904 aged eighty. In 1864 he commenced practice as a physician, being then elected Physician to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. He was also visiting Physician to the Bethel Hospital; he was engaged in writing the history of that institution at the time of his death. He was Sheriff of Norwich in 1872-3 and knighted in 1892.

After the war the site of No 70 was left vacant, but a Gospel Hall was built in the garden at the rear. At No 72 Messrs Walter Kett rebuilt a single storey showroom, but this was acquired at the end of the 1960s so that a new road could be constructed linking St Giles’ and Bethel Streets with the Grapes Hill, Chapel Field Road junction of the inner link road.

Upper St Giles’ Street has been a cul-de-sac since Grapes Hill was widened and its gradient reduced as part of the inner link road scheme. This entailed the demolition of buildings on either side of that end of the street: on the south, the St Giles’ Gate public house, together with Onley’s the tobacconist’s and Sandford’s the butchers, all old-established business, were destroyed, and on the north Nos 99-103, a solid-looking block evidently built not many years after the pulling down of St Giles’ Gate, was demolished. The grey brick facade of this group of houses was characteristic of the Regency period, with four pilasters rising from simple bases at first-floor level to support a broad entablature with a heavy overhanging cornice. There was a chemist’s shop for many years at No103, occupied in the late nineteenth century by Joseph English, who was succeeded latterly by Charles Hipperson, R Margetts, and finally Basil Veness. At No 101 a grocer’s and fruiterer’s had an equally long occupancy, owned in the nineteenth century by William Goggs and latterly by the Davison Brothers. At No 99 in the 1930s was the drapery shop of Mrs Blanche Nunn; it later became a hairdresser’s and then an electrical and radio showroom.

Although St Giles’ Gate was pulled down in 1792, a long section of the city wall remained to the north, forming the backs of cottage on Wellington Lane. When these were pulled down just before the Second World War, along with two or three others backing on them near the top of Grapes Hill, the lofty remains of one of the towers was brought to light. This was square in plan, unlike the others in the series, which were either round or horseshoe shaped.

About the year 1711 the historian John Kirkpatrick wrote an account of the walls as then existing, in which he recorded that it was fifty paces “from St Giles’ gate to ye next tower, wch. is a new square tower, on it an inscription”. This inscription does not seem to have been copied, but a chequered pattern of flint and stone could be made out on the southern face of the tower. Later reduced in height to a few feet only, this tower and the adjoining wall as far as Pottergate were completely cleared away when Grapes Hill was widened, although its site (but not that of the tower) have since been marked out with pebbles along the grass verge at the side of the road.

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