NORWICH SHOPS (8) LONDON STREET

This was the first major thoroughfare in the city to be pedestrianized; some minor streets in Norwich like Bridewell Alley and Lower Goat Lane had always been for passage by foot only, simply because they are too narrow for vehicles. When I was being driven around Norwich as a lad I could be taken down Gentlemans Walk, turn right into London Street and go past Opie Street and down Queens Street to Tombland, all in the car. I don’t claim this was easy – there were too many parked cars for that – but it was possible. The pedestrianization was hailed as a great breakthrough by many, but from others there were stark warnings that it would kill the street for shopkeepers. Over 50 years later shoppers still use the street, and the threat comes from online shopping rather than traffic management. It is certainly true that it can be convenient to drive through the city centre for the disabled, but even in the few places where you can still do this you are extremely unlikely to find anywhere near where you want to go to park, so the possibility of shopping by car is a remote one.

You can see Stevenson’s Interflora Flower Shop in the picture which heads this page. This shop had been there as long as I can remember, and appears little changed in this picture taken in about 1975. Interflora flowers are perhaps a little on the expensive side and on those occasions when I have to buy flowers for distant recipients I tend to use more reasonably priced shops. For sending flowers abroad it seems better to go for other options today, what with the internet and credit cards you can buy local to where the flowers are destined. Interflora was my father’s favourite florist and I think Stevenson’s was the only one he ever patronized.

London Street is an expensive place to go shopping, being the nearest thing to the jewellers’ quarter of the city. This picture is of the shop window of Windsor Bishop in the early seventies. Although it appears not to have changed, in those days you could just walk in if you wanted to, and browse around. Now the door is permanently locked and you must request entry from the doorman. In those more law abiding days you did not have to worry about thieves forcing their way into the shop. My wife Molly was looking for a watch to buy for our daughter recently, and one place she tried was Windsor Bishop. The experience was one of high security combined with subtly high-powered salesmanship.

Besides jewellers, the street is also namely for banks. The large branch of Barclays (formerly the headquarters of Gurney’s Bank) which took up the whole block at the far end of London Street, along the west side of Bank Plain, is no more although the building remains. There was still a branch of Barclays  until a decade or so ago. Even the branch of the National Westminster Bank (the name latterly abbreviated to Natwest) that heads this page has now gone. With its classical pedimented portico below a cupola it looks more like a church than a bank – a Wren church, a smaller version of St Paul’s Cathedral. There was once a branch of the Midland Bank here; the Midland is now part of HSBC, and there was still a branch of the Co-operative Bank last time I looked. Where Opie Street joins London Street is the office of Barratt and Cooke, Norwich’s stock-broking firm. So you can see, what with all these financiers and jewellers, it is a street that has a high powered reputation for money.

This has not always been the case. In the 18th century London Street was still called Cocky Lane after the open sewer which used to run down the middle of the road. Opie Street was the haunt of low life and prostitutes. In the middle ages it went by a disgusting name which I will not mention in this respectable blog, but which you can easily find by entering Opie Street in Wikipedia. [Click here to reveal the street’s old name.] The sensibilities of people have certainly changed, and the names of these streets have changed with them, to ones with less gross connotations. Opie Street’s current name comes from it association with the poet Amelia Opie who lived there in the early 19th century.

JOSEPH MASON

joemasonspage@gmail.com

THE BLOG FOR MEMORIES OF EAST ANGLIAN LIFE