Norwich – The Lanes and City Centre

Tuesday, 26 April, 2022

It’s not that I haven’t been anywhere or done anything, but I’ve been lazy about putting it all together.

We planned a two-night trip to Norwich, somewhere I’ve wanted to go for some time. I didn’t know much about it and tried to research a bit before I went, but these days  I’m just as happy to be away as to actually go out and discover new things. In fact, I didn’t spend that much time just relaxing but walked every day until I couldn’t manage another step.

The journey there was uneventful. We got the train to Stratford and from there another train all the way to Norwich, about an hour forty minutes for the longer ride. Luckily, the train was fairly empty and fast.

Norwich station was quite old fashioned and small. I was happy that we came straight in without any stairs to climb before we could leave. My friend, Julie met us there and we started our walk to have lunch together.

Norwich looked small-townish, but there were some interesting old stone and brick structures. I was itching to take photos already. However, we headed for a restaurant. The food wasn’t good and I think I made the best choices of the three of us – just some squid, and a papaya salad.

From there we walked to where we were staying on St Faith’s Lane. It wasn’t far from the station – a small curved back street with a view to the cathedral. We were staying in a studio apartment which I’d found online. I forgot to take photos but it was decent – we had a full kitchen along one side, an armchair, a bed, a little table with two chairs, and a bathroom with a big walk in shower.  It would do nicely for our two half and one full days.

We rested for a while and decided that we’d like to have fish and chips that night. One place, Grosvenor Fish and Chips in The Lanes area came highly recommended so we decided to head to The Lanes, which we could see the beginning of from where we had eaten. It seemed that if we plunged into the first sight of it and followed through, it shouldn’t be hard to find Grosvenor.

The Lanes are some winding, narrow laneways, often hilly and mostly cobbled. It’s a mix of tacky and interesting, the medieval and the modernised. The entire city is littered with churches and blue and other historic plaques, too many to read.  And finally we found the Grosvenor.

I loved the fact that we not only found it in the maze of lanes but it was on a street called Pottergate, which I decided to call Harry Potter Gate. Its name comes of course from being where the pottery industry once flourished. I’ve now read that there are many haunted spots in Norwich, but I hadn’t taken the time to learn about the many ghosts the city has.

We could have stopped for fish and chips then, but the queue was quite long so we decided instead to explore a bit more. This was a mistake.

I’ve become very spoiled by the fact that Krish can almost instantly orient himself anywhere we go. It’s always amazed me how he instinctively heads in the right direction without a map or having read anything much about our destination. This means I trust him to get us to where we want to be. That night, however, his instincts failed and we wandered and wandered. We had no idea where we were or where we’d end up, the only saving grace being the city’s small size so we couldn’t be lost for long. But try as we might, we couldn’t find our way back to Pottergate and Grosvenor. Up and down, round and round and where was Pottergate?

I checked my Google map more than once but each time Krish pointed our way and I said, I don’t think so, I’d head where he pointed because he’s never wrong. Only he was. More than a few times. In the meantime, we discovered Norwich Market, one of the oldest and largest outdoor markets in the country, it has 189 stalls. They stand in grid formation, each with a striped awning roof and sunken below a town square in front of the town hall, a building we meant to go into but never did. The market disappointed us, to be honest. It was mostly cooked food stalls and it was grubby and messy with pigeon poo everywhere around it. We were used to Turin’s market, where there’s so much fresh food and at night it’s thoroughly scrubbed and cleaned till it’s gleaming. We hoped that when Norwich Market was open, it would cheer up.

When we finally stumbled on the Grosvenor, at 7:10pm, it had just closed! ‘Oh no, we’ve walked so far to find you,’ I said, and was acknowledged with only a smile and a shrug. Norwich closes early – many places by 4 or 5pm.

I was done! We thought about finding something that would be open and having a meal, but it wasn’t in the cards. We headed instead for the first Tesco we saw and bought one meal deal (sandwich, crisps and some juice) some bread, sausages, cheese, butter, and hot cross buns. We weren’t going to be hungry the next time this happened. Along the way Krish admitted the city had completely robbed him of his usual orientation skills. A maze, he said. Would we ever figure it out?