Walking offers clues
We spent the morning in Norwich City Centre. Walking around a collection of sites relating to the 5 commissioners we are looking at allowed for further thinking about proximity, wealth and status.
We started the tour at Davey Place where Yallop was a partner at a Goldsmiths and Lottery Agent, we took a guess albeit an educated one that the current City Bookshop could have been the place we were looking for. Much of the street is comprised of relatively contemporary architecture, so we went for the only Georgian looking building on the street. Patricia went inside to ask if they knew of Yallop. A short time later someone who works at the book shop came out and told us a brief history of Davey Place and the building itself. We couldn’t work out definitively if this was the building we were seeking but felt happy at such a positive start to the walking tour.
When we arrived at the Guildhall, Ann went and asked for the keys so we could look around. http://www.heritagecity.org/index.htm . We gained access to the Council Chamber where, up until the completion of City Hall nearby in 1938, all civic matters were discussed. Three of our characters, Yallop, Herring and De Hague would have used these rooms. The Guildhall itself was also used as a collection point for taxes. Would the Land Tax have been collected door to door or would people have to go to the guildhall to pay over their money at quarterly intervals? The building itself is beautiful, however the Council Chamber rather empty. The walls should be covered with civic portraits which I believe at Blackfriars Hall / St Andrews Hall which we hope to visit next week.
One of our commissioners is Michael Bland and sites to visit in relation to him are thin on the ground. From the Guildhall we went to the Quaker Meeting House in Upper Goat Lane, Bland was a Quaker and we thought perhaps he may have spent time in the meeting house when he was in Norwich. In an earlier session with the group it had been revealed that gas lighting has been introduced into Norwich, we wondered if the light over the gateway might have been powered this way.
I was interested in how a walking tour can add to the historical research process. I asked the group and Mari who came along from the Parliamentary Archive for their responses: cementing what we have already found out, the visual impact of seeing a house or site prompts extra clues and thoughts about what to look at next in the archive.
