Qualla: Great Yarmouth

Great Yarmouth: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

King John's charter to Great Yarmouth in 1208 included an unusual obligation. Every year, the town owed the Crown one hundred herring, baked into twenty-four pasties. The sheriffs of Norwich delivered them to the lord of East Carlton, who delivered them to the King. Eight hundred years later the herring are mostly gone and the pasties are unaccounted for. But the medieval town walls still stand - eleven of the eighteen original towers remain - and the streets behind them remember when this was one of the great fishing ports of Europe.

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Great Yarmouth: The Spit and the Herring

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Great Yarmouth grew on a three-mile spit of sand caught between the North Sea and the River Yare. Fishermen from the Cinque Ports were drawn here by the herring shoals long before any permanent settlement existed; by the time of the Norman Conquest the town already had seventy bu...

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Great Yarmouth: The 145 Rows

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Behind the quay, the town developed a layout found nowhere else in England: three long streets running north to south, joined by 145 narrow alleys called Rows, numbered rather than named. The Rows were tight enough that a wide cart could not pass through them, and the houses lini...

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Great Yarmouth: Nelson's Column Before London Had One

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On South Denes stands a Grade I listed Britannia Monument, also called Nelson's Monument. It was completed in 1819 - twenty-four years before Nelson's Column went up in Trafalgar Square. Designed by William Wilkins, it shows Britannia atop a globe, olive branch in her right hand,...

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Great Yarmouth: The Bridge Disaster

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 2 May 1845, the Yarmouth suspension bridge collapsed. A crowd of children had gathered to watch a clown in a barrel being pulled down the river by geese - a spectacle so specific to Victorian England that it now reads like fiction. As the clown passed beneath the bridge, the c...

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Great Yarmouth: The Zeppelin and the Bombs

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 19 January 1915, a German Zeppelin called L 3 dropped bombs on Great Yarmouth. It was the first air raid on England. The Imperial Navy returned several times during the First World War, including a naval bombardment on 24 April 1916. During the Second World War the Luftwaffe p...

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Great Yarmouth: The Golden Mile

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Yarmouth's seafront promenade, the Golden Mile, draws millions of visitors a year. Two piers stretch out into the North Sea - Wellington Pier from 1853, Britannia Pier from 1858 - the latter still hosting summer variety theatre. Twelve amusement arcades pack into two square miles...

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