Black Tower or Boteliers or Butlers tower Norwich city wall, Bracondale. I think this was also called Snuff tower as well, but then I’ve been called lots of things and I’m only 44, this is 700-ish. You can walk round it, i would have liked to go inside it, but you can’t, because it’s got a daft gate on it, which presumably stops dossers and junkies from messing up the weed and rubbish strewn interior or disturbing the brazillions of pigeons who live in it.
I particularly dig the fact that you can see the platform/walkway and an entry point into the tower from it, complete with one crenelation and the long run of surviving arches, which soldiers would have huddled in out of the drizzle to not have a fag, because smoking hadn’t been imported, I suspect they wouldn’t have had a baked potato either as they hadn’t been invented yet. Or cocoa or lager. Maybe they quaffed some small beer and had a roasted turnip or something.
One of the more complete sections, this area appears to have not been routinely built against over the last 700 years, so it’s in quite good nick. I took lots of photos, but think this section deserves another trip, as I only did the inside walk as I didn’t have long.
This black tower is built of flint, not dodgy old brand wine bottles as the name indicates it might be in your most delirious drunken imaginings. People build with what’s available and to hand, for instance now it would be built of coke cans, dog shit and chip wrappers. I have to say I deeply love the city wall, slightly OCD about it even, but in fits and starts, I sort of wish the City would do something with it, it’s quite landmarkish in places and quite level with the ground in others, ie Grapes Hill, where it doesn’t exist except as a flint line on the grass, or Barn Road to the the bit between St Benedict’s Gate and Helgate (Heigham Street), which was rearranged by the Luftwaffe und sohn, and was also built on Marshland so it’s sunk a bit.
Other chunks are pretty grim too, going clockwise from here, The stretch to Kings Street is not to bad, Conesford gate is missing, the River part of it which was a chain gate has both boom towers damaged but there. the river then forms a natural defence, unless you had a boat or could swim, Bishop bridge was fortified, which has gone. Cow Tower forms a corner fort on the Wensum, The wall then starts again at the Old Jarrold site, I don’t have any record of it, but it could have had a watergate, some remnants remain, including a tower part, this leads to Pockthorpe Gate, which was quite a big chap, which has gone, but the Corner tower is actually in pretty good nick despite the best attempts of pigeons and buddleia, with vaulted roof etc, there’s a long stretch of wall complete with vaulting behind some flats, which had mattresses in repose against it last time I looked. the wall disappears and reappears inside some of the houses on Bull Close Road, Fyebridgegate on Magdalen street has vanished, demolished under the Victorian nazis, there is a nice piece of wall with cut through doors and vaulting, this is then buried under a row of terraces for the whole length of Magpie Road. It reappears again in the cellar of the Magpie Pub (I know because I worked there for a bit in the 1990s).
The next bit is at the site of Magpie Print, which would have lead up to St Augustine’s Gate, this bit has only recently been revealed, You could see the back of it near Dave Berkshire’s old shop, but the outside face was the back wall of Magpie print’s machine room, and bizarrely the kitchen was sort of inside part of a tower, the council revealed all this when they knocked the printshop down, slapped a load of stuff up to protect it, it’s currently dissolving in the rain.
I have reason to believe that part of the gate exists in the cellars of the shops on the far side of St Augustine’s street. Although apart from a hazy memory of someone telling me this and seeing something vague in a watching report on it from NAU I can’t actually remember. The wall continues on parallel with Bakers Road, with a few nice loups and slits visible, one of which has visibly collapsed over the last five years. this leads down to the “Old Dun Cow” which featured in one of Ninham’s drawings, sitting as it did just outside the gate (which isn’t there), to the rear of the old pub building is a low tower remnant, probably quite a small one, now eroded to 5 ft tall. Then onward to the river again, no remains exist or much clue as to whether it had a boom tower. the other side is the site of City Station, and was very marshy, again natural defence, unless you have enemies with large flat feet or stilts. the river swings up to Barn Road, which I covered earlier sort of. Up Grapes Hill to the site of The Drill Hall, which stood smack in the middle of the Roundabout, it contained, or was built around a corner tower, various remnants still exist along Chapelfield, including some bits of tower, loups, arrow slits and evidence of the houses that were built along the wall (I’ll cover that in more detail elsewhere – there’s quiet a lot of it and some good stuff on Plunkett’s). then onto St Stephen’s, which had probably the most impressive and non existent gate of all, being the one them London people would have come up against when they came to buy some wool or something. A particularly nasty subway was built here which will have buggered up a lot archeological evidence. The street was bombed heavily though which won’t have helped much either. The last bit before the Gildengate (opposite Sainsbury’s on Queen’s Road) is the tower and walkway that for some reason I remember most from when I was a kid, I seem to remember hanging about inside it after we’d been to a nearby cafe for a frothy coffee and a knickerbocker glory. It usually seems to have sleeping bags in it these days, testament to the improvment to services for the homeless in our fine city in the last 40 years or 700 years I suppose.
That wasn’t supposed to be a speed tour, it just turned into one, sorry…
