Great Yarmouth

In which Sid and Doris discover a surprisingly interesting town.

The Time and Tide museum shuts at 4pm so the Duo arrive in Great Yarmouth early afternoon with a few sights in mind. The Scroby Sands wind farm offshore from the town has a visitor centre. On the Google map it has a visitor centre, but not, alas, in real life as far as S&D can find.   The good news is the wind farm workers are providing regular custom for the Furzedown Hotel.  And it gives us a chance to see the pier, complete with pictures of splendid days out in GY, to include the very British Knobbly Knees Competition.

 

The current scene is not so inviting, but then we are in January.

And the brisk wind off the North Sea reminds me that towns are now competing to have renewables offshore. Great Yarmouth already has a harbour; it was once the capital of herring fishing and has deftly swerved through tourism towards wind farming. Because unless climate change makes a big difference no one expects the wind over the North Sea to die away. There are works worth £22bn due in the next ten years. We will come back to infrastructure.

But never mind the unvisited centre, there are fine buildings to see. The Empire was built as a cinema and now owned by the Jay family who seem to be top in local entertainments. It is now a music venue with multiple food vendors taking concessions.

Then past the Hippodrome, built in 1903, which is one of only three permanent buildings in the world specifically for circus. It has a stage that can be lowered into water, so the trapeze artists can out on displays of mermaid fishing. They can put on Poirate shows.  There are more [and better pictures – D.] about the Hippodrome Circus here.

Anyway, we do eventually get to the Museum of Time and Tide which is the town museum. It was a finalist in the Gulbenkian Museum of the Year in 2005 and is partially funded by The Esmee Fairbairn Foundation. They owned M&G fund management when it was young. The museum starts us off with Doggerland, when the North Sea was mostly land. So if you dredge or trawl in the North Sea you pull up relics of people who lived there before the sea rose.

By a miracle of fishy migration Great Yarmouth found itself at the centre of herring fishing, very seasonal as huge shoals came by in autumn. Boats and fish wives came down from Scotland to take a share of nature’s bounty. Boats had also been coming from Holland since medieval times (a surprisingly short journey over shallow seas).

At the same time as the railway was taking out fish they were bringing in tourists.  S&D roam around the museum marvelling at the herring/kipper smoking stacks and learning (and forgetting afterwards, natch) about the way that the herring export market was massive in 1913 to Russia and Germany and then completely collapsed with WW1.

In the non-stop fun that was Europe’s WW1/WW2 the town was first subject to Zeppelin raids and was later a top destination for the Luftwaffe, being very handy for a quick getaway to the German coast and having a large port.

While Sid thinks historically worthy thoughts, Doris snaps some wooden boats (for our not inconsiderable woooden boat enthusiastic readership) and also a couple of pictures competing for Conveyance of the Day

Not only did the museum have enough to sustain a proper long visit, the final rooms featured an exhibition on Ladybird book illustrations.  Do zoom into this picture, and imagine a knobbly-knee’d 8 year old Sid collecting the middle row of books in a geeky fashion.

Alas the museum was only open till 4pm and by 4:15 the staff were still prising Sid and Doris’s fingers off the exhibits and levering them out of the door.  We will return.

Walking through the town and to our hotel, Sid and Doris had the intense pleasure of seeing a mumuration of starlings (everyone in the street stopped to look up and Doris taught the word mumuration to a fascinated 10 year old girl) as well as an excellent red sky at night sunset.

The Furzedown Hotel is friendly and the staff here are the ones who chatted to us about the effect of the offshore wind farm on the town’s finances.  So Sid and Doris would recommend Great Yarmouth for an out-of-season visit.