Tag: herrings

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Westering

My book Westering is published this week by the award-winning independent publisher Saraband. Beginning in Great Yarmouth and meandering to Aberystwyth, the book describes a coast-to-coast journey on foot traversing the Fens, East Midlands, Birmingham, the Black Country and central Wales.

Here is a brief extract from the first chapter. It should be noted that the accompanying photographs shown here are NOT included in the book.

Extract from Chapter 1: Red Herrings

From our high viewpoint it was clear that Yarmouth developed on a sand spit, a narrow finger of land squeezed between the North Sea and the River Yare that points accusingly southwards in the direction of Lowestoft. Modern housing and light industry have long filled in the space between the river and the sea, and an industrial estate now surrounds the base of the column, but when the monument was first erected in the second decade of the 19th century, to commemorate Nelson’s maritime victories, it stood alone on a fishing beach, isolated from the town to the north.

Looking south, we could see the mouth of the River Yare at Gorleston. Just beyond were the Suffolk border and a cluster of holiday villages before the sprawl of Yarmouth’s historic rival, Lowestoft, Britain’s most easterly town. Further south still was the prim resort of Southwold, which, like its neighbours Dunwich and Walberswick, was once a mighty port before silting and coastal erosion took their toll. To the east lay the taut curve of the North Sea – a wave-flecked, grey-green expanse that diminished to a hazy vanishing point. A cluster of wind turbines, their blades almost immobile on this calm late-summer day, stood someway offshore at Scroby Sands. Across the water, far beyond the horizon, unseen even from our elevated viewpoint, were the polders and dykes of the Netherlands, a country that once had close economic ties with this easternmost part of England.

Some impulse had me imagining a time before the rising sea levels that followed the last glacial period, a time when a land bridge still connected Britain to Europe. Doggerland, as the territory has become known, now lies beneath the waves but it was a land of plenty just a few thousand years ago, roamed by mammoths, bison and small bands of Mesolithic hunters.

A little way beyond the entrance to Wellington Pier stands the intricate Victorian wrought-iron framework of the Winter Gardens, the last remaining building of its type in the country. Impressive but now empty and neglected, the structure resembles a giant multi-storey conservatory in need of a paint job: a potential future Eden Project in waiting (this is still one council member’s dream), if only the necessary funding could be raised. Although it looks perfectly at home here on the North Sea coast, the building was a blow-in from the southwest. Originally constructed in Torquay, it stood in that resort for twenty-four years before being carefully dismantled and barged around the coast in 1903 to take up residence here alongside Yarmouth’s then brand-new Wellington Pier.

Across the road from the Winter Gardens, the Windmill Theatre has a facsimile set of sails attached to its façade in impersonation of the Moulin Rouge in Paris, although it is doubtful if the floor show here was ever quite as racy as its French equivalent. Back in the 1950s, this building – which started life as The Gem, the country’s first electric picture house – hosted George Formby summer residencies. The Norfolk coast and the nearby Broads had become a second home for Formby in his twilight years when, rather than old-fashioned variety, public taste was starting to demand a more exciting, rock n’ roll flavour for its entertainment. But the entertainer and his ukulele always had a loyal following here on the Norfolk coast, where tastes were more down to earth. It did not take much imagination to turn the clock back to Yarmouth’s heyday and picture a grinning, Brylcreemed Formby strolling along this very same seafront in pullover and baggy flannels as he dreamed up double-entendres in the briny air.

Much of the Yarmouth that would have been familiar to Formby is still evident: the beach, the town’s ‘Golden Mile’ of amusement arcades, the miniature golf courses and pleasure gardens, the fast food outlets that gift the seafront a pungent cocktail of chip fat and fried onions (with notes of biodegraded phytoplankton from the beach and horse shit from the pony-drawn landaus). Such attributes are not as popular as they once were, but the town’s latter-day decline is the familiar story of many English seaside resorts in the late 20th century. The beach is still as pristine as ever, but a number of the town’s once-flourishing entertainment palaces now lie empty and abandoned. The Empire was one such place, a former theatre that lacked both audience and, until recently, a full complement of letters above its art nouveau doorway, its former terracotta cladding stripped and once-proud colonial name reduced by weathering and gravity to read ‘EMPI’. Although touted by some as an ideal venue for a future art gallery, it still stands empty and unloved.

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Time and Tide

Great Yarmouth’s excellent Time and Tide Museum continues to fly the flag for that town’s half-forgotten herring industry. Located near the old town walls just off South Quay in a former herring smokehouse, the museum informs and charms in equal measure. With mock-ups of 19th century ‘rows’ – the tiny terraced back-to-backs that once housed Yarmouth’s men and women of the sea – and with plenty of newsreel and black and white photographs of whiskery sailors and itinerant Scottish fishergirls it transports the visitor back to a time when the herring was king and Yarmouth served as his palace: ‘the fishiest town in all England’ as Charles Dickens once observed. Such erstwhile fishiness is tangible: the very walls of the museum are still redolent of smoked fish — rich, evocative, appetising. Once, the whole of South Quay must have smelled like this.

Yarmouth has had to reinvent itself several times over the past couple of centuries: prosperous periods as a boatbuilding hub, fishing port, herring processing centre and seaside resort have come and gone, overlapping one another as palimpsests of industry. These days, although a vestige of low-expectation tourism still clings on, it is more an ambience of low-rent charity shops, Portuguese cafes and boarded-up businesses that characterises this urbanised sand spit on England’s easternmost shore.

The Time and Tide Museum is struggling a little despite numerous plaudits since its establishment that include becoming a Gulbenkian Prize Museum of the Year finalist in 2005. Recently the Silver Darlings cafe in the museum courtyard was forced to close through lack of funding – a soft target for funding cuts in this penny-pinching era. The vending machine that has been installed is scant compensation. To Yarmouth’s credit, there was widespread dissent about this. People here are proud and do not like to see the ongoing decline of their town, especially considering that it once held such an elevated position in Britain’s maritime heritage.

Nowhere is this proud heritage better displayed than at the Britannia Monument at The Denes a mile or so south of the museum. The monument was erected in 1819 as a memorial to Admiral Horatio Nelson, Norfolk’s most famous son (give or take Stephen Fry or Delia Smith). Standing 44 metres high, just eight metres short of the Nelson monument in London’s Trafalgar Square, the column appears anachronistic towering above the humdrum low-rises of an industrial estate: a weather-stained monolith to past glory and the red-jacketed hubris of empire. Over less than two centuries, a booming herring trade, bucket and spade holidaymakers and lacklustre industry have all had their place in the sun here beneath Britannia’s unwavering gaze: such has been the drift of Yarmouth’s cultural topography.

But there is an undeniable glory to it too: a thick-set Doric column topped by a pergola framed by six caryatids that in turn supports a figure of Britannia atop a globe inscribed Plamam Qui Meruit Ferat (‘Let him who merits it take the palm’), the motto of Nelson’s coat of arms. All is not quite what it might first appear: you cannot tell from the ground but Britannia and her caryatids are modern fibreglass replacements of the stone originals — if you come here hot-foot from the Time and Tide Museum then you will already have seen the original head of Britannia there. I mentioned hubris; one might assume that Britannia would be facing square-jawed out to sea warning continental upstarts not to mess with the Royal Navy but no, she faces inland — towards northwest Norfolk and Nelson’s birthplace at Burnham Thorpe, some say.