March Hares

For the first day of the new season I thought I'd post these from a jewellery shop on Chapel Street. I won't call them mad March hares, madness is confined to much larger, two-legged hairless failed apes ...

I'm a hairin’ scarin’ fisherman...

‘I’m a hairin’ scarin’ fisherman and I hail from Kings Lynn town,
And in this old life I’ve seen many an up and down.
And when we’ve spent our stocker bait and had a jolly spree
Away we’ll crack, on board the smack, and plough the angry sea.’

To watch her and trigger and pipe her as she goes,
Give her the sea and let her rip we're the boys to pull her through
You want to see our Ally when the wind is blowin' through
Sailing from the Dogger bank to Great Grimsby.

I find that is a variation of an old song "Dogger Bank" ( which is in turn probably from another Music Hall song ) given to us by the grandly nicknamed Trunky Bunn of King's Lynn. Quite how it ended up engraved on a granite boulder in a playground on Loke Road I really don't know but there it lies, a gift to future generations, what they'll make of it I can't imagine.

On a similar theme I can include this little plaque on a former pub down the road and around the corner mentioning Ralph Vaughan Williams' dalliances with the natives of North End. If you listen to old RVW long enough you find yourself thinking I know that tune it's such and such ... well he's only gone and nicked it hasn't he ... plagiarism, as somebody once said, is basic to all culture.

The Butcher and the Baker

Back to Hunstanton for a rare scene these days, high street bakers (Mr Bun the Baker!) and butchers shops. I hope the current madness doesn't push them into oblivion like so many other small businesses; it's not possible for these guys to "work from home" or "self isolate".

The Hovis trademark derives from the Latin phrase hominis vis, the strength of man something which is being sorely tested by collective not to say global numptiness.  This is a bit of an antique sign, I haven't seen one like this for years.

The New Walk

Early in the 18^th century someone had the bright idea to construct a walk or mall from the town eastwards across uncultivated, vacant and I'm guessing somewhat swampy land to the Guannock Gate then part of the town walls. It was hardly a long slog being just some three hundred or so yards long but then maybe folk had not made a fetish out of walking as essential to a healthy body and mind but as a means of getting from A to B if you didn't have a horse and cart to help you. Here if you had stuff to strut was where it could be strutted outwith the grime of the town, with ruined walls and meandering Gaywood River to view it was akin to a country park in an urban setting. Anyhow it was the start of something as the New Walk was improved, lined with fine trees, and later a second walk crossed it and then more walks were added as the thing spread out beyond the now demolished town walls. I write all this trivia because I wondered why the place wasn't called something like Le Strange Park or Losinga Gardens or after some other notable local bigwig, it's called the Walks because, though now it may look like a park and walk like a park it is, historically, a collection of walks. So now you know.
By way of comparison Hull when it finally spilled out of its walls in the late 18^th century it dug a big hole and filled it with water; it was the biggest dock in the country, the Queen's Dock. Hull did not get a public park until the 1860s courtesy of gun-running property developer Zach Pearson. However the Queen's Dock is now Queen's Gardens ... with walks.

The Walks are lined with lime trees and horse chestnuts. Somebody has carved this out of a dead one.

Framingham's Hospital, King's Lynn

First sight I thought this looks a veritable old building but doing this blog has taught me nothing is ever quite what it seems. A wee plaque, so often my source of information, explains how the expansion of the cattle market drove the building of these replacement Tudor style almshouses in 1848.  Despite, or perhaps because of, being at the cutting edge of the Industrial Revolution our Victorians were seemingly so backward looking stylistically. 

Anyhow here it is close by the entrance to the Walks, opposite the Library and near where the town mill would have stood that I mentioned yesterday. A cattle market in the centre of town may have had a certain financial appeal to overcome the obvious odorous downside but it closed down long ago; that space is now the bus station in the modern-Elizabethan style.

Those twiddly bits and fancy windows could have paid for a building twice the size ... but reason not the need, eh!

Millfleet, King's Lynn

This completes the trio of fleets that run through and around the old town of King's Lynn, the Fisher Fleet, Purfleet and now this delightful burbling brook on what was then the southern edge of town, known as the Millfleet. It will come as no surprise to learn that it was used to drive a corn mill, though apparently the flow of water, being tidal, was, at times, so low it wasn't much use. In an early case of protectionist measures all the good folk of 15^th century Lynn had to have their corn milled at the town mill or they would "forfeit the grain or the flour produced outside town, which may be confiscated by the common sergeant or someone else and put to the use of the community. " The image of the jolly miller of old is, of course,  a myth. The mill seems not to have been a tremendous success and was cleared away to make room for London Road in the early 1800s.

This wild vegetation is hiding the site of long demolished grain silos and warehouses near to Devil's Alley.

And that I'm afraid is all there is to see of the once much longer Millfleet since Victorian noses and sensibilities had had enough of what, at low tide, was a stinking sewer and at a cost of £12,846 they covered it up in the 1890s to everyone's delight. It now runs under a road called Millfleet unsurprisingly.
This has been by necessity a briefest of brief passing glances at this site which has a history going back to Saxon times, at least, the stream then was known as Sewoldsfled. Boal Street, on the left of this picture was extremely important to the medieval port of Lynn. There's loads more; you could write books about it but that's not my job ... Here's a link to some more about Millfleet and its history.

Marriot's Warehouse, King's Lynn

How does a sculpture on the subject of the medieval practice of drying cod grab you? Hmm? Well outside this late 16^th century warehouse they've put up a  grey metallic thing with a little plaque telling us that dried fish was imported into King's Lynn back in the days before Beko fridge-freezers and this is so we don't forget how barrel loads of the stuff were transported inland from here ... *yawn, stretch...*  I liked the squawking gull but found the rest was a bit "so-whatish" but maybe others will find it fascinating.

Here's the front of the building (or is it the back?), it seems from what I read that the place was used for storing salt, wine, beer and building materials. Ships apparently moored inside the place which indicates the river has been pushed back a few dozen yards since those days. It's reckoned the stone base comes from demolished Friary which was just behind here. The building is now a restaurant and exhibition space and is run by a trust to keep it open to the public.

I'd like to see this "rain barrel" in a downpour ...