The theme for the evening was “Yarmouth Key of the Coast”. Dr Mary Fewster who has given several interesting talks over the years explained Great Yarmouth as being three towns, walls and rows, the present town and of course the herring town.
The First Town - Walls and Rows
Medieval in age we can still see today the majority of the wall in situ started in 1284 following a license granted by King Henry III to the burgesses to enclose the town with a wall, the townsfolk toiled for a hundred years to complete the structure with its fifteen towers and two great gates to the North and South. Of course, the plague held up the build but once completed it was forever being strengthened to take the latest form of weaponry. There are various theories as to how the rows, a unique street pattern developed in Yarmouth, 145 of these narrow streets running east to west once existed and were probably the result of water levels as they slowly fell exposing new land. The size of the town was restricted to 133 acres for centuries. No buildings were allowed outside of the town wall. Most inhabitants of the town lived cheek by jowl down these narrow rows, open gutters ran down the side of the rows, originally paved with cobbles it was difficult to walk. Troll carts first made their appearance as early as 1517, they carried goods from the quayside through the rows to the market place. The rows were also home to rich merchants who tended to live at the quay end of the rows
The Second Town – Present Times
It was around 1740 when it became fashionable to bathe and drink seawater. Amenities to support visitors soon sprung up. Our first bath house opened in 1759. The townsfolk no longer restricted by the walls were able to build, first in a southerly direction and then to the north. Wellington Pier built in 1853 was followed by Britannia Pier in 1859. The Victorians made Yarmouth a popular seaside town and with the arrival of the railways thousands of visitors enjoyed all that the town had to offer from the elegance of the piers to the jetty, through the town and onto South Quay.
The Third Town – Herring Town
Fish had been caught since before the year 900, the wealth of the town largely depended on the fishing industry, between September and November the herring, moving clockwise, arrived off the coast and were vigorously fished. The free herring fair was held on the beach during medieval times. During the 19th century we were curing fish in the town and girls from Scotland came down to work gutting and packing fish. Most of the fish were exported abroad from the Mediterranean to Russia. The heyday recorded in 1913 over a thousand ships in port, 2,488,140 hundredweight of herring were bought to shore and any that weren’t sold were processed for fertilizer. Following WWI the industry partially collapsed. By 1957 only 111 boats fished from Yarmouth, today the industry is sadly part of our history.