History of Great Yarmouth Row Houses
Old Merchant’s House and Row 111 House are amazing survivals of houses in an area once known as the Great Yarmouth Rows. This network of over 145 narrow streets, lined with houses, remained largely intact into the 20th century. The rows led down to the quayside, where from at least the 12th century trading vessels docked and fishing boats landed their catch, most famously herring.
The two row houses, built in the early 17th century, were the homes of rich merchants, living within sight of their ships. Both were altered in the 18th century to keep up with changing fashions, but their status later declined. Today they offer a tantalising glimpse into the now lost world of the rows.
Formation of the rows
Great Yarmouth’s remarkable situation, on a narrow peninsula bounded by the river Yare on one side and the North Sea on the other, explains much of its history and development. It was a boom town in the 13th century, drawing its wealth from herring fishing, and almost doubled in size by expansion onto its former quays.
By the late 13th century there were three main streets running north–south across the town – Northgate, Southgate and Middlegate. Long, narrow blocks of property running back from the streets east–west were first mentioned in the mid 12th century. The earliest use of the word ‘row’ – the lanes separating these plots – occurs in Great Yarmouth in the early 1280s. The streets of the rows were extremely narrow, typically 90–150 centimetres wide.
While many medieval towns had narrow alleyways, or rows, leading off the main streets between properties, they existed to a remarkably complete extent in Great Yarmouth, almost forming a grid pattern.
Rebuilding the town
By the early 16th century Great Yarmouth had fallen in the ranks of English provincial towns from fourth in the early 14th century to twentieth, mainly because the harbour kept silting up. But in the 1560s the problem was solved by a Dutch engineer, Joas Johnson, who helped erect stone and timber piers to secure the harbour’s mouth.
The town’s fortunes rose sharply again. Writing a history of the town in 1612–19, Henry Manship observed that in the preceding 40 years Great Yarmouth was ‘in more than a fourth part in the buildings augmented and in the number of inhabitants increased’. Houses were now built of brick and flint, rather than timber, and roofed with tiles. Great Yarmouth had long-standing trading and cultural links with the Low Countries, and Dutch building styles had a strong influence in the town.
In 1697 the town had over one thousand ships. In addition to the herring fleet, sailing ships exported vast quantities of herring to Holland, Italy, Spain and Portugal, alongside Norwich cloth. There was also a flourishing trade with Norway and the Baltic.
Grand designs
The Old Merchant’s House and Row 111 House were among those built during the boom years of the early 17th century.
Some of the grandest houses in town stood on the spacious and much admired Quay, and the two row houses were in prime locations, set just back from it, with their main entrances facing the Quay. Access to and from the river would have been important for the merchants who lived here. They would have been able to watch their ships in the harbour from the upper rooms of their houses.
The flamboyant plasterwork ceilings in the Old Merchant’s House – remarkable survivals from the early 17th century – and fine oak panelling indicate that it was home to a prosperous merchant of some standing in the town. Despite many alterations over the centuries and Second World War bomb damage, Row 111 House survives with its 17th-century structure largely intact – the reason it was saved from postwar demolition.
Image gallery
Row 111 House
Row 111 House hall/parlour
Row 111 House entrance front and yard wall
Old Merchant’s House exterior
Old Merchant’s House hall ceiling
Hall ceiling pendant
Old Merchant’s House withdrawing chamber
Old Merchant’s House staircase
Changing status
In the late 17th and 18th centuries both houses were altered to keep up with changing fashions. Mullion windows were replaced by sashes, panelling was painted, and buffet cupboards were installed to display fashionable tea-drinking paraphernalia and the gentility of the inhabitants.
But later the status of the rows changed. By the 19th century many of the richer inhabitants of the rows were moving to more spacious houses in the suburbs. Row houses were divided up and let out to multiple tenants.
We can trace this process at the Old Merchant’s House. In the early 19th century its owner was Robert Cory, who was mayor of Great Yarmouth in 1803. But after the Corys sold the house it passed through a series of landlords. By 1851, and probably much earlier, it had been divided into two separate cottages. And by the 1890s a clearly impoverished household in the western cottage consisted of Martha King, a widowed tailoress; her young son; her 84-year-old mother, described in the 1891 census as a pauper; and two single female lodgers, one of whom was also a pauper.
Similarly, Row 111 House had been divided into three by the late 19th century, and at the outbreak of the Second World War it was home to the Lee, Hook and Rainer families. In the 1930s the Lees, who lived in the east wing of Row 111 House, took in guests from London during the summer season. Even without guests, the two girls shared a room with their parents, while the two boys slept in a tiny passageway.
The herring girls
Great Yarmouth built its wealth on herring, which arrived in great shoals off the Norfolk coast to feed every autumn. In the days before refrigeration, herring, which kept well when salted or smoked, were an important part of people’s diets.
From the 1860s, during the herring season the population of Great Yarmouth swelled with many workers, mostly women and girls, who followed the herring shoals as they migrated from Scotland down the east coast of England. Along the route, ‘herring girls’ gutted, salted and packed herring in barrels, before following the fishing fleets to the next port.
While in Great Yarmouth, many found lodgings in the rows. Families like the Rainers, who lived at Row 111 House in the 1930s, took herring girls as lodgers, probably in their attic rooms, to supplement their income.
After the First World War the herring fishing industry was in decline, but the last of the herring girls were still migrating annually by train to work in Great Yarmouth in the 1950s and 1960s.
Bombing and survival
During the Second World War, Great Yarmouth suffered intense bombing. In 1941 alone there were 167 raids, with over 7,000 incendiary bombs and 803 high explosives dropped.
In 1943, a team led by the architectural investigator Bryan O’Neil toured the rows between South Quay and Middlegate Street – the area in which the two houses stand. This part of the town had seen the most extensive bomb damage.
His team searched through the bombed-out houses to record and preserve what they could. The town council had condemned the rows as slums before the war and earmarked them for clearance. O’Neil and his colleagues feared that anything which had survived the bombs would soon be lost.
From across the rows, the team salvaged an array of historic fixtures and fittings dating from between the 15th and 19th centuries. Over a thousand such objects, fixtures and fittings – including wood panelling, door furniture, fire surrounds and ornate cupboards – are now cared for by English Heritage, with some on display in the two houses. They form an important record of the architecture and craftsmanship of the rows, and provide glimpses of what life was once like there.
Preserving the rows
Row 111 House and Old Merchant’s House’s stories differ from those of many other houses in the rows area. They survived the clearances of the 1930s, Second World War bombing and post-war redevelopment. Both were rescued and subsequently restored in the 1950s and opened to the public, making them remarkable and rare survivals of the town’s unique architectural heritage.
Today, the houses stand isolated in a sea of post-war development that seemingly disregards the old street pattern. The visitor can look from one building to the other across an open space, and it is hard to imagine that they once stood in narrow rows crammed with buildings, with another row, Row 112, between them.
Yet despite the demolition of so many houses and much redevelopment, the layout of the rows still defines the shape of the town today, and around 80 rows survive in some form. Their numbers and names can be found on signs throughout the area – witness, like the Old Merchant’s House and Row 111 House, to a vanished way of life.
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