After seven years the first book in the Unthank series (Colonel Unthank and the Golden Triangle) continues to sell well …Continue reading →| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
I’m pleased to announce that the third book in the ‘Unthank’ series is now in print (November 2022) and is …Continue reading →| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
While reading about Parson Woodforde’s shopping expeditions to Norwich around 1800 [1] I was struck by the modest scale of the places he visited in the streets around the marketplace. This wa…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
The look of a place Until the coming of the railways in the mid C19th, towns were necessarily made from the materials around them. The honey-coloured villages of the Cotswolds look so right in the…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
Art nouveau (the new art), le style moderne, Jugendstil (youth style), Secessionism, all refer to the newness of an art that, around 1900, broke away from academic tradition and – in some versions …| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
Angels aren’t as common as they used to be. Five hundred years ago, before the Reformation, church was where most people would see artistic representations. The subject matter was strictly re…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
Thomas Jeckyll helped popularise the sunflower as a decorative emblem in Victorian art.| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
Knighted by King Charles II in St Andrew’s Hall, Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) was probably Norwich’s most famous inhabitant of the seventeenth century. He was born in London, the son of a silk mer…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
When writing about secular buildings in Norfolk and Norwich I have been struck by the scarcity of the Gothic Revival style. Seeking enlightenment in Wilson and Pevsner’s entry for this county…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
When trawling through Norwich history I catch rare, tantalising glimpses of ’Sons of Flora’ and ’Florist’s Feasts’, intriguing allusions to the story of horticulture in this city that promised to s…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
The Society of United Friars was founded on the 18th of October 1785 in a Norwich ’house of public entertainment’. Conviviality was written into its constitution that rejected religion and politics…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
No Georgian new town arose in Norwich and what fresh development there was barely disturbed the medieval footprint [1]. The building campaigns of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries had a mu…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
Before World War 1 several groups in Norwich worked for female emancipation but it was the young ‘window slashers’ who gained most publicity.| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
Exceptional Late Medieval Art in Norfolk churches| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
When browsing in the City Bookshop in Davey Place I came across Official Guides to Norwich for 1929 and 1935, in the reign of King George V. The contrast between ancient and modern was striking for…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
Over the years Norwich’s largest public green space has been known as Chapel-in-the-Fields, Chapel Fields, Chapple/Chapply/Chaply/Chapley Field, and now Chapelfield Gardens [1]; my daughters …| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
We’ve already encountered the artist Noël Spencer, most recently when his book on Sculptured Monuments provided inspiration for two posts [1, 2]. He came to Norwich in 1946 as Headmaster…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
In 1505 and 1507 great fires swept away the majority of Norwich’s early medieval buildings and a new city – still largely timber-framed – arose on the old street plan [1]. Two centuries later,…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
Norwich was slow to find its way into the industrial world. Before the slum clearances, the city still had a timber frame: largely Tudor in appearance with Georgian contributions. Around 1900 the a…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
An unintended consequence of the puritanical whitewashing of brightly coloured Catholic imagery on church walls was that it liberated vast acres to be colonised by hanging monuments. We see this at…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
Carved monuments found in churches provide a remarkable public record of changes in fashion, politics and religion. A year ago I wrote about Norwich physician and author, Sir Thomas Browne (d.1682)…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
Madness was an all-enveloping term whose varieties can affect us all and for which we now have much kinder words. A jarring name, much used up to the eighteenth century, it was replaced by ‘i…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
I would occasionally be asked if a book would emerge from the Colonel Unthank’s Norwich blog but I had to wait until the second Covid lockdown before I had the opportunity. I rewrote selected…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
In the previous post on Norwich department stores I mentioned the architectural practice of Augustus Frederic Scott three times, more even than local hero George Skipper – and Edward Boardman …| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH
I’ve referred on several occasions to Norwich’s sense of spirited independence. We caught the briefest glimpse of this in the previous post on Parson Woodforde who, instead of describin…| COLONEL UNTHANK'S NORWICH