Fifty Years of the UEA – Public Lectures

As part of the UEA’s 50th anniversary celebrations there will be a series of free lectures taking place on Monday 3rd and Tuesday 4th June. All lectures will be at the Forum in Norwich, in The Curve Auditorium.

The lectures will be covering a broad range of topics and disciplines – you can download the full running order here.

In particular we would urge you to make space in your diaries for the following:

Tuesday 4th June – 11.00am

Professor Tom Williamson – How ‘natural’ is ‘natural’? Historical perspectives on Norfolk woods, heaths and commons.

Tuesday 4th June – 4.00pm

Professor Stephen Church – King John, Magna Carta and the East Anglians

You can find out more about various events taking place to celebrate the 50th anniversary here.

 

Centre of East Anglian Studies – Winter Lecture Series 2013

The Centre of East Anglian Studies winter lecture series will begin in February, with lectures from Dr Carenza Lewis, Professor Helen Cooper and Dr Jessica Sharkey.

Our first lecture, by Carenza Lewis, will present the results of more that 1,000 excavations conducted in rural villages, hamlets and small towns across the eastern region by members of the public, and consider the new light that the results throw upon the impact of the Black Death on the region.

Dr Carenza Lewis is an archaeologist based at the University of Cambridge. She is widely recognised for 13 years spent on the innovative, long running and award-winning Channel 4 archaeological series Time Team, and more recently for her involvement in Michael Wood’s The Great British Story. Outside of her television appearances, Dr Lewis has long-standing research interests in settlement development in medieval England. Since 2004 she has developed and run the Access Cambridge Archaeology programme  at the University of Cambridge. This aims to enhance educational, economic and social well-being through active participation in novel, important, fun and challenging archaeological activities. Members of the public, including school children, make new discoveries about themselves and the world around them, develop new skills and confidence,efficacy of ACA programmes, while the results of more than 1,000 Access Cambridge Archaeology excavations in rural villages, hamlets and small towns are providing important new evidence about medieval society and economy.

We do hope you will be able to join us on Thursday 7th February, at 7:15pm in Lecture Theatre 1 at the University of East Anglia.

All lectures are free, and open to all.

January 2013 – Winter at UEA

The view from our office, Tuesday 15th January 2013

 

A belated Happy New Year to everybody. We’ll be gradually updating and adding to the blog over the next few weeks – we have a number of projects in the pipeline and hopefully numerous field trips to report on. Tomorrow we ought to have been enjoying the sights of Catton Park (Repton’s first commission) but once again the weather has intervened. Still, at least when it starts to thaw all of those earthworks will show up beautifully…

Autumn in Norwich

After 12 years in Norwich we still take great delight in wandering around the city, particularly on sunny autumnal afternoons. We’ll usually set off with a vague plan of ‘heading for the Cathedral’ and see what takes our interest. Today it was a chance to finally go and see the Jarrold Bridge across the Wensum, a ‘J’ shaped footbridge close to St James’ Mill, as well as revisiting a number of old favourites.

Trinity United Reformed Church, Unthank Road, Norwich. Designed by Sir Bernard Feilden.

St Giles, Norwich. Repair work currently being carried out on the tower.

Norwich Cathedral.

Repairs and repointing at Pulls Ferry.

Norwich Cathedral and the Great Hospital, seen from the riverside path along the Wensum.

Jarrold Bridge. A small but rather wonderful new footbridge across the Wensum designed by Ramboll.

Quay Side, River Wensum. Middle Saxon Norwich got going here (and on the other bank). They’d have probably enjoyed a J-shaped bridge too.

Upcoming Events

CEAS Research Seminars

This week sees the start of the Centre of East Anglian Studies research seminar series. The series kicks off on Thursday 8th November with a paper by Margaret Bird on ‘Drunkenness and Debt: the struggle of Norfolk innkeepers under the brewer’s yokr 1770-1810′. Margaret’s research is based largely on the detailed diaries of Mary Hardy, a brewer’s wife from Coltishall in Norfolk.

A more detailed synopsis of the paper, and more information on the Mary Hardy project itself is available on the project website.

The seminar will take place on Thursday, at 6:30pm in Room 2.16 of the Arts II building at the UEA – all are very welcome to attend.

A Celebration of Archaeology in West Norfolk

On Saturday 24th November Sarah Spooner, Jon Gregory and Rob Liddiard will be giving papers at a one day conference in Kings Lynn to celebrate 45 years of the West Norfolk and Kings Lynn Archaeological Society. Other speakers include Dr Richard Hoggett on the Anglo Saxon period in west Norfolk, Dr John Davies on the Iron Age and Roman period and Dr Clive Bond on prehistoric west Norfolk.

The conference is free and all are welcome, but booking is essential. All the details are in the conference poster, which can be downloaded by clicking on this link – WestNorfolkArchaeologyConference_121124[1]

Hope to see some of you there!

Sail and Storm – Book Launch

Yesterday was the official launch of the book we have been working on with the Aylsham Local History Society. Sail and Storm – The Aylsham Navigation explores the history and landscape of the navigation along the River Bure from the late eighteenth century onwards.

The launch event in Aylsham saw all the members of the research team come together – the volunteers who researched and wrote the book, and our team from UEA.

The event kicked off with a guided walk around the former staithe in Aylsham, now mostly filled in and  covered in private housing – but the research done by the Society enabled nearly 100 members of the local community to rediscover the forgotten elements of the Navigation which have survived since its closure.

In the Town Hall, many people came to look around an exhibition of images and documents relating to the Navigation, as well as being able to watch locally made films about the river. In the Heritage Centre members of the Norfolk Wherry Trust were on hand to discuss wherries, the distinctive vessels which carried goods up and down the Navigation.

Our own Professor Tom Williamson rounded things off with a short talk about the interlinked nature of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions which was underpinned by improvements in transport infrastructure, like the Navigation itself.

The book itself is available from local bookshops, and online from the Aylsham Local History Society.

The cover is from an original painting by Norfolk artist Kerry Buck.

The book launch in the Eastern Daily Press.

We will all really miss working on the Aylsham Navigation project after 18 months – but we have lots more community heritage projects in the pipeline over the coming year.

A visit to the dig

Work has started at UEA to prepare the site for the new Enterprise Centre, to be built opposite the Sportspark next to University Drive. Archaeologists from L-P Archaeology have recently been investigating the site and last week invited us along to see how things were progressing. Further work is scheduled to take place over the summer so look out for future updates.

The site has not turned up a great deal of finds, but a few discoveries have nevertheless been made:

A nineteenth-century rubbish pit containing an assortment of bottle and jars, perhaps buried by estate workers from the nearby walled gardens of Earlham Hall. Judging from some of the jars found it was in use c.1870-1880

A small but well preserved curving ditch feature, possibly prehistoric in date although no dateable finds have been recovered.

The buried remains of a former hedgerow, showing up clearly as a dark humic patch alongside the lighter sands and gravels.

So, an interesting assortment, but nothing that will significantly change plans for the new building. You can see some artist’s impressions of the new Enterprise Centre here on the Architects’ Journal website and learn more about the project on the UEA website.

Many thanks to John from L-P Archaeology and Ken from Morgan Sindall for providing us with an informative and entertaining tour of the site.

Ideas Bank

We are very excited to be working on a new community heritage project, the Ideas Bank.

Community groups can submit their ideas for projects on the Ideas Bank website, and then the project team will help them develop their idea into an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund scheme called All Our Stories.

The Research in Community Heritage project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and is about bringing academics and local communities together to support one another in finding out more about community heritage.

We want to find out what local communities are interested in researching, and we are keen to share our knowledge and skills with community groups, as well as helping to develop new ideas for researching local heritage.

More information about the Ideas Bank can be found on the project website, as well as on our project Twitter feed and Facebook page.

We’ll be talking about the Ideas Bank at the Great British Story event at Ickworth House in Suffolk on Sunday 20th May. Do come and say hello if you are there – we’ll be on the ground floor of the Rotunda, alongside the HLF stand. On Sunday 3rd June we’ll be at the Norfolk History Fair at Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse Museum.

More information on the Heritage Lottery Fund ‘All Our Stories’ scheme can be found on their website.

 

Spring Field Trips

So far this Spring we have been exploring both rural and urban designed landscapes on field trips with our third year students.

Earlier this term we went on a grand day out to London, visiting the Garden Museum in Lambeth to see their exhibition on Garden Cities and Green Cities, which is still open for another week or so.

We also explored the architecture of Whitehall, including Inigo Jones’ Banqueting House, built for Charles I in the 1620s. Then it was off to St James’ Park, Green Park and Buckingham Palace – all thoughts of architecture and landscape design were banished by a glimpse of Prince Charles driving up the Mall…

We spent some time discussing the houses which border onto Green Park, like Spencer House, built in the 1750s, before heading into Bloomsbury to explore the gardens created by Humphry Repton in Russell Square and the rest of the Bedford Estate, including Bedford Place (below) developed in the early years of the nineteenth century.

Back in Norfolk, we have visited one of Humphry Repton’s best known commissions – Sheringham Park. 2012 is the bi-centenery of Repton’s Red Book, and we are involved with a project being run in partnership with the AHRC, the University of Nottingham and the National Trust to celebrate the anniversary (more to come on that soon!).

The sun did come out a couple of times, but we still got a good view over the surrounding landscape from the top of the gazebo on the hill behind the house.

This week the third year students are studying World War Two archaeology, so we made sure that we stopped to investigate the pillbox on the edge of the woods (and wave to a passing steam train).

There are at least two more field trips to come this Spring – fingers crossed that we get some lovely sunshine!

Spring Field Trips in 2010.

Spring Field Trips in 2011.

Michael Wood – The Story of England

This Thursday will be the next in the winter lecture series organised by the Centre of East Anglian Studies.

Historian and broadcaster Michael Wood will talk about his recent BBC TV project taking one village, Kibworth in Leicestershire, through the whole of English history, and looks forward to his forthcoming series on the social history of Britain.

The lecture will take place in Lecture Theatre 1 at 7:15pm on Thursday 23rd February. All are welcome, and there is no need to book.