During the research phase of the recent Mile Cross 100 project one of the little details we were hoping to find out was who were the first people to move into a Mile Cross home on the new estate. I wasn’t surprised to realise that we couldn’t figure out who the first tenants were. I mean, we had some names of people who were here in the beginning, but it was nigh-on impossible to pin down any one person or family who were given the first set of keys here in Mile Cross, which is a bit of a shame. We knew that people started moving in to some of the first purpose-built Council-owned homes in around 1923, at around the same time, or not long after the new bridge at Mile Cross was opened in September of the same year, and using the Directories of the time you can build a fairly accurate map of which streets were inhabited and in which years. For example, at the start of 1924 there were people already living at Bolingbroke Road, Chambers Road, Civic Gardens, Losinga Crescent, Marshall Road and Rye Avenue, but not all of those roads were yet fully inhabited.
A quiet corner of the Drayton Estate as seen from the once-empty 3 Pinder Close
A while back I wrote a piece about a house just around the corner from mine that had stood empty for a few years (click to read). This house had barely been modernised over the years, and the more I delved into the history of this one particular house, the more interesting it became. Often is the case when researching your local history, following your nose often leads you down historical alleyways that you never expected to end up in, and more often than not, they end up being more fascinating than you ever could have imagined. And it’s this kind of follow-your-nose research that the MX100 research leads, myself included, had been teaching our fellow citizen researchers as we encouraged them to dig for interesting snippets of the estate’s history for the recent Mile Cross 100 project. Another part of this process was also asking for the public to provide us with their own stories about Mile Cross.
Just a short (but picture-heavy) piece this time, and it’s about a project I’ve been involved with for the best part of a year; the Pit Stop Mile Cross Photo walks, in conjunction with a Norfolk-based charity focusing exclusively on the health and wellbeing of men, named MensCraft. Men were invited to join me as ‘The Mile Cross Man’ (or just plain-old Stu) on bi-weekly photo walks within the Mile Cross Estate, starting at Civic Gardens. No photographic experience or fancy photographic equipment were necessary, and my tagline was: “We’ll go for a wander about the estate with our cameras to find some interesting new angles. I might even bore you with some history along the way”.
So, it’s been 100 years since those first residents began moving into their new Mile Cross Homes and here in 2023’s take on Mile Cross, we’ve been celebrating the estate’s centenary in many ways. First up was the free theatre/show by the wonderfully on-point theatre company, The Common Lot; named “The Great Estate, 100 Years of Mile Cross”, then there’s the website, (that we still need your help with), The Humap 100 years of Mile Cross (take me there!). There’s also an up-and-coming publication that I’ll be involved with, all about 100 years of Mile Cross called “The Mile Cross Miscellany”, along with the reawakening of the Mile Cross Festival, and a Mile Cross House Lantern Parade, coming in September.
This is just a short entry to let you all know that I am still here. I realise that it’s been quite a while since I’ve written anything (for this website at least) but that doesn’t mean I’m no longer involved or engaged. Over the last few months I’ve been spread quite thin with various Mile Cross related projects; I’ve written a piece about the trees here in Mile Cross for the Norfolk Gardens Trust Magazine (downloadable here soon), I’ve been writing pieces for the new Mile Cross Newsletter, “mileXchange”, which hopefully you read after it dropped through your letterbox recently (if you live in Mile Cross, that is), the second issue should follow shortly. I’ve also been helping to come up with ideas on how to use the soon-to-open community space named the “mileXchange” in the former Draytona Bakery shop on Drayton Road. On top of all that, I’ve also spent a considerable amount of my spare time as one of the lead researchers for the “Mile Cross 100” project which in 2023 will celebrate the Mile Cross estate turning one hundred years of age.
MX100 logo.
We aim to celebrate a Centenary of Mile Cross by creating a play, a pageant, a website and a book about Mile Cross, so there will be lots to look forward to in the next few months, some of which we’re hoping residents or former residents of Mile Cross can get involved with.
For a couple of my previous pieces ( Old Farm Lane and Sweetbriar Marsh ) I’d been studiously looking into the countryside landscape and the scattering of buildings that were here in what we now call Mile Cross, long before the later housing estate turned up. Whilst poring over the old maps and aerial photographs, searching the landscape for anything of interest, my eyes kept falling upon a little lane that was lost long ago. This little lane was called “Half Mile Lane” and it ran south from Upper Hellesdon Road (now Aylsham Road) down to Lower Hellesdon Road (now Drayton Road), seeming only exist to enable the local farmers to access the many fields that made up our landscape and to connect the two main roads together. Unlike the bloated and expanding city we live in today, Norwich had barely stretched out this far along Lower Hellesdon Road, the only buildings of any merit being the ancient Lower Hellesdon Farm and the pair of old Red Cottages about half a mile further out at the slough bottom. However, at the northern end of Half Mile Lane where it met Upper Hellesdon (Aylsham) Road, The city had been a little more adventurous, managing to branch its way out along the busy, Aylsham/Cromer Road as far as the boundary. Along this busier trunk road, which led out to Aylsham and the then the coast, the maps show that there were plenty of homes and businesses dotted along it all the way from the inner boundary at the old city walls, right the way up to the outer boundary of the city and county at the imaginatively named boundary at St Faith’s Cross, or the area known then as Mile Cross.
The lower half of Half Mile Lane running from Mile Cross Road (top right) to Drayton Road (bottom left), now lost under the gardens of the later added homes of Shorncliffe Avenue. In this imagethe fields have been replaced by houses to the west and allotments to the east, and the northern half of the lane has been repurposed as Mile Cross Road.
Why this particular little country lane with no buildings along it had intrigued me so much is anyone’s guess, but when I started searching for any references to it I wasn’t really expecting to find anything. To my delight I kept finding the road mentioned in newspaper articles from the early 1900’s, which only helped to feed my curiosities further. The lane was not completely forgotten by the passing of time either and two later-added roads, part of the “Mill Hill” extension to Mile Cross estate; Half Mile Road and Half Mile Close were named after it, even though they don’t mirror it. On top of this, although the old Half Mile Lane no longer exists in name, many of us have regularly and unwittingly travelled the northernmost half of it as we walk or drive along the later-added Mile Cross Road.
The wandering wonderer. I’m often wandering about Norwich with my camera in hand and my head in two separate places, usually the same space but in two completely different time-zones. No, not like you used to see in those 1980’s movies where some Fleet-Street shyster dressed in a suite that needed a volume control, who has three or four clocks on the wall behind him showing New York, London and Japan whilst he arrogantly barks down a mobile phone the size of a breeze-block. My head can be found wandering and wondering through and across completely different sets of decades, or floating between completely different centuries.
This is a story that I have already written about in the past, over two separate pieces and I thought it was about time to merge the two old posts together to tell the whole story in one. It’s a story that demands attention and it makes far more sense to be able to read it all in one sitting.
In the very northern corner of the estate and just behind the Boundary Pub is a quiet little cul-de-sac named Spynke Road. Like a lot of the roads up there on the very fringes of the boundary it wasn’t always this quiet. Most of the roads adjoining Boundary Road were once connected directly to it, allowing for people to use it as a rat-run to avoid the increasing volumes of traffic building up on the increasingly-busy outer ring road. Soon these roads were deemed too unsafe for the local residents and it was decided that for everybody’s safety it would make sense to have them closed off. Because of these road closures the area now has a strangely quiet and closed-off feel, but with the unrelenting background drone of traffic. As annoying as that background droning may be to the visitors or new residents, the modern day residents of Spynke Road are probably more than happy for that to be the only drone they need to worry about, as will become apparent later on.
I wrote a piece some time ago now about the names of the roads here on the old estate and the possible/probable thinking behind them, and there’s one road in particular that stands out for me above the rest. It stands out not because it’s named to echo the memory of a famous person who once frequented the streets of Norwich eons ago, or out of some sort of pride-fuelled 1920’s civic duty. This particular road name is purely a nod to what was here, in this exact spot long before the estate and its rows of lovely new houses appeared on the scene. This is a lane where the path has been well-trodden by footsteps for centuries. This particular road formed part of a much-longer road than it does now and occupies the southern-most stretch of the only road that cut from north to south across what we now call Mile Cross. Other than the two main trunk roads (Aylsham and Drayton) that now border the estate as they head in and out of old Norwich, it’s probably the oldest road on the entire estate. The road I’m talking about is a short little road, now closed off at one end, just next to the entrance the nineties Lidl Supermarket on Drayton Road, and it’s named “Old Farm Lane”.
August 24th, 2001. To start with it was a morning like any other, I’d dragged myself out of bed and was unenthusiastically contemplating breakfast before another day of staring blankly into a computer screen in a bland office. However, my weekday morning indifference was to be interrupted by a vibrating mobile phone on my bedside table, making me wonder; who on earth is calling me at this time of day? As I flipped open the phone, there was the name ‘Dad’ on the screen, which was odd for two reasons; he was normally at work by now, and if they ever wanted anything it would usually be mum who rang, as dad and I never really see eye to eye. Casually intrigued, I pressed the answer button and said: “Hiya, what’s up?”
A trembling voice that almost sounded like dad, but not as I’d ever heard him before simply replied: “help”. Now, at that time, Dad’s car – a mk2 Vauxhall Cavalier – was notoriously shit, leading me to instantly assume that he had just dropped mum off at work and that the unreliable Vauxhall shit-box had broken down (again) leaving him stranded somewhere on the A47 between Norwich and Brundall. My short-lived assumptions were about to be stopped in their tracks like a car running into the side of a bridge by the next few words that would leave my dad’s mouth: “Your mum’s dead”.
My response, which still haunts me to this day was: “OK, I’ll just finish my breakfast and I’ll be right over”. A shock like that and the way a person reacts to it can be simply baffling.
Sue Lane at Fountains Road in 1975/1975
Susan (Sue) Lane was a Tuckswood Girl born in 1955 and she grew up on Fountains Road on the southern fringes of the then fairly new estate, built during the post-war housing boom. She went to the nearby Hewett School where she performed well as a student and shortly after leaving her full-time education she was introduced by her cousin (as pen pals) to a chap he had befriended in the same regiment as him in the British Army, a young Glaswegian chap named John. After exchanging letters, they instantly hit it off and by November of 1974 they were married at St Paul’s Church in Tuckswood. The day of their marriage was the only the third time they’d actually met in person! As a result of this whirlwind romance I entered this mortal realm in 1976 as an army baby, born in Tidworth Military Hospital. For some reason and even though the Maternity Block had recently been refurbished the hospital closed 5 months later in March 1977. Perhaps it was something I’d said?
The Mile Cross Man 