Wensum Park is a unique park for Norwich and is (and has always been) well loved by the generations of Mile Cross inhabitants.
Tag Wensum
Chalk and Putty
Our beloved Mile Cross is sat on a bedrock of chalk, and on top of this chalk sits the deposits of gravels and clay left behind when the Ice sheets receded during the last Ice age. For millennia after the Ice sheets retreated northwards from where they came, the Wensum has been hard at work, slowly stripping back those layers as it snakes its way back and forth across the landscape, digging out what is now the Wensum Valley and helping to define the topography of the Estate we are familiar with now.
As it does so it exposes the chalk bedrock making it easier for the many generations of humans to excavate:
Continue reading “Chalk and Putty”
SSSI
It might be a surprise to some to know that Mile Cross has its own little Nature reserve, comparable to the likes of Marston Marshes to the South of the City, only far more interesting and relatively unheard of.
As the River Wensum slowly winds it way through the Norfolk Countryside on its journey from its source out near Whissonsett to its confluence with the Yare in Whitlingham, it moistens the Southern boundary of Mile Cross as it glides silently by. 
Continue reading “SSSI”
Non Standard Construction
I’ll start this entry with a company you may or not heard of: Dorman Long & Co.
I first stumbled across their name whilst out on the Marriott’s Way doing some work for the recent Marriott’s Way Heritage Lottery Fund Bid.
Swimming in the trees
Believe it or not, this photograph was taken in Wensum Park Continue reading “Swimming in the trees”
Over the Wensum and down with a bump.
Mile Cross sits to the North West of the City Centre and on the far bank of the river Wensum, so for access to the soon-to-be-built estate and subsequent expansion of the City further to the North and West, the Corporation needed to start building bridges.
Before any of the new bridges existed, the only means of crossing the Wensum – other than paying the ferryman at Dolphin – would have been at the old bridge in Hellesdon (Hellesdon Road) or at the newer (1882) bridge situated at Norwich City Station (now Halfords on the inner ring road). These two bridges are over a mile apart so it would have been a bit of a trek in either direction to get across. It seemed more important to get the Loco’s and their trains over the river than anything else, but people being people, always tend to find the quickest route of getting from A to B and I wonder how many people would have risked a dash across the narrow, single tracked A-Frame railway bridge to avoid paying the ferryman.
The first of the newer bridges to spring up was the Dolphin Footbridge.
Continue reading “Over the Wensum and down with a bump.”
The Mile Cross Man 