The Lost End of Calvert Street
ISBN 9781803527581. Size 210 x 148mm, 72 pages, 62 illustrations (11 colour). Price £9.50 plus £2.50 p&p (UK only).
This book is a sister title to Norwich Over the Water: demolition and change. It offers a candid and personal recollection of what life was like for someone who was born and grew up on a street which was entirely erased in the late 1960s by the construction of Anglia Square.
His recollections provide a vivid, amusing and sometimes tragic account of a family’s day-to-day experience in an area that was deliberately allowed to run down in the post-war years - ahead of comprehensive redevelopment which left a crumbling brutalist eyesore in the 21st century.
The stories challenge some of the more sentimental claims about cosy old streets lying north of what is now the inner ring road. While the family in question were slightly extraordinary, the tales evoke a time of strong and characterful local community amidst lingering poverty. Perhaps there are things to be learnt today as the area again faces major redevelopment.
The book contains a reference plan and the text is supported by both old and new photographic images making it an invaluable record of 80 years of profound physical and social change in the locality and beyond. It also mentions a little-known piece of heritage that may have survived almost ten centuries.