cathedrals have them. Bury Abbey had a crypt under the east end of the church, but not the undercroft such as Chester Cathedral or Fountains Abbey cloisters.


Not all cities have undercrofts, for structural reasons connected to the type of soil and foundations required. Comparably, York apparently has few. Impressive ones are also found in Chester, Winchelsea (Sussex) and Southampton. Other close by ones are in Bury St Edmunds (the Angel Hotel and Moyes’ Hall), Clifton House in Kings Lynn, Blakeney ‘Guildhall’ and an endangered one on Howard Street, Yarmouth, which has turned green with mould and is falling in.


Undercrofts are often half sunken so that there are windows and natural daylight with some steps down from street level. Their survival – sometimes the only part of a building – shows their strength and the quality of engineering.


Norwich is unusual in being able to show a well preserved example of a Norman crypt. This is the best surviving part of a 12th Century Jewish home whose thick walls and small windows were needed to keep the family and their large amounts of money safe. If one visits Wensum Lodge Adult Education Centre, you’ll find Jurnet’s Bar under the pink building facing King Street. The range running parallel to that front (with the stuffed pheasants and snooker table) is 15th Century, but the part where the bar counter is belongs to the original home. You can see the round- headed slit windows and the arches in the ceiling, decorated by flags and circles of candles hanging on chains.


Vaulted ceiling of The Crypt Cafe in St Andrew’s Hall


Norwich’s best crypts are all in public use and part of their charm is when, like Jurnet’s bar, they have an atmospheric new use. Strangers’


and Dragon Halls are part of the visitors’ tour of these heritage attractions. Stripped of the white paint covering and with the odd barrel strewn around, Dragon Hall does have some feel of what the room was used for, and you can hear more about it on the audio tour. Sadly, the other hall - which has been called Norwich’s best crypt - currently has no display panels or any furnishings. Stranger’s Hall is perhaps the next oldest crypt in the city.


I will qualify that.


When places speak of their age, they like to boast of the very oldest part, but it is often not the age of the majority of the building and can often refer to archaeological


rather than structural evidence. Others we will encounter also


call themselves early medieval or even Saxon.


By reading several sources, I deduced that nearly all our vaults were


Fine City Magazine 2011


built of red brick during the great building boom of the 15th Century. The majority of our parish churches were rebuilt then; the cathedral received its present spire and ceiling; and the great halls (such as Dragon Hall and Strangers’ Hall) date from then. But, like all the above, the builders added to earlier structures.


At Charing Cross, the c1320 crypt is the only one I know of in Norwich to still fully date from that time. It has stone ribs (the ridges going across), which is unique here, except for Jurnet’s Bar. The current surmise of its use is of a merchant’s shop/warehouse where customers would view goods and perhaps pay for them in the counting house, in the room we now know as Sotherton Room. This use is widely cited in other cities, cf the rows of Chester. Therefore, the impressive vault is there not just to keep up an impressive dwelling and keep food and drink cool and safe, but to impress visitors, too. Often the undercroft can be one of the best rooms in a house, and at Strangers’ Hall this is no exception.


Strangers’ Hall has another crypt, although this was not part of the merchant house we now call that, but an adjacent property subsumed into the museum. It houses the coaches and shop signs. It is again from the 1400s.


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