The grand beams that make up Suckling Hall
carved on the outside (of Strangers’ Hall). Two little pointed doors lead into the storage areas. Suckling’s House seemed to have an unusual amount of places to store bottles (butteries), and there is one on the other side of the hall too. It also seems that kitchens, butteries and food storage (pantry) changed uses over the hall’s history. There is some controversy over what the vaulted rooms that we now dine in were for.
The Great Hall is actually quite small, having lost another ten or more feet to the passage under the minstrel’s gallery we’ve just emerged from and the dais (raised platform) for the High Table on the other side. The ceiling is unusually high for a room 20 feet by 30. I had a theory that the hall was once longer. On the map that local historian George Plunkett uses (by Clarke) the hall is bigger. The bay window is in the middle of the hall, not the end. If this were so then the upstairs panelled room (now the lobby for screen one) would have further trusses concealed in it. The tie beam across the open ceiling comes in the middle of the hall, and this gives evidence that the hall is actually its full size now. However, it could be a third bigger, and the last third of the crown and truss medieval roof removed.
Outside sitting area
We ascend a tight stair turret to a similar room. We come back to the hall and out through the other door in the screens passage – which we can still do today – into the courtyard. It’s bigger than the one we enjoy our drinks in today and has a gallery round it and a garden beyond.
Let us return to the St Andrews Plain spot we began at; it is now 1920. A road has been cut past and the workshop (where artist Standard lived) has been lost along with part of Garsett House and the counting house that had become the City Arms pub. The St Andrews Hill side all gained a storey but have since lost it. The side nearest St Andrews Street has been encased in Georgian red brick, and then shorn off.
It is plausible this could have been done, as by the 1580s the great hall is being phased out in favour of smaller rooms with flat beams or plastered ceilings. No-one can agree on a date for the hall or its roof, but it is worth noting that great halls were built in Britain up to 1650. The bay window might be relatively new and placed at the new end of the hall. Outside, today, we can see the old flint continuing into Stuart Hall and that the roof of the hall is all one right over the porch, which might suggest a bigger hall.
There are tapestries on the wall and the bay window we know today, but the rest of the fenestration is unclear. There may be a chimney on the north (bar) side.
We peep into the area beyond the high table and see one of the main withdrawing rooms for the master of his house and his family, panelled with the long mullioned windows of elsewhere, though one room has a pointed window of 14th century style (a decorated two light lancet) on the east side.
Back through the hall, we leave it by a door to find the second biggest room of the house, with a fine fire place and a ceiling with plaster and chamfered beams (where grooves have been made and the angles cut off the corners) and a coat of arms painting in the middle of the design.
office@finecity.co.uk
We see a forlorn ruin with wasteland beside it that makes the Cumberland Hotel today look smart and robust. The bay window of the hall has gone and a large one has been made next to it. The flint wall of the former pub on St Andrews Hill (now the kitchen, an education block of Cinema City) is so dangerous that it needs rebuilding.
Look again – it is the present. Little has changed since the Colman sisters asked a local architect to restore the building and presented it to the city - except a lift, some plate glass, and some purple upholstery. Although the Norfolk and Norwich Film Theatre Trust came to the building in 1977, Boardman provided for a ‘kinema’ projection his 1924 plans when he built Stuart Hall auditorium.
A porch has been added where nubbins on floor plans are. The window above, in the room with the sofas and panelling, was put in by Boardman. The fireplace in the box office (Boardman’s crush hall) is not supposed to be in situ as there is no evidence of a flue or chimney. The main doors east and west of the hall are Georgian, and there are the remains of the
medieval service doors, but not the stairs. Both windows on the north side are Boardman’s, and he reconstructed the bay window. The panelled room of the dining rooms was found in the recent refurb and looks like the room in the street display at Strangers’ Hall of 1690. There seem to be no other features visible in this Georgian part, except in the education room is a blocked pointed door leading to the Great Hall. The rest of this red brick Georgian block is offices with large education and conference rooms upstairs in the flint walled section, the latter having a kind of mock hammer beam open roof, apparently of the 1920s.
The courtyard is mostly Boardman. Opposite the Great Hall are offices by him which are not part of the Cinema; as a light is never seen through the big window, it’s assumed this is blocked off. The stairs and the ‘foyer block’ which now has a lift in it are Boardman.
The only other old feature is an underground storeroom, discovered during the 2004-7 works, used by the kitchen staff.
Suckling Hall makes an amazing backdrop to one of the area’s cultural institutions, and, for me, remains the defining emblem of what makes our city special.
Day time view of Suckling Hall To advertise call 01362 288084 13
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