Jennie lived in King Street from 1965 and was Chair of the Friends of Wensum Lodge for 16 years. She followed the development of Wensum Lodge through from it being a hostel for students who couldn’t get home every day to an iconic social and educational centre.
King Street and the beginning of Wensum Lodge
I came to live in King Street in May 1965 at about the same time as Ken and Brenda Davis arrived. Wensum Lodge was going to be a ‘hostel’ for students at the City College who couldn’t get home every day. It was a County Council provision under Lincoln Ralphs, who was Chief Education Officer at the County Council, and after he retired it was taken over by Mike Edwards. Ken and Brenda were working in the youth service in King’s Lynn and Lincoln Ralphs brought them over to run the hostel – that’s why they were called ‘wardens’.
Somehow, under Ken’s ideas, Wensum Lodge gradually evolved into having a few classes itself and when the students got their own accommodation Wensum Lodge gradually went over to providing adult classes.
Ken set up Management and Advisory Committee made up of a representative from each of the organisations that had an input into Wensum Lodge. There was a meeting every month.
The Friends’ involvement
Ken saw that the more classes they had there the more they were running out of space for classrooms and this is when the ‘Friends’ were born. Ken wanted to make use of some of these Brewery buildings to make more classrooms and facilities for the Lodge. He’d heard about Morley College having a Friends organisation and thought that would be the ideal thing for Wensum Lodge. A group of us went down to Morley to find out about their Friends organisation and came back and set one up here. The idea was to raise money to do something with those buildings. Every year we had a big Christmas Fair which brought in over a thousand pounds, which was quite a lot of money in those days.
Wensum Lodge was a member of an organisation for Adult Education Colleges and there was a lot of interacting with the other colleges in the group – perhaps one in Surrey would come up to a summer school in Wensum Lodge and Wensum Lodge people would go to a summer school somewhere else.
This was in the late 60s, early 70s. It developed bit by bit as the Friends undertook the job of converting the buildings into classrooms a piece at a time. The middle bit, an open yard where they had the horses, was made into a hall that could hold a large meeting. The other buildings were made into classrooms. Then Wensum Lodge started doing weekend courses and summer schools, so the part of the building known as ‘The Maltings’ was made into bedrooms.
All the development was done by the Friends raising the money to do it. We had some help from charities – Norwich Consolidated Charities and the Anguish Charity. Some very helpful members of the Management and Advisory Committees knew the right people to apply to, and Barclays gave us a grant to make a ramp into the building.
The Friends did all the rest – they converted the other rooms into bedrooms. However, when they were not needed any more the County Council, instead of offering all the items to local charities supporting half-way houses and that sort of thing, they just chucked the lot into a skip. That space was made into a big open-plan office and they moved Adult Education from all their outlying posts into Wensum Lodge. This was after Ken and Brenda’s time – over Ken’s dead body would they have done it when he was there!
When Ken and Brenda retired over 20 years ago it changed the whole ethos. They lived in the Edwardian bit of the house, the red brick building –their daughter was born in the downstairs room. As wardens, when they had young people staying, they were in charge.
I was Chair of the Friends for about 16 years, the second Chair. Jim Sinclair was the Treasurer and another member of the Committee was George Schroder. The big thing each year was the Christmas Fair. And in the spring, we used to have a Friends’ Spring Lunch – that made some money as well. Brenda used to organise trips away in the summer for Friends, staying in university accommodation. Exeter is where my in-laws live, and of course the university accommodation at that time was free for people to use. The price of these trips covered what it cost to go on these outings/trips plus a little bit of profit for the Friends.
You could become a member of the Friends, but there was a very hard-working committee that did all the food for the Spring Lunch and that sort of thing and organised the Christmas Fair. That was a really good example of ‘participation’ into what was happening in Wensum Lodge. All the tutors took part – each tutor would take a stall. The German class always did the book stall and the French did the tombola – it was quite a competition between them to see which stall made the most money on the day. So you can see the difference in atmosphere between then and now.
Wensum Lodge and Adult Education
Ken’s Management and Advisory Committees were purely Wensum Lodge. On the Management Committee we had the County Council and the City Council with other representatives. The Advisory Committee had input from all the people who used the Lodge: there was someone from the WI, from the Townswomen’s Guild, from Cambridge, from the Open University.
There were adult education classes at the Hewett and at other schools in the evenings. Wensum Lodge’s difference was that it had classes morning, noon and night. Its clientele during the day were mostly older people who didn’t want to go out at night to classes. They had kitchens and a dining room so people could spend the day there: they could do a class in the morning, have some lunch and then do something in the afternoon. As Ken said – ‘It kept them out of the doctors’ surgeries.’ I believe the kitchen was in what became a photographic studio.
Chris Barringer who did a lot on local market towns, had classes over there., it was one of the local headquarters of the Cambridge Extra Mural Board.
Jurnet’s Bar was separate, but they did make use of the kitchens. People could have lunch in Jurnet’s and the food came from the kitchens. I’m pretty sure they were still there when Ken and Brenda retired. That Ken and Brenda weren’t replaced was an indication that things were going to have to change.
Furnishing the bedrooms – Ken
It was fun how we furnished those bedrooms. Ken was very friendly with the manager of the Nelson [pub], and he used to ring Ken up and say ‘We’re refurbishing our bedrooms, do you want anything for Wensum Lodge?’ Ken would nip down to the Nelson in his van and come back with little dressing tables and bedside tables that would be put into the Lodge bedrooms. Never threw anything away did Ken, always came in handy for something to do with the Lodge.
Ken knew a chap who was running a building course at the City College and suggested to him that instead of these lads building brick walls and the like and then knocking them down why didn’t they come and do some proper work at Wensum Lodge and that’s how we got the work done – by whatever the building course was at the time.
The things they used to do over there… Silversmithing, upholstery, pewter work and patchwork and embroidery and … badminton classes, there was a craze for badminton when the Sports Hall was first built.
The Sports Hall
The Sports Hall have just spent an enormous amount of money putting a new floor down. They’ve got a lease from the County Council that has recently been renewed [2023] They really made a go of it. It’s now a registered charity. Of course, they got the car park that went with the Sports Hall and they’ve made money on it as they have a ‘pay and display’. The spaces back of the Sports Hall are taken by a couple of Norwich solicitors’ firms. So they’ve got guaranteed income.
The Friends built the squash courts. We had a loan from the County Council to build them and paid back the loan from the income.
Television
We were never allowed to put any TV aerials on these houses [they are all listed] and so it all came off of Normandie Tower [local high-rise block of council flats]. It was piped down, through our attics and they took a spur off of this set of buildings and took it over the road to Wensum Lodge for the Open University (OU). All so that the OU could have television.
You can’t do that on line
After the 70s and 80s it lost its identity. Now I see that the gates are shut all the time. Everyday was full of classes, all the classrooms busy. That’s when Wensum Lodge had its own brochure, a whole brochure for the centre. It’s interesting that City College students came from all over the county and needed somewhere to stay. It means that there was a centralisation of provision for adults and college students.
You can put a maths course in a library but you can’t for specialist courses. It’s the same with the silversmithing – they’ve got a forge and you can’t move that. And another building is where they did the upholstery, but I don’t think they use it at all now – it was a nice big open space. With the ‘Repair Shop’ on TV there must be people who are clamouring to do upholstery and they can’t do that on line, or the art classes! I went to a wonderful patchwork class. The teacher was Anna Wilson and she did an embroidery class. Some people did the most wonderful embroidered pictures – beautiful, beautiful work but you can’t do that online.
Jennie Downing talking to Susan Steward in King Street, Norwich on 6th November 2023. © 2025 WISEArchive. All Rights Reserved.
King Street Community Voices interviewed Jennie for their project in 2010. The edited version can be found on the Dragon Hall website kscv-20-living-in-king-street-the-red-light-area-wensum-lodge.pdf
