Peter recalls how the 1987 hurricane led him to Wensum Lodge, his many years on committees, the effects of Covid, and the astonishing range of activities he encountered.
From Kent to Norfolk
I grew up in Kent and joined the GPO, as it was then. I moved to Staffordshire in my mid-twenties on promotion to the training school, and began working for British Telecom. In 1984 I came to Norfolk to run the workshops for British Telecom in and around the whole of Norfolk. My office was in Norwich and we moved here to Lingwood. I would cover Cromer to Lowestoft (which of course isn’t Norfolk) and to Kings Lynn. I ran about eight or ten workshops in the Eastern Region for British Telecom.
When we came to Norfolk I played squash for the team at the Civil Service Club on Newmarket Road in Norwich. During the hurricane of 1987 the roof of the courts were damaged so they had to close them. We looked around for somewhere else to play squash and someone said ‘Oh, there’s this squash club down at Wensum Lodge’. I’d never heard of Wensum Lodge – I wasn’t looking for adult education – and when I went there I found they had two squash courts, so I joined the club. And that’s how I came to Wensum Lodge. I subsequently joined the squash club committee where I met a chap called Ken Davis (the Warden) who was very well known at Wensum Lodge, and he got me involved in other things there.
The extraordinary range of activities on offer at Wensum Lodge
When I got to Wensum Lodge I gradually discovered it was a heck of a place. You expect Maths, English, languages in adult education but I learned they did blacksmithing, silversmithing, pottery, weaving and upholstery. So many things. It’s a lovely site, lots of interesting listed buildings including the old brewery sites and the Music House which dates from 1170.
Ken invited me to join the Friends of Wensum Lodge (FOWL), for their annual dinner, in Jurnet’s Bar. There was a kitchen where they served meals at midday for the students in the Bar. By now, 1990, I was Chairman of the squash club committee and subsequently got pulled onto the FOWL committee.
At Wensum Lodge there was a massive sports hall where they could play five a side football, they had cricket nets and I think there were three badminton courts, as well as changing rooms and, of course, two squash courts, all managed by Wensum Lodge and owned by Norfolk County Council. The person who took the bookings and did everything within the building for the County Council was a lady called Josie Walters who was there for many years.
Such a lot went on at the Lodge in the evenings. Any room not being used by a class between 5pm and 9pm could be hired by people for their own societies. The Military Vehicle Club had a meeting every week; there was Greek dancing in the big room at the end by the gates, every week, and another group that did sign language for the deaf, all run by the societies and groups themselves. There was a rifle range then, rifle shooting! Not many adult education centres have a rifle range. They came into the Bar every week, with their guns in their cases, and went over their scores for the evening. At one point there was a blacksmith teaching how to shoe a horse! There were five or six caretakers and one of them had working carthorses which would come down! An art group, The Twenty Group, met every Thursday and did life drawing, pottery, silk screen printing, at a high level. This was not basic skills, not people like me thinking, ‘Oh, I fancy doing a bit of pottery’, they were artists. My wife and I got to know Jane Mackintosh in Postwick, who was well-known and taught at the Lodge, and she regularly had exhibitions and sold paintings. And there were others. The Norwich Twenty are nationally renowned. They would be in the Bar every Thursday night. We had music in the Bar which was very good acoustically, apparently, and at the far end at the cellar part, we had a sort of dance floor. Musicians loved playing in there because of the ceiling. Two or three groups used it on music nights and towards the end their business kept the Bar afloat.
Friends of Wensum Lodge fund-raising
The Friends of Wensum Lodge (FOWL) was a charity with the objective to support students in Wensum Lodge, and Ivory House, which I didn’t really know about. It was interesting to learn that the Friends of Wensum Lodge had built the Sports Hall courts. They took out a mortgage sometime in the ‘70s, for £25,000, or something of that order – a voluntary committee raising funds for the Lodge taking on a debt like that. There is a folder on the building of the courts, with all the dates and plans. That was the sort of thing the Friends would do. Fantastic people, the money they raised was incredible. They paid that mortgage off in six to eight years, I think, pretty good, and they spent £30,000 on bedrooms in the Maltings for the residential students, from the money they raised.
There was a brochure, basically a tourist brochure, in English, French and German, advertising where to come and stay in Wensum Lodge, to explore Norwich City. We had our language school there every year, with foreign students staying in residence. The other group we had every year was ambulance paramedics who ran courses during the day and stayed overnight. They were very good in the Bar. Paramedics can drink quite a lot of beer. Profits went up every time they came to stay!
FOWL got money from the lights for the squash courts because you had to pay for the courts every 40 minutes. Wensum Lodge made perhaps, £12,000, a year out of the lights and all the hirings of the hall, Of which about £10,000 was a management fee paid to Norfolk County Council and the Friends would get whatever was left, £2,000 as a rough figure. They ran bazaars at Christmas and in the summer, and the students would make things to sell, raising an enormous amount of money, to be spent on Wensum Lodge. The Council would pay for major maintenance since they owned the buildings.
When I took over as Chairman of the Friends, there was still £30,000 in their funds. We worked hard to spend it on things for the students. The Friends would only buy things that the Council couldn’t supply, like the silversmithing booths, twelve sewing machines and a couple of skeletons and special lighting for the art classes, uplighters, things like that. In the Lodge, somewhere in the main Reception Area, there’s a plaque listing things the Friends paid for over the years.
Ken Davis – devoted warden and organiser
Ken Davis was a warden who lived on site and looked after the residents, weekends and nights. Gradually his rôle was taken over by caretakers. Ken poured his heart and soul into the place, he really did. He was such an organiser. Classic example, all the seating in the bar was pews from the local church that Ken heard was being de-consecrated. He went across and said ‘Um, what are you doing with the pews? Do you think we could have them?’ And sure enough, they got them free and he got people on carpentry courses to fit them. We had various flags hanging up, which people on the needlework course had made. The lights were cast iron lamps made in the forge, and this was all Ken’s doing. He’d say ‘Oh, I think you could help me out Peter. Do you think you could do…?’ and you just did it for him. He had all sorts of contacts, particularly in the County Council, so whatever happened he knew the person to speak to to sort out what we were going to do next. He was quite a character.
The kitchen was available for residents and again (classic bit of Wensum Lodge and Ken, I suspect} the kitchen is close to and attached to the cellar side of the bar. When it came to ‘Oh, we’ve got this kitchen, but where can we serve? Where’s the dining hall we can use? Oh, why don’t we use the bar?’ So the bar was used to serve possibly breakfast, but certainly midday and evening meals. The servers walked out through the bar to serve people out on tables, coming back to collect everything. There was a hostess trolley full of knives, forks, salts and peppers. Nothing to do with the bar really, except we provided the bar person, hopefully to sell coffees, teas, soft drinks or beers, if we could persuade them. Yet another of Ken’s ‘everything ties together really’.
When Ken retired the changes took a little while to kick in but he was a main influencer at Wensum Lodge. The new wardens didn’t live on site, they were council managers who almost all worked from County Hall. They had an office at the Lodge, came in, did their job and went home. They didn’t live here as Ken had, didn’t love it as Ken had. It was probably hard for anyone from Norfolk County Council to manage the site because it’s very complex. Ken was probably the only one who really knew how it all fitted together because he built it from the ground up. He was there at the start.
Jurnet’s Bar
Jurnet’s Bar was planned early on and opened in 1982, I think. The Friends were involved with it inasmuch as Ken set it up. It was set up as a members’ club. You had to join, primarily to cover the licensing laws. We couldn’t just open as a bar as local businesses would have objected to us having a licence to sell alcohol. All students became a member the moment they enrolled on a course. They were told they could use it during the day and in the evenings. They mainly came in their breaks in the evenings, to have a drink of some sort. People from outside could also join as a members. People from the sports clubs would join, as well as people from King Street. Users of the Bar had to be members and most did as it was a nominal fee of £1.50 to £2.00. This meant we had membership details to show the magistrates when applying for a licence. In those days licensing was dealt with through a police sergeant up at County Hall. They did expect you to obey licensing rules. Eventually they became more relaxed because it all came under the City Council. Actually, I’m not sure that the membership was necessary because I used to apply for a licence every year and they granted it, as long as you paid your £70.
The Friends supplied four trustees to oversee the Bar so they were involved in its management and were the main people to say ‘Yay’ or ‘Nay’ to anything the Bar wanted to do, and from then, they formed a wine committee and sub-committees were created for whatever activities we were doing in the Bar. I didn’t get involved personally in the 1990 Silver Jubilee celebrations but Jurnet’s Bar put on some things. I was Chairman by then and would delegate!
Later on managers would try and understand the set up. Some of them never understood the tie between the Bar and adult education. We had awful discussions about supplying a caretaker when we were there, why did they have to have the gates open because we were there? What advantage was the Bar to adult education?
Almost the end of FOWL
I’d been involved with Friends of Wensum Lodge as a committee member for a long, long time when, suddenly, in 2006, there was the fateful meeting when, in Ken’s records (Ken had retired by then), it recorded that winding up FOWL was on the agenda. That’s when I became Chairman. The officers of the then committee decided they’d done everything they could with the Friends. Raising funds was getting more difficult. People weren’t interested in bazaars and things anymore and the County Council were going to sell off the Sports Hall, which would end any income from there. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it was to get the tutors to ask us for money. We would have meetings with them and say ‘Look, we’ve got all this money, is there something we can buy that would help your students? We’re not supplying exercise books but if there’s any other piece of equipment that the County won’t supply, can’t supply, we will buy it’. It was almost impossible to give the money away and the Committee thought, ‘We’ve had enough of this’ so they decided, en bloc, to close the Friends of Wensum Lodge down. David Eastick, the Treasurer at the time, came to me and said ‘They’re going to close down the Friends and give the money to Norfolk County Council. I’m not happy about that. Are you?’ I said ‘No, beggar that!’ He said ‘Well, will you become Chairman and I’ll be the Treasurer?’ and I said ‘Yeah, okay’. So that’s how I became Chairman of Friends. I was already Chairman of the Jurnet’s Bar and the squash club so I had three by then. My wife used to say ‘Why did you volunteer for that? That’s another night you’re going to be out’. At the end I was Chairman and Treasurer for FOWL and Jurnet’s.
By 2016, we’d given most of the money away and Mike Goodings, the then Secretary, and I decided there wasn’t much more we could do. We’d set up the Sports Hall committee and given them money to get started. The Lodge weren’t interested in us so we felt it was time to wind up the Friends. About £2,000 remained. However, another group took over our offices.
The Friends had spent an awful lot of money on the bedrooms but they were torn down and turned into offices, an awful shame. There was a time when the County Council tried to get everybody out of commercial buildings and into their own buildings to save money.
Changes in funding
Brochures from the 90s show there was a management committee made up of different users at Wensum Lodge. Norfolk Adult Education, the WEA, Chris Barringer and Continuing Education, the WI and the Open University, so it looked as if Norfolk Adult Education had taken over the place and it wasn’t the same. The bottom line was that the funding changed. The way Norfolk County Council’s funding from central government was given, and what it was given for. I think adult education took the brunt of it as they made the classes so expensive and gradually they stopped running them. People didn’t want to pay so much money to go along and learn upholstery or weaving, or whatever, so those courses were lost. It seemed as if there weren’t so many older people there, but more younger students, sixth-formers. Because of the funding it became less of an adult education centre and more part of Norfolk Education which was then competing with sixth forms and other colleges, and wasn’t special in and of itself. Council thinking seemed to change. Back then, if you were a Norfolk or Norwich person there was a number of council sports facilities around, including the Crome Centre and Mile Cross, but they were gradually closed because the Council decided those sort of things weren’t their core business.
All through that period those sort of civic amenities gradually disappeared and Wensum Lodge was part of that. It only hung on as long as it did because it was so unique. Some courses did move to local schools but, of course, you couldn’t do upholstery or pottery evening classes at a local school, and you wouldn’t have access to rooms during the day.
A complicated site
Wensum Lodge has always been a complex site. The Music House actually belongs to City Council, not County Council. So, we’re on a County Council site but the Bar’s in a City Council building and County Council are supplying people to keep it open, so it all became very complicated. Our lease was with County but it took me a long time to realise that they don’t own the Music House. If something needed repairing County would have to ask City if they could do it. When they wanted to sell the Sports Hall and the land around they came unstuck because it comes under City Council planning laws. There was a meeting when they applied for change of use from sports to residential but City didn’t allow it, arguing the Sports Hall should remain as a community asset. It remains there to this day, though run by a separate committee, originally set up by FOWL.
Another problem was safety. They’d stopped using the upstairs teaching rooms because there weren’t adequate fire escapes and you couldn’t open those 1170 windows without the glass or the frames falling out. There’s only one set of stairs up one side and a very narrow corridor coming down the other side, going on to the street. There’s no Wi-Fi or disabled access, especially up in the attic rooms. There were plans, somewhere in the Friends’ files, to put a lift shaft up from outside the Bar to access those rooms but it wouldn’t have passed fire regulations. They did use the room with the outside staircase above the cellar bar.
Around 2015 County Hall allowed the Sports Hall to be run by a separate group but it took them several years to get a lease. County didn’t really want Jurnet’s Bar to be there and put pressure on us, making us pay for cleaning and caretaker cover in the evenings. They also wanted us to pay for electricity but had to go to the trouble of installing a separate meter. We were only there in the evenings! They stopped hiring out rooms and it resulted in nothing going on in the evenings and just educational courses for young people running during the day. There was always the threat of the Lodge closing down altogether, with Maths and English courses being moved to local schools. I never understood why they stayed. Office staff who’d been working in the Lodge gradually seemed to disappear.
During this time the idea of a business hub came up, to try and rent out space to businesses. A printing company did move in to the old kitchen at one point.
The County want to sell buildings around the site but it’s difficult to see how that would work. Any purchaser would have to provide access to the Music House which fronts out onto the street, and to the Georgian house that’s built into the Music House, through the Wensum Lodge gates. It would be a difficult site to redevelop. There are the Maltings, The Tun Room, all part of the brewery and the old stable block.
There’s another set of buildings which they call the Loading Dock, just past the Sports Hall, which was part of County Council as well, and was used for training. I played squash with a guy who was an electrician who ran Youth Opportunity scheme courses. When they finished the space was used for storage. They called it The Stores because there was a loading dock where you could back up a van or lorry. The Sports Hall closed it but it became apparent it was still in use when someone investigating the power source turned the electricity off and a short time later somebody came across from The Stores complaining that their electricity had all gone out! The source went through the undercroft to the Sports Hall. The undercroft used to be full of desks, chairs and noticeboards discarded from schools all over the county.
Winding down and then came Covid
We did carry on with Jurnet’s Bar despite the changes going on around us. We kept having battles over caretakers’ cover. County got rid of all their caretakers and brought in Norse contracts, so we had to pay them. We started cleaning the place ourselves to avoid costs. You always had the feeling they wanted us to close down. We were a nuisance on the site. Then the pandemic gave them the perfect excuse.
During Covid there was a leak in the heating and the pipes under the floor had to be dug up and repaired. The caretaker had gone in and found the carpet was all wet. We’d always known there was damp (no damp courses in 1172) and it needed airing. During lockdown the building was locked up and they’d turned off the fan behind the bar, which ran 24 hours a day, so it had become very damp. A Grade 1 Listed Building being allowed to deteriorate, arguably. I asked for the doors to be opened every day but they said the building wouldn’t be secure. Looking back I wish I’d insisted on the doors being open and an iron grille fitted. We asked if we could go in and collect paperwork and tidy up the bar but that wasn’t allowed. Though, at one point they did let us go in and empty all the beers out. All the barrels, belonging to Adnams Brewery, are still there, and a cupboard full of spirits. Also, there’s still some of our paperwork in there, bills, staff wages, time sheets, that sort of thing – not interesting archives, and nothing that includes personal information.
Towards the end of Covid it looked as though we might be able to re-open and County offered to re-carpet the floor for us and we’d even chosen the pattern, but when it came to fitting it they discovered the floor hadn’t dried out, and it never did. They put some dehumidifiers in for a while, having to empty them every day, but it didn’t improve. Jurnet’s Bar is an awkward place to air, some of it’s a cellar and some of it’s at ground level, there are no windows and we had to keep the end doors shut when we had music nights to avoid complaints from the neighbours. The last time I was there the bar top was completely soaked, water dripping off the ceiling. Condensation.
It’s a shame because we could have re-opened, admittedly not immediately, after Covid. It would have been difficult with no students. We could have done music nights Thursdays and Fridays, but otherwise the books wouldn’t have balanced. I’ve got a letter from the County Council about the need for ventilation to reduce the risk of Covid! They wouldn’t let us back in when the pandemic was over. They’d found mould on the walls, which there’d always been, but that was a perfect reason to close us down. We have asked what’s happening in the Bar. Has the floor been dug up, as English Heritage had been interested in doing, have they cured the damp, sealed the ceilings? `
The beginning of the end of Jurnet’s
When it was clear we couldn’t re-open we decided there were things we could sell, like a glass washer and a couple of bottle chillers. We made a list of all the equipment we had and what we thought it was worth, having consulted Adnams, and the refrigeration company in Great Yarmouth. It would have been difficult for us to sell, since the whole industry was struggling. In the end County Council bought everything and we made about two and a half thousand pounds.
Gradually they started winding things down because, of course, they had to employ caretakers for the site but didn’t want to keep paying people to be there at night, especially if there wasn’t enough money coming in to cover it.
Reflecting on Wensum Lodge
It was interesting and it was quite a unique place, in my opinion, and it’s a great shame it’s gone. Things change and I’m sure Norfolk County Council’s priorities change; probably their funding from central government changed.
I’ve spent a lot of my life at Wensum Lodge since 1987. I was down at the Bar at least twice a week, one night emptying the safe, Monday nights cleaning the pipes, after I’d retired from work. Good old Ken got all sorts of people involved and once you got in you couldn’t keep away. I moaned about it from time to time but I kept going because its’ uniqueness, if that’s the word, made you want to go back. I was working with a nice group of people. Lorraine, was my bar manager and she put an awful lot of time into it as well. We still meet up occasionally. We had some interesting bar staff at times, a few headaches with employing staff, that sort of thing.
It’s a great shame that it’s all disappeared but the Bar really need the Lodge to be open, bringing people in on site who would use the Bar. I could see why County questioned why they were supporting a bar that had nothing to do with adult education. They didn’t know the history of Ken saying ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if the students had somewhere to go in the evenings, or to eat their food midday, to have a common room’. They weren’t really interested. The Bar was a nuisance. They were always very politically correct when they were on the committee but every complaint they could bring us, they would.
The caretakers were lovely people, they did all sorts for the Bar. It’s a frightening place to be for ladies coming out at 11 o’clock at night, in the dark. I’m not sure I’d want my wife doing it, but the caretakers would make sure that the ladies got off the site and on their way home safely. Luckily we didn’t have many problems, just the odd tramp off the street, and a few harmless drunks. We did have a couple of people who were clearly on drugs, but never violent, who were told by the bar staff that they couldn’t come in as it was members only. Got rid of them, or got them to leave, should I say? Yes, so a very interesting place, a great shame it’s gone.
Peter Hoadley talking to Susan Steward in Lingwood on 25th February 2025. © 2025 WISEArchive. All Rights Reserved.
