Object

Representation ID: 22561

Received: 16/03/2020

Respondent: Historic England

This site includes the grade II listed 77-79 Barrack Lane, part of the City Walls and towers which is a scheduled monument and also the western part of the site lies within the City Centre Conservation Area.

This is the immediate setting of part of the Scheduled City wall, the grade I listed St James’s Mill, the grade II listed numbers 77-79 Barrack Street and the grade I listed former church of St James. It is also in the wider setting of a number of other heritage assets including Norwich cathedral. Any development of the site has the potential to impact upon these heritage assets and their settings The site was most recently occupied by Jarrold’s printing works which incorporated the 1836 textile mill and an abutting modern building which now contains the printing museum. The site has much earlier origins and stands between the river Wensum and the medieval city wall. This section of the wall ran between the tower on Silver Road to another on the waterfront. As well as River Lane, a street running immediately inside the wall, the site featured a number of elongated property boundaries stretching back from the river reflecting the value of waterfront commercial property. Within the walls was a densely built mixture of domestic and commercial property with the part of the application site outside the walls less developed with garden areas surviving through to the 20th century. In the 19th century the commercial property along the waterfront was redeveloped sometimes without heed to the medieval boundaries with more substantial building of which St James’ mill is a good example. This tall, elegant building establishes a scale of development on the waterfront which other modern building adjacent has respected. At the northern side of the site the small houses of the 18th and early 19th centuries which characterised parts of Norwich before the Victorian period are represented by numbers 77-79 Barrack Street. These are remarkable survivals and reflect the scale of much of the historic building in this area. The 19th and early 20th century building on the northern side of Barrack Street is also domestic in scale while the former church of St James (the Norwich Puppet Theatre) is a relatively modest building of the 15th century with a low octagonal tower.

Historic England is broadly supportive of the principle of redevelopment of this site, providing it is of an appropriate scale and massing and conserves and enhances the heritage assets.
We suggest a more detailed HIA is prepared for this site. We welcome the reference to the City wall in bullet point 2 (although delete the word ancient as we would normally refer to these as scheduled monuments now). We suggest that you specially refer to the grade II listed 77-79 Barrack Street.

Suggested Change:
Delete ancient
Refer specifically to 77-79 Barrack Street.
We suggest a more detailed HIA is prepared for this site.