Swainson Photo Archive – Kingsway Pub in Norwich

Norwich, 1997 on a rather grey day. These photos, which I took on slide film, show the former Kingsway pub on King Street, at the corner with Carrow Road, and the former Read Mills from the river and from King Street.

There is also a shot of the empty Riverside development site taken from Carrow Road standing next to where the swimming pool is now. The Kingsway was a big pub that catered for away fans to football games, and also had extensive space below it where once music and dancing occurred. We did that sort of thing before computers took over our lives.

Tim Martin once visited with a view to buying the pub. I remember seeing him, a Bentley in King Street was not a common sight in those days. Apparently he was dissuaded from purchase by a manager at the Bell, although I have no proof of this story. Whatever the story, the facts are that a sturdy and well built pub was lost, as so many have been.

Developer Livesey acquired everything between the river and King Street from Carrow Bridge to the Novi Sad footbridge near the former Ferryboat Inn and built the flats we see there now. The River here, as far up as New Mills, is part of the Broads National Park and the then Broads Authority objected to the scale of the flats next to the river but the scale of the former flour mills no doubt gave a pretext for the height. Now, rivers across the land are being hemmed in with skyscrapers as a decade of Tory free-for-all for developers blights our towns and cities. These pictures were all taken on film in 1997 and are copyright protected