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Norwich has two cathedrals and many churches, including 32 built in medieval times – more than anywhere else in western Europe.
The Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, a striking example of Victorian Gothic, with lots of turrets, gargoyles and flying buttresses, was built between 1894 and 1910.
The splendidly-named Cathedral Church of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity towers over Tombland. Its foundations were laid in 1096, thirty years after the Battle of Hastings. Its 15th century spire rises 315 feet and is the second highest in England (after Salisbury Cathedral’s). The cloisters, built in the 14th and 15th centuries, are England’s largest. Near the cloisters, beneath the cathedral’s outer wall, is the grave of Norwich-born Nurse Edith Cavell who was shot by the Germans in 1915 for helping Allied troops escape from Belgium.
The cathedral’s interior is an architectural treasure house with a magnificent stone-vaulted roof and 1200 carved stone bosses illustrating the Bible story. Carvings on the misericords depict everyday life in Tudor times.
Open daily, the cathedral has a shop and restaurant. Guided tours are available.
St Peter Mancroft Church is so imposing with its splendid 15th century tower and huge windows that newcomers often mistake it for a cathedral. Completed in 1455 after 25 years under construction, it stands on the site of the original Norman church. Mancroft is a corruption of the Latin magna crofta, the ‘great meadow’ which is now the city’s marketplace.
St Giles’ Church, about 400 metres west of the Castle, has the tallest tower in Norwich, reaching a height of 113 feet and capped with an engaging cupola and weathercock. Dating from around 1420, it has a collection of grotesque gargoyles and a splendid 15th century roof that was so leaky by the 19th century that worshippers sat under umbrellas on rainy days.
Another church perpetuating a name from the past is St John Baptist Maddermarket. It stands near the site of the medieval market where Norwich weavers bought the red dye prepared from madder roots. The church contains 15th century arcades and brasses and Georgian reredos and communion rails.
St Julian’s Church, tucked away in a small alley between King Street and Rouen Road, is associated with the 14th century mystic and recluse, Julian of Norwich, the first woman to write a book in English. She wrote The Revelations of Divine Love while living as a hermit in a cell attached to the church. Now regarded as a spiritual classic, the book took her 20 years to complete. Mother Julian’s hermitage was pulled down at the Reformation but rebuilt after bombing in World War II. The Julian Centre, next door to the church, contains a bookshop, lending library, refreshment stand and toilets.
About half of the city’s medieval churches have been made redundant and some have been put to secular use. The attractive Perpendicular St James’s Church, near Whitefriars’ Bridge, now houses the popular Norwich Puppet Theatre. St Swithin’s, on St Benedict’s Street, dates from at least the 15th century and is now the Norwich Arts Centre.
