In the last half of the nineteenth Century, Norwich saw a sharp social and economic decline.

The industrial revolution brought sophisticated machinery to the north and the weaving trade, once the life blood of the city's prosperity, was dealt a fatal blow. Compounding this, many agricultural workers found themselves surplus to requirements and came to the city in droves looking for work.

The years immediately after Billy was born saw the city's population increase from 79,000 in 1861 to over 122,000 in 1910 and almost all were living within the boundary of the old city wall. Twenty percent were considered to be living in abject poverty where disease and squalor were rife. Many thousands lived in one or two room dwellings in the cramped and decaying conditions of the city's numerous courts and yards. Built in the early nineteenth century to accomodate the weaver labourers, these houses were thrown up on the once magnificent gardens behind the houses of the tudor merchants with scant regard for those that would inhabit them. Back to back, connected by a maze of narrow streets and alleyways, the drainage and ventilation was utterly inadequate, the light minimal and the stench of decaying waste and open privvies stifling. Typhoid and cholera were regularly reaching epidemic proportions and the mortality rate was the highest of any major town in the country. It is almost unimaginable to think that one yard might be home for as many as forty six families. The Norwich City Corporation clearly had a huge social problem on their hands.

The first attempted improvement scheme proved little more than cosmetic. The real solution came after the first world war and brought sweeping change. New estates were constructed outside the city limits, Mile Cross, Earlham and Lakenham being among the first, and alongside this the Corporation undertook a huge programme of slum clearance that would last into the sixties.

By 1940 almost all the yards had been demolished, and their inhabitants succesfully re-housed. The face of Norwich has changed so radically in the last seventy years, it is hard to get a picture of how things might have been - but the names of some yards still remain on some of the surviving alleys.

The next time you take a walk in the Magdalen Street area, you might spare a thought for the thousands who lived there and scratched a living in the teeming, crowded alleyways of old Norwich's yards. The inevitable march of progress had closed a chapter.

Simon Floyd