Anna Keay: belief

Transcript context

…What makes the historical architecture of Norfolk so special? One of the things that’s really interesting about Great Britain is, if you ever have one of those maps that you can get, which show the geology of the place that you live in, the country or the state you live in. It shows the stripes or the bands of different kinds of geology, whether it’s limestone or granite or chalk or whatever. If you look at one for Britain, it is amazing because there are so many different stripes of geology just to do with the way the world evolved geologically, which means that places in Britain that are very close to each other have completely different geology. The reason that is interesting and relevant is, places are built overwhelmingly from the materials that you find locally. When you have an old building stock like we do, that’s very vivid. It’s expensive to transport materials, and so on. One of the great pleasures, I would say, of traveling around the UK is that places that are maybe only 15 miles apart can look completely different because of that. In the case of Norfolk, what it means is that Norfolk has no building stone. It has a lot of chalk, which has seams of flint in it. What you get are buildings in our part of the world which are overwhelmingly brick, very beautiful red brick that’s been fired locally from local brick earth. Then you get dressings of napped flint, which is a very beautiful black, knobbly stone. If you go 20 miles east from us to get to Northamptonshire, there’s wonderful limestone, and everything is built of honeyed, beautiful stone. It’s such a lovely thing about your connection with your environment. I feel that in this country, we are very lucky in this, that you have this tremendous local distinctiveness. You could open your eyes if you know about this stuff, and you could see, just by looking, which county of England you are in, and given all these places are very close together compared to the States, and quite often, which part of which county. Norfolk is very, very strongly brick. It has beautiful brick merchants’ houses and buildings of the 16th, 17th, 18th century. It has also some wonderful medieval churches because Norfolk was very, very wealthy. It’s the bulgy bit on the side of England, if you look at the map of England, on the right-hand side. It was the wealthiest part of England all the way through the Middle Ages because it was where all the sheep farming happened, and all of England’s wealth in the Middle Ages really came from the export of wool. It had less of a 19th century also, right? In the sense of less of an Industrial Revolution.…

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