Norwich Underground

Norwich’s network of underground passageways is the stuff of legends. Many of them may be the work of over-active imaginations but others undoubtedly do exist as relics of the city’s medieval glory days when a little subterranean expediency came in handy in times of religious persecution or civil war. Of course, even those that exist solely in folk memory still make for a good story.

The city’s bedrock is pitted with less glamorous tunnels too. Chalk and flint mining was a Norwich tradition for centuries and both materials were necessary for building the extensive city’s walls and numerous churches of what was England’s second largest city in the medieval period. As a result, certain areas of the city have long been synonymous with subsidence problems. A reminder of this came to the fore in 1988 when a double-decker bus was unexpectedly swallowed-up by the earth on Earlham Road close to the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St John the Baptist. Thankfully no-one was hurt. This bizarre event made for some entertaining postcards and even gave the opportunity for the chocolate manufacturer Cadbury’s to promote one of its products using a photograph of the unfortunate bus alongside the slogan, ‘Nothing fills a hole like a Double Decker’.

Walking recently in a formerly unexplored corner of a familiar haunt at the city outskirts I stumbled upon an entrance to this chalky underworld. Long sealed-up with steel to deter would-be intruders, this one had been recently prised open – by shadowy urban explorers, no doubt, keen on charting this unmapped terrain. Resistance was futile – there was no way to turn down such a serendipitous opportunity.

Just a few metres beyond the entrance the absolute darkness is intimidating – the light of torches too feeble to identify much more than where the tunnel floor is and highlight spray-painted ciphers marking dead ends and potential exit routes. The photos taken here with flash were made by simply pointing and hoping for the best: a strange turn of events in which the results reveal detail unseen by dim yellow torchlight at the time of their taking.

A troglodyte world such as this is a starkly alien environment that can bring out the most atavistic of fears. Past underground visits have been to well-lit caverns filled with phantasmagorical stalactites and stalagmites, or tropical caves in south-east Asia populated by strange blind fish and albino insects — beautiful unthreatening spaces. My only previous mine experience was a terrible, yet fascinating, place on the other side of the world: a Bolivian silver mine at over 4,000 metres altitude at Cerro Rico (‘rich hill’) near Potosí, where visitors are expected to bring along gifts of Coca-Cola, bags of coca leaves and sticks of dynamite – the necessities of a Bolivian mining life. The miners in turn offer their own gifts to El Tío (‘The Uncle’), the spirit of the underworld – a pact with the Devil that permits them to scratch a dangerous living from the earth for their short tough lives. Since this visit I have always afforded miners the greatest respect.

It might seem odd that a short excursion beneath the ground just a mile or so from home can feel almost as alien an experience as a visit to a Bolivian silver mine – even without a cheek-wad of coca leaves and the necessity of appeasing ‘The Uncle’. There again, the juxtaposition of a jarring new experience in a wholly familiar setting is always going to be disturbing.

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Crossing the Bridge

A little south of Ipswich, the vast concrete span of the Orwell Bridge stretches across the eponymous river like a conveyor belt to Hades. Well not Hades exactly, but the Port of Felixstowe. A constant rattling procession of lorries shunt to and fro the port, their drivers barely aware of the river they are crossing or the county town they are skirting by. The ciphers that identify their payloads have become household names — Maersk, China Shipping, Cosco – those magic metal boxes that contain the necessities of 21^st-century life. Well-travelled, and more often than not coming from the Far East, the containers are the camels of the latter day Silk Road: a trade route, which, as any historian will tell you, was about a lot more than just silk.

The bridge might appear to be no place for pedestrians, but they are tolerated, and walkers intent on completing the Stour & Orwell Walk between Languard Point and Cattawade, and wishing to avoid the extra six or so miles of the alternative ‘Ipswich Loop’, are obliged to cross it on using the walkway on its southern side. The approach on foot from Orwell Country Park is intimidating – the noise, speed and volume of traffic all contributing to the inevitable feeling that this is an unnatural place for hikers to be setting foot. The 30-metre drop to the Black Ooze (yes, it really is called that) of the River Orwell below is held at bay by just a concrete ledge a little more than a metre high. This is certainly not comfortable strolling territory, nor a place to suddenly become aware of a hitherto undiscovered acrophobia.

Steps lead up sharply to the bridge walkway, past a Samaritans sign that bears a short but kind message and a phone number. Like steps to the gallows, the certainty that you are shadowing the last steps taken by some desperately unhappy souls is chilling. At the top is a free phone, proof that someone cares, although the lorries flying by seem wholly indifferent. The views along the Orwell estuary are pleasing – green fields, houses snuggled in woodland, little boats bobbing in silver water – but the constant thrum of the traffic, and a tangible sense of alienation, do not encourage lingering. The walk across takes around 15 minutes.

Bridges are powerful metaphors for the journeys of life, for transformation. The novelist Ian Banks wrote an entire novel – The Bridge, no less — using an enormous industrial super-complex of a bridge as the dream environment of his comatose crash victim protagonist. Religion and mythology make good use of the bridge as metaphor too and the crossing of a body of water — the River Jordan, River Styx — is ascribed a spiritual meaning. Most of the time though, our concerns are more mundane: if crossing the Orwell Bridge on foot is disturbing then it is because of its height and heavy traffic as much as its psycho-geographic imprint.

Elsewhere in the world, where health and safety concerns are not held as sacred as they are here in the West, dodgy-looking footbridges have been used daily for generations without much fuss. The one illustrated here is over the Hunza River in the far north of Pakistan. To be honest, it is a little nerve-wracking to traverse, especially when local villagers join you and the bridge sways nauseatingly above the rapid rock-filled glacial river beneath. More alarming still is to cross halfway only to discover a missing slat and the necessity of making a jump to the next complete one.

In contrast, this footbridge feels much safer; nurturing even. Perhaps it is its solid organic nature that reassures, and also the surprising realisation that it hardly sways at all? This remarkable feat of bio-engineering, which resembles something that Frodo might have encountered in The Lord of The Rings,  is one of many living root bridges found in the deep, rain-washed valleys of Meghalaya, northeast India. Fashioned from the living roots of fig (Ficus elastica) trees that grow alongside the region’s turbulent monsoon streams they take decades to build but last for centuries. You can read my article on them in Geographical magazine here.

Returning closer to home, to the Waveney Valley in fact, here is a short extract from Slow Norfolk & Suffolk that describes an encounter on the bridge across the Waveney at Mendham on the Suffolk/Norfolk border. Perhaps bridges do affect us psychologically more than we might credit?

This is classic Waveney Valley scenery — the sort of thing Munnings might have painted if he had not concentrated on horse fairs or attacking modernism quite so much. It’s the kind of landscape that brings reverie. The iron bridge crossing the Waveney seems like a giant staple attaching Norfolk to the Suffolk mainland. Brown cows wandering the meadows contentedly graze and flick flies away, keeping their eyes on a pair of locals fishing beneath the trees and catching nothing. As poplars rustle in the breeze, the very English sound of an accordion drifts down from the Munnings pub. It could almost be the 18th century, if it wasn’t from the fishermen’s car parked by the road. As I am taking all this in, a man who is clearly the worse for drink ambles down the road towards the bridge. He stumbles exactly halfway across, pauses for a moment, then goes back the way he has come. It is as if he is fearful to place his feet on Norfolk soil, or there is some sort of invisible barrier. Two minutes later, a sleek Jaguar arrives from the north to pick the man up. Then it turns around and ferries him back across the bridge… into Norfolk.