20th century

In the early part of the 20th century Norwich still had several major manufacturing industries. Among these were the manufacture of shoes (for example the Start-rite or Van Dal brands), clothing, joinery, and structural engineering as well as aircraft design and manufacture. Important employers included Boulton & Paul, Barnards (inventors of machine produced wire netting), and electrical engineers Laurence Scott and Electromotors.

Norwich also has a long association with chocolate manufacture, primarily through the local firm of Caley’s, which began as a manufacturer and bottler of mineral water and later diversified into making chocolate and Christmas crackers. The Caley’s cracker-manufacturing business was taken over by Tom Smith in 1953, and the Norwich factory in Salhouse Road eventually closed down in 1998. Caley’s was acquired by Mackintosh in the 1930s, and merged with Rowntree’s in 1969 to become Rowntree-Mackintosh. Finally, it was bought by Nestlé and closed down in 1996 with all operations moved to York; ending a 120-year association with Norwich. The demolished factory stood on the site of what is now the Chapelfield development. Caley’s chocolate has since made a reappearance as a brand in the city, although it is no longer made in Norwich.

HMSO, once the official publishing and stationery arm of the British government and one of the largest print buyers, printers and suppliers of office equipment in the UK, moved most of its operations from London to Norwich in the 1970s.

Jarrolds, established in 1810, was a nationally well-known printer and publisher. In 2004, after nearly 200 years, it passed out of family ownership. Today, the Jarrold name is now best-known and recognised as being that of Norwich’s only independent department store.

The city was home to a long-established tradition of brewing,^[43] with several large breweries continuing in business into the second half of the century. The main brewers were Morgans, Steward and Patteson, Youngs Crawshay and Youngs, Bullard and Son, and the Norwich Brewery. Despite takeovers and consolidation in the 1950s and 1960s in attempts to remain viable, by the 1970s only the Norwich Brewery (owned by Watney Mann and on the site of Morgans) remained. In 1985 the Norwich Brewery closed, and was subsequently demolished. Small-scale brewing continues in Norwich in “microbreweries”.

Norwich suffered extensive bomb damage during World War II, affecting large parts of the old city centre and Victorian terrace housing around the centre. Industry and the rail infrastructure also suffered. The heaviest raids occurred on the nights of 27/28th and 29/30 April 1942; as part of the Baedeker raids (so called because Baedeker’s series of tourist guides to the British Isles were used to select propaganda rich targets of cultural and historic significance rather than strategic importance). Lord Haw-Haw made reference to the imminent destruction of Norwich’s new City Hall (completed in 1938), although in the event it survived unscathed. Significant targets hit included the Morgan’s Brewery building, Coleman’s Wincarnis works, City Station, the Mackintosh chocolate factory, and shopping areas including St. Stephen’s Street, St. Benedict’s Street, the site of Bond’s department store (now John Lewis) and Curl’s department store (now Debenhams).

In 1976 the city’s pioneering spirit was on show when Motum Road in Norwich, allegedly the scene of “a number of accidents over the years”, became the third road in Britain to be equipped with “speed bumps”, intended to encourage adherence to the road’s 30 mph (48 km/h) speed limit.^[44] The humps, installed at intervals of 50 and 150 yards, stretched twelve feet across the width of the road and their curved profile was, at its highest point, 4 inches (10 cm) high. The responsible quango gave an assurance that the experimental devices would be removed not more than one year following installation.