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To view the full details for Friday's tour click here.
To find out more about Norfolk's churches and chapels click here.
To see images of the other tours click on the links below:
Friday's coach tour
Sunday's Cathedral tour
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The Octagon Chapel, Colegate
Presbyterian, later Unitarian. Built in 1754-56 by the well-known Norwich architect Thomas Ivory, it’s beautifully proportioned octagonal design inspired Nonconformist architecture across the country. John Wesley famously called it “the most elegant meeting house in all Europe”, although also wondered “How can it be thought that the old coarse gospel should find admission here”. The interior has Corinthian columns supporting the domed ceiling and internal gallery.
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The Old Meeting House, Colegate
Congregational. One of the finest early nonconformist meeting houses in England, built in 1693, on a site tucked away down a lane behind the street frontage. The architecture however is anything but retiring; the main front with its paired doorways is divided into five bays by full-height pilasters of rubbed brick with stone Corinthian capitals and a deep projecting modillion eaves cornice. Internal gallery with bolection moulded panels, supported on Doric columns with an Ionic upper order supporting the plaster ceiling; mid nineteenth-century pulpit and seating.
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St Andrew’s Halls and Blackfriars
The Halls are the only surviving late-medieval Friary complex in England still in use, in this case having being converted into a common hall for the city in 1540, a function they still serve. The cloisters were home to several early Independent congregations in the mid seventeenth century, and the chancel was given to the immigrant Dutch church – who formed one-third of the city’s population in the late sixteenth century.
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St Andrew’s Church
One of the finest late medieval parish churches in the city, substantially rebuilt in perpendicular style in the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century this was a hotbed of radical Puritan preaching, under the influence of John More (‘the Apostle of Norwich’). As a wealthy civic church there are many fine monuments to citizens and gentry, including splendid late sixteenth-century Renaissance mural monuments to the Suckling family.
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Friend’s Meeting House, Upper Goat Lane
One of two Quaker meeting houses in the city, the current building replaced a late seventeenth-century structure in 1826. grey brick with stone dressings, and a central neoclassical porch. The building was the place of worship for several of the city’s prominent Quaker families, including the Gurneys, and Elizabeth Fry, the prison reformer.
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United Reformed Church, Princes Street
Originally Congregational. The first chapel was built of grey brick in 1819 and parts of the side walls remain; the chapel was heightened and extended with a new frontage in 1868-9 by Edward Boardman; the frontage is of yellow brick with four giant pilasters and an elaborate pediment. Next door is a large school building of 1879-80.
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