At the award-winning Time and Tide museum you can smell history. Charles Dickens called Great Yarmouth ‘the fishiest town in all England’ and here you’ll discover why.
Great Yarmouth’s rich maritime heritage is brought vividly to life in the old Tower Fish Curing Works, built around 1850 to cure herring. Humans love the smell of woodsmoke, perhaps it’s an ancient instinct for home. And the smokehouse aroma still lingers today, evocative of early 20th century days when this was the world’s most important herring port and Yarmouth ‘bloaters’, a cured herring, were famous across the globe. For many the cost of living crisis has resonated throughout history and herring was cheap, tasty, nutritious food. 12 million tons were landed at Great Yarmouth in 1913 alone.
Every autumn great shoals of ‘silver darlings’ migrated down Britain’s east coast to feeding grounds in the southern North Sea. Known as the ‘Home Sea’ it was the world’s best herring fishing and boom time for the town. Every year between October and December Scottish fishermen and ‘herring lassies’, working as equals, swelled the town’s population by 10,000. Elizabeth Bain, a Nairn Herring Lass wrote: “Oh for Yarmouth bustle and hurry / Time for nothing but making money / But still it has its little joys, / Hippodrome, theatre, Gem and Boys.”
Explore a Victorian street, see inside a fisherman’s home, uncover mysterious goings on in Kittywitches Row and experience the heady atmosphere of an old quayside when the magnificent shining herring was ‘King of the Sea’.
