6 SCIENTIFIC SURVEY OF NORWICH AND DISTRICT 
guards its remarkable heritage from the past, the municipality controls 
one of the largest of provincial museums, with an art gallery, and no 
fewer than four branch establishments which specialise in crafts, in folk 
and domestic collections, and a possibly unique ecclesiastical museum, all 
housed in buildings of appropriate associations, especially the last, for 
which one of the many historic churches, that of St. Peter Hungate, has 
been accommodated. A voluntary Publicity Association places the 
necessary information at the disposal of the visitor. ‘The Central Public 
Library has all the resources demanded by the cultural needs of the 
population, and has opened three branches, while a fourth is projected. 
This leads on to the mention of the four new suburbs in which portions 
of the population are being rehoused, and of the many responsibilities 
undertaken and facilities provided by the City Council on behalf of the 
inhabitants. A detailed record follows. 
Thus it will be seen that the description, ‘ the Norwich Blend,’ is not 
fanciful. Norwich presents a curiously complete cross-section of English 
life, not only contemporary but historical. No one industry, no marked 
physical peculiarity has ever dominated it. It was not suddenly built 
in a generation or two, or altered in a hurry. It has adjusted itself, not 
perhaps fast enough to changing conditions, and is not perhaps quite 
eager enough to display itself to the visitor. It has a strong local, one 
might say, insular feeling. It has not yet solved its traffic problem, 
and is only now building adequate municipal offices to supplement 
the beautiful, but outgrown accommodation of its fifteenth-century 
Guildhall. 
But we need not depend on the opinion of those who were born in it, 
love it, and prefer to reside in it. In 1909 it was the subject of a most 
detached study by C. B. Hawkins, a trained investigator from Toynbee 
Hall. He is worth quoting : 
* It is impossible to stay long in Norwich without realising the strength 
which comes of a great tradition handed down through many centuries 
of honourable and self-sacrificing labour for the City. It is no small 
thing that those whose duty it now is to deliberate on the affairs of their 
City, should meet in the very Chamber, and sit on the very benches, where 
their fathers and their fathers’ fathers sat and deliberated before them.’ 
