14 April 2018: More on creating small country estates

Margaret Bird, editor of The Diary of Mary Hardy 1773–1809 published by Burnham Press, will give an illustrated talk as Honorary President of the Norfolk Archaeological and Historical Research Group (NAHRG) on Saturday 14 April 2018 at 2.30 pm.

It will be held at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and all are welcome, free of charge. Details of the venue appear below.

The main front of Coltishall Hall, built c.1700 and enlarged 1871. Here the brewer Chapman Ives created an idyllic setting 1780-96, taking half the common into his hands in 1782 for his new plantations

From brewing to gentry

Entitled ‘From brewing to gentry: Creating small country estates 1780–1830’, the presentation will focus on the desire of Norfolk brewers to surround themselves with domestic buildings and pleasure grounds suited to their rising social status.

Manufacturers in town and village in this period were forming ever-larger maltings and breweries and increasing the number of tied houses in which to sell their beer.

While engaged in this business expansion they took care to enhance the setting in which they and their families lived. Houses were enlarged, gardens became more sophisticated and main roads were diverted so that their impressive properties could be enveloped in parkland.

The ‘beer brewer’ of 1780 had become the ‘gentleman’ or even ‘esquire’ of 1830.

This island, shown on the Coltishall tithe map of 1841 in front of the Hall, was used for pleasure boating by Chapman Ives and his mother, the brewer Rose Ives

An Earlham connection

UEA is built on the Earlham Hall estate. For a time the prominent Norwich brewer Nockold Tompson, Mayor of Norwich 1759−60, farmed at Earlham and was praised by the agriculturalist Arthur Young for his crop-yield experiments in Young’s Farmer’s Tour of 1771.

Thomas Paine Lecture Theatre, UEA

The meeting in the Thomas Paine Lecture Theatre takes the form of the AGM followed by the Presidential Address by Margaret Bird.

The lecture theatre is in the Thomas Paine Study Centre in the Norwich Business School block at the end of Chancellor’s Drive.

The NAHRG website gives details under Lecture Programme.