Great Yarmouth Row Houses

The Row Houses on South Quay are two surviving merchants' residences from the dense warren of narrow lanes that once covered the old town. The Rows were one of the most densely populated urban environments in medieval England — narrow enough in places to touch both walls simultaneously — and the houses that backed onto them were correspondingly compact and ingenious in their layout.

English Heritage manages both buildings and they are open for guided tours in season. The interior of the Elizabethan house is the better-preserved of the two, with original panelling, fireplaces, and a sense of how a prosperous Yarmouth merchant lived in the seventeenth century. The bombed-out house next door is left deliberately as it was found after the 1942 air raid, which makes it unexpectedly moving.

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A story
The Rows were one of the most unusual urban environments in England — 145 lanes so narrow that a special narrow-wheeled cart, called a trolley, had to be invented to carry goods through them. The Blitz destroyed most of the Rows in 1942; the two Row Houses that survive are all that remain of a neighbourhood that once housed thousands of people.