Time and Tide Museum

The Time and Tide Museum is housed in a Victorian herring curing works near the South Quay, and it is the best single stop for understanding Great Yarmouth's history. The building itself is atmospheric — a cavernous brick structure that once processed thousands of tons of herring each season — and the exhibits cover the town's life as a fishing port, a trading centre, and an unlikely node of the offshore oil and gas industry.

The maritime galleries are the strongest part, with good material on the herring drifters, the trade routes, and the Scottish fisher girls who came south each autumn to gut and pack the catch. There is also solid coverage of the wartime bombing that destroyed much of the old town, and a section on the Broads. Allow two hours minimum.

things to do museum
A story
The building that houses the museum was a herring curing works for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the height of the herring season, Scottish fisher girls would travel south to work here, processing up to sixty barrels a day by hand. The smell of salt and fish apparently lingered in the building for decades after it closed.