The Cavendish Collection - True's Yard
Richard Cavendish visits True's Yard folk museum and heritage centre in Norfolk.
The delightful old town of King's Lynn has survived centuries of wind, weather and politics, and even the earnestly destructive efforts of its local authority to appease the everlasting motor car in the 1960s. On the Great Ouse in Norfolk's north-western corner, the town is a small but flourishing port and still has a fishing fleet of ninety or so smacks, catching shellfish in the Wash. In the eighteenth-century King's Lynn ships went whaling in Greenland waters every March and returned in July, beflagged and garlanded to the ringing of the town bells.
The fisherfolk of Lynn used to live clustered companionably together in the North End area of the town in a teeming warren of alleys and yards until the slum clearance projects of the 1930s began to clear them away. Today only one little yard is left, True's Yard, with a pair of tiny cottages and a former bakery converted into a shop and the museum headquarters. It is a vivid memorial to a hard, demanding, sturdy way of life.
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