Radical East Anglia

East Anglia is different. It is not on the road to anywhere. Norwich may have once been the second city of the kingdom but East Anglia missed out on the Industrial Revolution. A culture of being different has marked its history. It provided serious resistance to both the Roman and the Norman invasions. There has been a strong tradition of rural Nonconformity, and it has been the location for sustained challenges to the established order, from the Peasants’ Revolt in the fourteenth century, the Kett Rebellion in the sixteenth, Cromwell in the seventeenth, down to the twentieth-century Burston School Strike, ‘the longest strike in history’.