Princes Street URC, Norwich
In 1819 Princes Street United Reformed Church was founded in Norwich. In 2020 I received a message, asking if I’d be able to travel to Norwich to photograph the church before it closed. I had a busy week that week, but they were pulling out the furniture within days. This would be the last chance, and how could I say no?
After a hectic drive I arrived on a drizzly Tuesday afternoon, two days after the official closure and final service. The following day people would come to begin pulling out the furniture, but on that day it was just myself, my friend Madeline, the Minister, and his daughter.
They told us the story, same as so many others. The church was fine, small, but self-sustaining, doing better than many, in fact. Then the roof needed repairs, every slate needed replacing. The bill would be astronomical, around half a million pounds. The money was far out of reach. The church closed.
In the wide entryway the visitors book sat still open, the last words already written. All those who had attended that final service making their mark for the last time.
Walking in, the first thing you notice is the bright paint job, blues, greens, teals and oranges, spreading out between arcs of white put in to highlight the architectural features. They renovated the building in 2014, and the sheen of ‘newness’ had not yet worn off. The only sign of real wear was the peeling ceiling paint, caused by that leaky roof which closed the church.
I wandered the floor for a while, getting my bearings, and then headed over to the door that led to the balcony, my love of heights taking over as I slipped up the graceful curving stairway.
From up above, it was easy to imagine the place in its heyday, bustling with people. Back in the day this place was so full people had to reserve pews, just to ensure they had a seat, they even added new pews in 1927, replacing box pews, and making room for even more people.
Though they’d removed the pews in favour of more flexible seating on the ground floor, the balcony was full of them, each with little iron umbrella holders and pew numbers. Up here, row after row of seating curved around the room.
It was up here that I found the churches memories, tucked away, between the pews, which had sat unused for decades, the balcony providing overflow space that hadn’t been needed for a long time.
I found myself leaning over the balcony railing, shouting out my discoveries to the Minister below.
Everywhere I looked, there were reminders that this place was loved, so very loved. That it had formed the heart of a community until roof repairs of £500k pushed the church from its home. A walking stick by the coat hooks; a handwritten note; a display of fake flowers, impervious to decay.
If I could, I’d have given them the money they needed that instant, but I could not. I cannot. All I could do is bear witness to this place, to what it had been, in order to honour those who had loved it, and those who continue to love it still.
So I stood there, and took my silly little photos.
While upstairs I made my way inside the organ, among the pipes, memories of a thriving church, old notes, scraps of service sheets, an organ specification. Life slipping through the cracks.
Back downstairs, I flicked through the Bible on the lectern. Inside the front cover was a mass of writing. This was a family Bible, recording over 100 years of births, deaths, and marriages among one local family.
I called the Minister over, and he recognised the name, they were still part of the community. He tucked it under his arm, and promised he’d get it back to them.
Books quickly became the theme of this adventure. In a side room downstairs a pile of old books sat on a windowsill. Madeline and I pulled them down, and opened them up, one by one.
Here, a Bible belonging to the founding minister of the church, John Alexander, here a gift to his Granddaughter, here a private inscription. The lives and faiths of all these people stacked up in a pile of paper and leather and gilt edges.
This is how churches tell their stories, in the end. It’s not the plaques that interest me, it’s the everyday. It’s the things people use and do and forget, clustered in forgotten corners.
Near the bottom of the stack of books we found an unassuming old Bible, tattered around the edges.
But when we opened it… questions began to arise.
Absolutely every page was covered in annotations, cross references, notes - much of it written in some form of shorthand, though it was not one any of us recognised.
The sheer volume of the annotations, and the content of those that we could read, made us assume that the Bible had belonged to one of the Ministers of the church. "Who was he?" we wondered aloud. "Did the congregation appreciate the work he put in?"
Luckily, there was an inscription in the front, not that I could decipher the whole thing. I took a guess at bits, and then, giving up, sent a photo to my friend, Mark, who is trained in reading old handwriting (a skill called ‘palaeography’).
He got back to me, fast.
It was a gift to Ethel Mary Colman, from her parents.
The mysterious annotator was a woman.
But this was the 1880's, and there were notes in the book that were clearly sermon preparation. How could that be? The current Minister of the church explained. In the 1800's Ethel Colman was one of the first ever permanent female Deacons in England, and was honoured by the church for her long service around 20 years before her death.
It turned out, however, that Ethel was much more than that. In 1923 she became the first female Lord Mayor of Norwich, and, in fact, the first Female Lord Mayor in England. During her tenure her sister, Helen, acted as her Lady Mayoress.
But there’s more. We’re in Norwich, and we’re talking about a member of the Colman family. Yes. As in the mustard. The whole family of entrepreneurs and philanthropists were committed members of the church, and just kept popping up. In book after book. The Colman sisters. Ethel. Laura. Helen.
Isn’t that what a church is, after all? Yes, a building contains it, and the building is the thing that fascinates me, but a church is group of people, passing things on to one another, leaving traces of themselves behind. Changing, and being changed, by a place and a community. The building simply holds the story, and, if you know how to read it right, helps us to tell it.
As I find myself saying - so often that my friends now sigh as I begin - churches are the only buildings in the UK that have been used for the same purpose, in the same place, for, in some cases, over 1000 years. They change and evolve based on the needs and desires of the community who live in that place, and in doing so, they become records of what has been. Churches are tapestries of communities through time. They hold - in their walls, and their interiors, and their chaotic little junk piles - the story of a people and a place like no other buildings do.
So 200 years after Princes Street URC was founded, the community continues even as the building closes. A reminder, if ever you needed one, that the faith held within these walls, for 200 years, has been one centred around resurrection - and for resurrection to happen there must, necessarily, be some form of death.
Even now, people gather together, to worship, and remember, and care for each other. Both those still living, and those long dead.
Before we left, we spoke to the minister about our discoveries, and told him to speak to the local museum. He promised to keep the books safe, and to do just that.
A few days later, the Norwich Heritage centre turned up, and collected a pile of books.
Included in the collection was Ethel’s Bible as well as the Bible given to the church in memory of her sister, Laura (Norwich’s first female Justice of the Peace). And so, in this ending, the stories of these women, and this church, live on.