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Queen's Hills Country Park

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Queen's Hills Country Park is situated in the Tud Valley to the west of Costessey which is itself a western suburb of Norwich. It was created at the same time as Queen's Hills housing estate around 15 years ago. The park is roughly delineated by the estate at its north and the River Tud to its south. Over the past year we have all become more familiar with our immediate surroundings than we would ever expected and I have enjoyed discovering how much the park has to offer. The geography of this part of Costessey has been heavily influenced by gravel quarrying. The clatter of gravel travelling through the steel tubes of Longwater Gravel's processing plant on the other side of the Tud valley is familiar enough to have become part of the ambient noise here. When the plant restarted after England's first lockdown in 2020 however, the renewed noise and light came as quite a shock. To the east lie Costessey Pits which have been repurposed as watersports and fishing lakes...
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Community Garden, Bowthorpe

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  Bowthorpe is a largely residential suburb of Norwich on its western side. It has developed enormously since the 1970s and now comprises three major housing estates and a large industrial estate. You may have seen steam pouring from the Kettle Chips factory that is situated on the industrial estate or collected an item from the sorting office there. Other than that its not the sort of place that you might stumble upon unexpectedly. If you do ever make your way there it becomes obvious that the roads have been designed to keep Bowthorpe slightly detached from the rest of Norwich. For example if you lived on Earlham Green Lane and you had bought a TV from someone on Clover Hill Road you would need to drive 2.4 miles to get to their house even though there's a reasonable chance that you could see it from the front of your house.   If you are walking, cycling or taking public transport though its a different matter. Just make sure that you've got a big enough backpack for the ...
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Water Tower, Easton

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If you have ever driven to Norwich along the A47 from the west you will have noticed a tall concrete structure looming like one of H.G. Wells' aliens in the suburb of Easton.  It's a water tower. If you are wondering what they are used for, I can tell you: they are for storing water. You can thank me when that comes up in the pub quiz. East Anglia's flat landscape means that if one was to create a reservoir it would likely be on a similar level as the houses that it was supposed to feed so, without enough gravity, there wouldn't be the pressure in the system for distribution without a lot of pumping. The solution in East Anglia was to increase the gravity by building water towers to store the water so that water could be supplied even in the case of a power cut. The Easton tower is a brutalist design in reinforced concrete so probably originates from 1950s. In the photo at the top you can see three horizontal stripes where it looks like the concrete has had to be rei...
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