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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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The Jenny Lind Play Ground for Children

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As you arrive in Norwich from the south, the A11 turns into Newmarket Road and just before you reach the city centre you pass the site of the old Victorian hospital that closed in 2003. Its domed spires (or maybe spired domes) and dutch gabled front still stand today though much of the building was rebuilt as the hospital was converted to flats. A little way behind the flats and the housing that has replaced the rest of the hospital, is a green square that includes a playground for young children and some outdoor basketball courts. On the other side of the path this marble arch stands as an entrance to a small open grass field. The playground, courts and field form Jenny Lind Park. The name 'Jenny Lind' will also be familiar to many parents whose children have needed medical attention in or around Norwich since 1854. The Jenny Lind Infirmary for Sick Children was the UK's second children's hospital after Great Ormond Street and...
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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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