New and Refurbished Former Street Signs
King’s Lynn Civic Society’s project for 2024 was to refurbish 12 old former street name signs and commission 20 new ones.
The new street plaques are blue with white letters to match the historic plaques from 1970 which will return with a slightly darker blue background. We also made two street names trails for adults and children. We called the project ‘Every Street Name Tells a Story’. The little booklet is available in the Tourist Information Centre (yes, we do still have one of these rare things!) and the children’s book was given out by the Mayor, Cllr Paul Bland, at three events in our historic town hall where classes from local primary schools also watched a play we commissioned by the theatre group ‘Time Will Tell’ about the derivation of local street names. The children were really engaged with the two actors and delighted to have their own books. Over 500 local schoolchildren received these books.
Our Civic Society has a very good working relationship with our local authority, the Borough Council of King’s Lynn and West Norfolk, who were helpful partners in the essential job of fixing the plaques and the associated work involved. Their help has made the project so much easier to achieve. The Audrey Muriel Stratford Trust gave a generous grant to enable this work by the Society and to print the two new trails. King’s Lynn Town Guides gave useful financial help as part of their annual grant making. St Margaret and St Nicholas Parish Trust also gave a welcome grant.
A town like Lynn would have been almost self-supporting with gardens and fields within the town walls. Trade with the Baltic towns through partnership with the Hanseatic League brought wealth and status to medieval Lynn. The medieval origins of our urban street names tell a story of a time when the town was busy with hawkers and traders while brewers, tanners and bakers occupied premises near the
fleets which crossed the town.
They tell us where trades flourished, now obsolete, where buildings stood, long since demolished and the names of great men of the time who ruled the town. Many medieval street names reflected their primary industry, or the goods being sold there.
For several years King’s Lynn Civic Society has undertaken a small but useful project along with the other work we do with planning and policy advice. We have, over a few years, commissioned two special benches to celebrate Margery Kempe and Frances Burney, both born in Lynn, one the writer of the first autobiography in English and the other one of the first women authors.
In 2023 we wrote and published a Pilgrimage Guide to the town which will also support a larger parish project: the ‘King’s Lynn to Walsingham Way’, hopefully helping local villages along the route by encouraging green tourism.