This week Heather and I are returning to North West Norfolk for a few days staying in Heacham and enjoying the welcome from quite a network of people that has developed over recent years and successive visits.
My first visit to the area was in 1967 when I was 9 years old. We stayed in some holiday chalets called Sandringham Bungalows behind The Lodge pub in Old Hunstanton. The highlight of the week as I recall was a train ride to Kings Lynn on the then newly modified railway where you paid the conductor on the train, just like on a bus, and there were automatic level crossings which I’d never seen before.
It was our second visit in 1970 which had a more profound effect on my interests in transport and planning and was to become influential in my future career choices. By then I was approaching the end of my first year at secondary school and had developed an interest in geography as well as sharing an interest with several school friends in railways. Holidays were a chance to develop and explore my passion for both………
Where we were staying was ‘Old’ Hunstanton. The bigger seaside resort along the road was ‘New’ Hunstanton and as I explored the place it became obvious that it had been developed to a ‘plan’. The centrepiece to this is the Green, a triangular shaped public open space with the town hall and Golden Lion hotel along one side, a row of shops with ornate glass canopies and ironwork along another and the promenade and pier on the other. Leading off the Green were the High Street from the inland apex of the triangle. At the seaward side of the triangle, an esplanade of grand houses led off to the north sitting above red and white striped cliffs and looking out over the Wash. At the south west corner was the railway station and, in 1970, the former site of the Sandringham Hotel (which was being demolished during our earlier visit in 1967).
What shocked me in 1970 was that the railway station was locked up out of use. What happened to the modernised branch line that we had travelled on three years earlier? Even to me at that young age, the prospect of a seaside town with no railway seemed to be a death sentence. What I didn’t realise at the time was the role the railway had played in developing Hunstanton as it had with other Victorian resorts.
So on 29 May 1970 I used the remaining four frames on the film in my Kodak Brownie to take four photographs of Hunstanton station. My parents thought I was ‘wasting’ my valuable film but I reckoned that the station would be gone by the time of my next visit and indeed that proved to be the case.
On my return to school, our geography teacher set us a project on land use and I used Hunstanton as my case study. Mr Ridley, my geography teacher was so impressed he awarded me full marks! At home I set out to build a 00 gauge model of the station, a project that I have still failed to complete 44 years later though I do have a model of the signal box and main station building along with a kit built representation of the rolling stock that ran on the branch in BR days.
The Hunstanton railway lives on in people’s memories and through the new uses that various elements of the branch have been used for. Heather and I are staying in the old down side waiting room at Heacham station where guests can also stay in a BR MK1 railway carriage reminiscent of the old former Pullman camping coaches that used to be at Heacham. Hunstanton itself has reinvented itself though he traffic queues remind us of the folly of closing the railway!
We will be reporting back during the course of the next week or so…….
spatialsynergydave 