The peregrines gave us away as tourists in our own city. We were standing in the cathedral close with our necks bent back, squinting at the spire alongside a dozen other people doing exactly the same thing, and it occurred to me that I had walked past this building most weeks for the last ten years without once stopping to look up at it.
That is the honest reason this guide exists. My girlfriend moved to Norwich with me recently and wanted to see the place properly, which meant I had to see it properly too. What follows is the weekend we put together: a day in the city at walking pace, then a day east to the coast. The two halves are nothing like each other, and that is the point.
Why this weekend works
Norfolk gets sold to visitors as either the north coast or the Broads. Both are lovely and both are covered elsewhere. This is the other Norfolk: the city, and the stretch of coast east of it that people either love or write off entirely.
The pairing works because the days balance each other. Day one is stone and cobbles and standing about in old buildings. Day two is arcades and sea air and a Roman fort in the middle of a marsh. Do them in that order and the second day feels like a release.
It also works logistically. Everything here sits inside a thirty minute drive of everything else, so you are never committing an hour of your weekend to getting somewhere.
Day one: Norwich
Start at Whitlingham
Get to Whitlingham Country Park early. The full loop of the lake takes about an hour at a comfortable pace, and in the morning the air is clear and the path is quiet. By mid morning at a weekend, any weekend the weather allows, it is a different place entirely: dog walkers, runners, families. Nothing wrong with that, but the early version is better.
The Flint Barn Cafe does coffee and pastries, and the sausage rolls are good. They are not cheap, and you should know that going in, but you are eating them looking across a beautiful lake, so it is slightly easier to forgive.
Dogs are welcome throughout, which makes this the natural start if you have a four legged friend alongside you.
Into the city
It is a five minute drive from Whitlingham into the centre, and this is where you make your one important decision of the day.
Park at Rose Lane, not at the shopping centres. Rose Lane is £8.70 all day. Castle Quarter, three or four minutes’ walk away, is £11 for four to six hours, £18.50 for six to eight, and £26 beyond that. Both shopping centre car parks also get incredibly full at weekends. The walk up from Rose Lane is a short hill, steep enough to notice, but over quickly.
That is more than ten pounds saved on a four minute walk, which is the sort of thing nobody tells you and everybody wishes they had known.
Norwich Cathedral
Free to walk into, and one of the finest Norman buildings in England. Spend longer than you think you need to. The nave, the cloisters, the sheer scale of it.
Two specific things to look for. If you are visiting between March and June, the peregrine falcons nest on the spire and have done since 2011. There is usually a telescope set up in the close with volunteers who will help you find them, and they are very happy to talk to you about it.
The other is Paddington, sitting on a bench with one of his famous marmalade sandwiches. It is a permanent installation and finding it is a small, silly pleasure. Take the photo.
Dogs are allowed inside on a lead, which for a building of this significance is unusually welcoming.
Norwich Market for lunch
A five to ten minute walk from the cathedral. Norwich market is one of the largest and oldest open air markets in the country, running six days a week under its rows of striped roofs, and the prices are what a market’s prices should be.
My pick is Taste of Shanghai, run by a husband and wife who could not be friendlier. Be prepared to wait fifteen to twenty minutes, because everything is cooked fresh to order with nothing sitting under a lamp. If you would rather eat sooner, the choice around you is genuinely enormous: hog roast, bagels, chips, Jamaican jerk, tacos, kebabs, falafel. You will not struggle.
Norwich Castle
The Norman keep has recently reopened after a long redevelopment, restored as a royal palace, and it is the reason to go.
Be aware of the cost, because it has gone up a little with the reopening. Adult admission is £17 on the door and £15.30 if you book at least a day in advance. Children aged four to eighteen are £14.50 on the door, £13.05 in advance. A family of four is therefore around £63 on the day, which is a real amount of money and worth deciding on rather than wandering into.
Two things soften it. Booking ahead saves ten percent. And there is a twilight ticket at £2.50 for the last hour before closing, sold on the door only, which is a very good deal if you are happy to move at pace.
The guided dungeon tour is the part I would not miss, and it is a separate ticket at around £4.50 when we visited. You do not need general admission to do it. Tours run through the day and cannot be booked in advance, so ask at the desk when you arrive and take whichever slot is free. They last about half an hour and are for ages ten and up, so check that before you build a family day around it.
There is also an art gallery and a good gift shop.
Gelato, and an afternoon choice
One minute down the hill from the castle is Cafe Gelato, handmade Italian gelato from Alessandro and Jenny Glorio. Large scoops, proper flavour, and often a queue out of the door in good weather. The queue moves and it is worth standing in.
From here the afternoon can go two ways. If you have energy, take a walking tour or hire a canoe on the Wensum. If you would rather slow down, walk ten to fifteen minutes to the Plantation Garden, a Victorian garden tucked into a former chalk quarry behind the Roman Catholic cathedral (no, not the one you saw earlier - Norwich has two!). Entry is around £2 and it is the best two pounds in the city: a genuinely hidden bit of Norwich where you can sit for an hour or two. They run events through the year. Note that dogs are not allowed here, the one real exception on this day.
What we would skip
The two shopping centres. Castle Quarter and Chantry Place are perfectly fine and contain precisely the same shops as every other city in the country. You did not come to Norwich for Boots or Zara.
Walk the Norwich Lanes instead. Small independent shops, record stores, vintage places, bookshops and coffee, in the streets between the market and St Giles. It is where the character of the city actually lives, and it is five minutes from the shops you would otherwise be standing in.
Dinner
Norwich is unusually well served by independents for its size. Three we would put you towards:
Yard for pasta. Mango-T for Thai, and do not be put off by the frontage, because the food is excellent, the service is genuinely warm, and there is a lovely hidden courtyard out the back if the evening is good. Grosvenor Fish Bar for proper fish and chips if you want something more relaxed.
Or find a pub. Norwich has well over a hundred of them and the good ones are very good indeed. We have written about that at length in our guide to the best pubs in Norwich, which covers eleven worth your time and one to walk past.
Day two: the coast
Burgh Castle first
Head east and start at Burgh Castle, about twenty five minutes from Norwich. It is a late third century Roman fort, one of the Saxon Shore forts built to defend the coast, and three of its walls are still standing to something close to their original height. The fourth slid into the marsh a very long time ago.
Entry is free. The car park is £1.50 for two hours or just £2 for four, and it is locked at 8pm. Allow one to two hours. It is a morning starter, not a full day’s main course.
What makes it is not really the fort, impressive as the walls are. It is the position: the ground drops away to Breydon Water and the Halvergate Marshes, and on a clear morning you can see for miles across the confluence of the Yare and the Waveney. There is a circular all weather path that is accessible for wheelchairs and pushchairs, and rougher ground beyond it. If it has been raining, expect mud, because this is a marsh and it behaves like one.
No toilets on site, so sort that before you arrive. Dogs are welcome on leads throughout.
Great Yarmouth seafront
Ten to fifteen minutes from Burgh Castle, or nearer twenty at the height of summer.
Lunch at The Corner for chips, then walk ten minutes along the front to Joyland.
Joyland is the bit I would insist on. It opened in 1949, it is still run by the same family, and the snail ride is a rite of passage for anyone who grew up in this part of Norfolk. You climb into a snail and trundle round a track. It is bumpy in the way a ride built in 1948 is bumpy, and it is completely brilliant. Horace Cole designed and built the snails himself at the family engineering works in Great Yarmouth; there are nine of them now, all different colours, repainted every couple of summers. It recently took bronze for best historic ride in the UK.
While you are in there, the Tyrolean Tubs is the only miniature Virginia Reel still running anywhere in the world, which is a genuinely remarkable thing to find on an English seafront.
Rides run on tokens, around £3 each, with twelve tokens for the price of ten. The tokens never expire, so if you come back in three years with four left in a drawer, they still work. Tokens are only sold in the park.
Joyland is seasonal, roughly late March to the end of October, opening around 11am, weather and trade permitting. Dogs are allowed in on a lead but not on the rides.
Then give the arcades an hour or two. The 2p machines are the point. Play for the keyring or the fridge magnet or that random sculpture of an elephant kicking a football, not to win.
The Hippodrome, if the timing works
Check what is on before you come, because this should shape your day rather than fit around it.
The Hippodrome is a circus building from 1903, the last surviving total circus building in Britain and one of only three anywhere in the world that still has its original sinking ring. In the finale the ring sinks, the water rises and the show finishes in a pool. It is not a novelty, it is a properly good show, and it works as well for adults as for children.
They have four show runs a year rather than one continuous season, so the calendar is worth checking well ahead. Tickets are usually somewhere around £20 to £30 for adults and £10 to £20 for children. No dogs, which makes this the second and last exception of the weekend.
I went every year as a child and I still go when I am back. If there is a show on while you are there, go.
Walk up to the Venetian Waterways
From the seafront, walk north along the promenade to the Venetian Waterways, a restored 1920s water garden of winding canals, little islands and small bridges. It is a lovely, slightly odd, very English thing, and the walk along the front to reach it is half the pleasure. Pedalos are available in season if you fancy taking to the water - much more quaint than braving the North Sea.
Fully dog friendly.
Park up here rather than in the middle of the seafront. It is pay and display along the road, spaces are far easier to find than in the small central car parks, and it means you finish the day at your car rather than walking back the length of the promenade.
What we would skip
Great Yarmouth town centre. The market area has genuinely improved in recent years and it is not a disaster, but it is a market town with ordinary shops, and the further from the sea you go the flatter it feels. The seafront is the reason to be here. Stay on it.
Dinner at the Boathouse
Before heading back, drive the eleven minutes from the seafront to The Boathouse at Ormesby. It sits directly on Ormesby Broad, the views are the point, and the menu is broad enough that nobody in your party will be stuck. Strong vegan and gluten free options, a Sunday roast if your timing lands there, and a children’s play area outside. It has won multiple Tripadvisor Travellers’ Choice awards.
Dogs are allowed in the bar area, and the bar is where you want to sit anyway for the view over the water.
Where to stay
The right base depends on which day matters more to you.
Great Yarmouth seafront, for day two. The Knights Court Hotel is where we would point most people. It is right on the seafront, it has free parking for guests which on that road is worth more than it sounds, it is properly clean, and the staff are friendly. Rates often include a hot breakfast. The Imperial a few doors along is a four star to Knights Court’s three, and having looked at both, we do not think the difference in quality justifies the difference in price.
Just outside Norwich, for comfort. Dunston Hall is a handsome old building with big rooms, a spa and a restaurant, free parking, and it is close to Norwich while being quieter than staying in the middle of it. It is further from Yarmouth, so it suits you better if day one is the priority.
In the city itself, the Maids Head is the best of the central options, and we have written more about it in the Norwich pubs guide.
Somewhere in between. There is a string of villages spreading across either side of the Norwich to Yarmouth road, Acle, Reedham, Freethorpe, Filby among them, full of guesthouses and holiday rentals. This is also the area for the holiday parks, both Broads and seaside. If you want to split the difference between the two days, or you are travelling as a family and want space, this is where to look.
Pro tips
Do the city first. Stone, then sea. It reads better in that order.
Book the castle ahead if you are definitely going, for the ten percent, or go for the twilight ticket if you are not.
Ask about the dungeon tour when you arrive, not before. You cannot book it in advance, slots are first come first served, and it is ten plus only.
Check the Hippodrome calendar before you fix your dates. Four show runs a year means a chance of nothing being on, and it is worth building the weekend around a show if one is running.
Bring proper footwear for Burgh Castle. It is a working marsh, and after rain it behaves like one.
Keep your Joyland tokens. They do not expire. Ours have outlasted two phones.
Nearby
If you have longer, or you are coming back, Holkham is the other side of the county and a completely different Norfolk: big skies, pine woods and one of the best beaches in England. Our full Norfolk guides are here.