Penguin Guides: Norfolk and the Isle of Ely

Just before Christmas, there was an article on the BBC News site about the Penguin guides of Britain edited by L. Russell Muirhead.
They were first published in the 1930s and 1940s, and (re)presented an England which was at once familiar, but also utterly different. Emma Jane Kirby has been using the guides to visit locations, including Kent and Derbyshire.

The Penguin guides were sometimes written by local people and the Norfolk one was written by Elizabeth M Harland. It describes a Norfolk whose beaches were still being cleared of unexploded ordnance after the Second World War.

They sounded utterly intriguing of course, and the next minute I was on eBay and buying a 2nd hand copy of the guide to Norfolk, which also coincidentally included the Isle of Ely (somewhere I commute to every work day), and which arrived a few days ago, as shown opposite.

The guide is small, and has a slip cover. It is guide number 8 in the series.

It opens with the lines "Only three counties in England are larger than the North Folk's, and none more fascinating...shaped like an egg, it is 67 miles across at its longest, and 43 miles across at its widest points". Those from Norfolk are, in the words of Sir H. Rider Haggard "a strange people, born of the East Wind", and "you are still a foreigner when you have lived among them for half a century".

Will share more as I use it to explore my local area during 2018

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