The Dragon Hall, Norwich

Visit Date: 21 February 2008

Admission Price: At time of visit, the charges were as follows:
Adult - £5.00
Concessions - £4.20
Ages 5-16 - £3.00
Family - £12.00 (defined as 2 adults and up to 3 children)

Please check to see whether these charges have since been revised.

Ownership: Norwich City Council (Ownership), Norfolk & Norwich Heritage Trust (Management)

Tel. Number: 01603 663 922

Website: http://www.dragonhall.org/

Walkthrough: Audioguides are provided for you at the entrance before you walk through into the distinctly un-medieval glass gallery. Serving as an extension to the original building, the result allows visitors to look out into the landscaped yard. Within the gallery, there are podiums that each have models of the hall – one of the hall in its pomp, the other showing its location within Tudor Norwich – with related information panels on each side. The audioguide dictates the route towards the stairs and lift, leading up to the street level floor of the main building. This floor is split into three rooms, all of which have site-branded window blinds that block out the road outside. The initial room is a video re-enactment of the life of the building’s merchant owner Robert Toppes, where sensors send the audio of the video into the audioguide once visitors move towards the benches. The other two rooms are focused upon trading, life within Norfolk and the legend of the Snap Dragon, through information panels, artefacts and hands on features.

Doubling back to the staircases and lift, the upper level is the Great Hall itself. The wood beams extend down from the ceiling and into the walls, with a separating beam wall by the stairs at the far end of the hall. On the other side of that wall were tables laid out with activities for a later school visit, including wall-building and weaving. In the main area of the hall are movable tables, as the space is often hired out, with horizontal panels and hands on features, such as a wooden crown joint for visitors to build and a faux open book with some fabric pages to turn. There’s either the option of taking the far stairs that lead towards the Old Barge Room, where the local history of the outside road is showcased via panels, vintage photographs and display cases of local artefacts, or doubling back towards a different set of stairs from the ones that led up there. These stairs within the Tudor building itself lead down beneath the street level to the cellars. This level also splits itself into three areas, with panels and artefacts about the hall’s architecture, the archaeological dig that helped uncover the foundations and it’s Victorian history, when the hall was converted into terraced housing. The final stairs go even further down into the more spacious Undercroft with modern tiled flooring and replica woolsacks, chests and barrels to symbolise what used to be stored there.

Highlights:

- The audioguide.
- The Main Hall
- The Glass gallery

Lowlights:

- The outside traffic can drown out the audioguide at ground level.

Access: Slightly outside of the city centre of Norwich, the Dragon Hall is a five minute walk from the train station and whilst the site doesn’t provide a car park, there is a pay and display alternative on a nearby road by an alleyway that leads to the site. Whilst there are ramps and lifts within the building, the cellars and the undercroft of the building cannot be accessed by wheelchair users. To counter this, information about these areas are provided on the ground floor as well as through the audioguides.

Overall Impression: The Dragon Hall really brings to life the merchant history of the building, with a consistent focus on the life and times of Robert Toppes. Even if it isn’t an era of history that you might warm to as a visitor, the audioguide is very informative and the features should be varied enough to hold your interest. It was certainly worth the price of admission.