How to fight a fire in 1797.

Alright?

I’m in Kent at the moment. Thankfully, the wonders of modern technology mean I don’t have to physically post this newsletter through each of your letterboxes, but still, it’s strange not to be sending it whilst stood (or, more likely, sat on my arse) on Norwich’s chalky soil.

Rest assured, I shall be back this evening, just in time for another insufferable night of heat-interrupted sleep.

Speaking of heat, Norwich has had plenty of fires in its time (that’s what I call a segue). Rather than developing the country’s best fire service, it developed the country’s best insurance.

Today, I’m going to point you in the direction of the wall-mounted clues that point to this surprisingly interesting part of Norwich’s past.

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The Great Fire of…Norwich.

You might argue that Norwich made great fires trendy. Before the great fire of London in 1666, there was the great fire of Norwich in March 1507. Admittedly smaller in scale, it still destroyed a third of the city’s buildings (718, to be exact).

And whilst no subsequent fire matched the devastation of that one, Norwich’s citizens continued to suffer from frequent fires, including another one just two months after the great fire.

One of Norwich’s biggest Netflix stars, Elm Hill, was all but destroyed by these fires. All but the Britton’s Arms remained by 1508.

Norwich Union.

Thomas Bignold (who, by total coincidence, was born in Kent) saw an opportunity. After all, if you can’t fight a fire, monetise it.

In 1797, he founded Norwich Union. It would later become Aviva, but that branding decision is probably up there with the least interesting things about Norwich (along with the fact that Ed Balls once switched on our Christmas lights).

It was originally called “Norwich Union Society for the Insurance of Houses, Stock and Merchandise from Fire”, which is a mouthful, but gives us a clue as to how frequent fires must’ve been. So frequent, indeed, that ‘NUSIHSMF’ did pretty well.

Like all insurance companies at the time, each one had its own private fire service. That’s important for the next bit.

Fire insurance plaques.

Believe it or not, even something as primitive as Microsoft Access hadn’t yet been invented in the 18th century. Neither had Excel.

So when the smoky plumes began to bellow from Norwich’s skyline and the church bells began to ring (that’s how they’d alert the authorities), the various insurance brokers hurrying their fire services to the scene had a problem. How would the fire service know which houses were their customers? They could hardly ask the owner of the decaying building for signed paperwork.

The answer was fire insurance plaques, introduced in England around 1710. Here’s a Norwich Union one you can find in the Cathedral close:

There are a few things to observe here:

1. The picture. Norwich’s coat of arms.

2. The name. It says “Norwich”, which means it was a Norwich Union Fire Insurance Plaque.

3. The number. We already know that 1587 can’t refer to the date (it’s 210 years before Norwich Union existed). So it must be the policy number of the holder.

Some aren’t quite as detailed. Here’s a cool one on Unthank Road:

As you can see, this one just has the name and logo of the insurance broker (Phoenix - which is either genius marketing or a sick joke. Or both?).

Incidentally, Phoenix was known for insuring particularly fire-prone businesses, like bakeries.

There are seven fire insurance plaques in Norwich listed on this website, which has been invaluable for researching this newsletter. But you can find Norwich Union’s fire insurance plaques across the country. This one is found on a cottage in Cambridge:

Wait…what if a house wasn’t insured?

It’s said that no claim was paid out until the plaque was produced from the burnt-out building. Which somehow still sounds easier than it is to get an insurance payout today.

But what if the wrong fire service showed up? What if the house wasn’t insured at all?

In both scenarios, the answer is (rather boringly) that fire crews would put it out anyway. Despite the myths, fire crews didn’t wait for a fire to spread to an insured home before tackling it.

For those insured by another broker, the fire service that turned up first would extinguish the fire and then invoice the other broker after the fact.

For those uninsured, the logic was pretty simple: if they didn’t put it out, it’d spread, and if that happened, they’d probably have to pay out even more.

Two things serve as evidence that this approach worked: firstly, these insurance companies were, and still are in some cases, really successful. Secondly, there weren’t that many hugely destructive fires during or after the 18th century in Norwich.

I’ll be back next week to talk about Norwich’s parallel universe.

See you soon,

Secret Norwich.