True's Yard Museum

True’s Yard Museum sits in King’s Lynn, a port town on the edge of Norfolk’s flat fenlands. It stands in what was once the North End fishing quarter, where whole families lived in single-storey cottages built close to the docks. The museum occupies a row of these cottages, most of which were demolished in the 1930s and 1960s slum clearances. A retired turkey magnate, Bernard Matthews, helped to keep the memory of the quarter alive. The buildings show how tightly the fisherfolk once packed their lives into tiny spaces. The cottages themselves tell the starkest stories. One room upstairs and one downstairs made up each home, yet eleven people sometimes shared them. Nine children slept head-to-toe in one double bed while parents lay on the floor. There were no indoor toilets, only chamber pots kept under the bed. The museum keeps cottage number five exactly as it was, so visitors can feel the cramped closeness of the past. A brick smokehouse at the back of the row shows how fish was preserved. Thomas Westwood, a retired fisherman, opened it in the 1890s with his wife Mary and their five children. They smoked herring whole, turning them into ‘bloaters’ that kept for weeks. The family also ran a fishmonger’s stall in the front room facing St Ann’s Street, selling the same fish they had just smoked.