A love letter to Norfolk

Dinky market towns and seal-strewn beaches? Local opinions, Sunday drives, Blackpool-of-the-East and early churches, this is novelist D. J. Taylor's Norfolk and he wouldn't want to live anywhere else

- D. J. Taylor

Land of mists and magic: a purple sunrise at Thurne Windmill on the Norfolk Broads

PEOPLE who live outside Norfolk and get their ideas about it from television programmes nearly always assume that the backdrop is more or less identikit, a matter of flat fields, wide skies, picturesque churches nestling among the reed beds and, once you get to the eastern side, seal-strewn beaches. In fact, the county is as differentiated as anywhere else. This is a big place—70 miles from Elm in the remote north-western corner down to Gorleston on the eastern coast in sight of the Suffolk border-with variations to match. The gap between one of the dinky north Norfolk market towns, with their stratospherically priced second-homer cottages, and some of the downbeat Breckland hamlets is as wide as the gulf between Hampstead and Brixton.

Thatched boathouses on Hickling Broad.

Characteristic tall Dutch gables and warm red brick at Blickling Hall

Norfolk. Merely typing the word on a computer screen gives me a little twinge of satisfaction, a sense of coming from somewhere unlike anywhere else and revelling in the fact of your upbringing. But already some distinctions need to be drawn, for I was born and brought up in Norwich-smack in the middle of the county, yet, in some ways, not at all like the countryside that surrounds it: different accent; different politics (there is a long tradition of electing Labour MPs); much less inward-looking than some of the distant villages, where a day trip to London is a very serious business. In my teens, Norfolk was full of people who had never left the county in their lives. Even now, one or two of them precariously survive.

The heart of a disparate county: Norwich's many delightful roads include Princes Street.