The story
Inside the stone keep of Norwich Castle you can once again climb to a royal floor. A five-year project, finished in August 2025, put the Norman levels back into what had long been a hollow shell, so visitors now walk through a great hall, a chapel and a king's chamber, furnished as they might have looked when Henry I held Christmas here in 1121.
The Normans founded the castle soon after 1066, and the keep later served for centuries as the county gaol. The city bought it and opened it as a museum in 1894. Its newest addition is a medieval gallery made with the British Museum, with around 900 objects from the Conquest to the 1530s, 50 of them lent from London.
The art galleries have a strong local heart. Norwich Castle holds a deep collection of the Norwich School, the East Anglian landscape painters gathered around John Crome and John Sell Cotman in the early 1800s, with their woods, rivers and windmills. French painting is here too, including Alfred Sisley's view of the main street of Argenteuil, painted in 1872 and given to the museum through the Art Fund in 1945.
