Mention Cromer and someone within earshot will think “crabs”. Cromer crabs, a happy bit of alliteration which sticks in the mind and conjures visions of wide beaches, seaside fun and wholesome seaside fare, with or without mayonnaise.
And that’s pretty much how it is. The brown crab – Cancer pagurus – is found all around the UK, but here off our stretch of Norfolk, in the shallow water on the chalk reef, brown crabs are sweeter than anywhere else. Men were launching boats to bring them in long before visitors began to spread the word.
The visitors began with the railway, in 1877, further induced in no small part by one Clement Scott, theatre critic for the Daily Telegraph, who in 1883 arrived on a press freebie and waxed lyrical about the then small fishing settlement and the poppy-covered cliffs. He dubbed the area “Poppyland” in his poem The Garden of Sleep, written in Sidestrand churchyard a couple of miles to the east. And if its doggerel, shot through with exclamation marks, aspires to birthday card lyricism, it still went Victorian viral and the punters rolled in.
Cromer became fashionable. Visiting notables included a 10-year-old Winston Churchill who in 1885 famously wrote in his diary: “I am not enjoying myself very much”. The quote is today inscribed on the promenade. Later, as a family man, he holidayed in nearby Overstrand, and in 1914, by then First Lord of the Admiralty, borrowed the Sea Marge Hotel phone to liaise with London on the looming conflict.
And in 1901, there was Conan Doyle, for whom the 19th-century “Tudor Gothic” (so described by Pevsner) Cromer Hall was the inspiration for Hound of the Baskervilles – that and the fact that his coachman’s name was Baskerville, and the legend of Black Shuck, a ghostly hound roaming the marshes, was well established.
The pier opened that year and these days the Pavilion Theatre claims the world’s only end-of-the-pier show, staging a summer Seaside Special, Christmas Special and any number of gigs and festivals, not least Folk on the Pier and the Cromer half of the Cromer and Sheringham Crab & Lobster Festival, both in May. In August, there is the World Pier Crabbing Competition.
But this is a town to live in as much as visit, a place of local traders whose profits are not sucked away into distant shareholders’ pockets. Many crabs are dressed and sold to local shops and restaurants, or direct to daytrippers. The Davies Fish Shop on Garden Street is supplied by John Davies, crab fisherman and Cromer lifeboat coxswain. The Norfolk Food and Drink Company on Tucker Street, facing the church, buys all its seasonal produce from north Norfolk suppliers; its strawberries and asparagus in particular from Sharrington just west of Holt. Seventy per cent of everything else is made in the county, including toothpaste and a remarkable range of gins and beers.
And that ethic runs through the 20-odd independent cafes, coffee shops and restaurants: Huckleberries opposite the church; Henry’s further up Church Street; Café Main on the main drag. Breakers on Garden Street does good family meals, Mary Jane’s across the street traditional fish and chips; and Upstairs at No 1, on the cliff and owned and run by Michelin-starred chef Galton Blackiston, received a rave review from Jay Rayner in the Observer this month. It does fish and chips on the ground floor and an international menu upstairs, both with sunset views.
Or for sea vistas with your crab salad, try the Rocket House Café, above the lifeboat museum, with its balcony looking down on the beach where crab boats are hauled up by venerable and rusting tractors.
But this is all delicious detail. For the full Cromer take, park in Runton Road car park and stroll the few hundred yards down the cliff-top path into the coastal dip which first attracted settlement. You can see from one side to the other of this town of still fewer than 8,000 – small enough to know people, big enough to grant space. And come the evening, when you’ve done the beach or the footpaths or the rolling hinterland, take a pre-dinner G&T on the pier and look up at the town’s Victorian and Edwardian convolutions spread along the low cliff, their centrepiece the Hotel de Paris, a grand Victorian replacement for a so-named earlier model developed by a refugee from the French Revolution.
And if the mood takes you, write a poem. Some will have done worse.
• The Grade II-listed Cliftonville Hotel, on Cromer’s west cliff, offers big sea views and authentic Edwardian style, not to say quirkiness. Doubles from £120 B&B
