Quoting from the Borough Council site,
Visitors have been coming to Great Yarmouth for nine hundred years but it is only in the last two hundred years that the seaside has been the main attraction. The monuments of Great Yarmouth’s long and unique history are spread throughout the town.
Behind the glamour, glitter and bright lights that make Great Yarmouth one of the UK’s most popular seaside resorts, lies a charming town that is steeped in history.
Great Yarmouth has a rich and proud maritime heritage, and once boasted being one of the wealthiest towns in Britain, on account of its prosperous herring fishery. In 1724 Daniel Defoe was able to say that the town had ‘the finest quay in England, if not in Europe’. Within the town itself, the greatest monument is the Town Wall which ranks amongst the best in the country. It it was built between 1261 and 1400, and much of the wall and some of the towers still survive, one of which now houses a pottery and a museum to the Yarmouth fishing industry.
Admiral Lord Nelson was a Norfolk man, and his monument on South Denes was built in 1819, long before the one in London’s Trafalgar Square.
The Market Place is not only at the heart of the shopping area, but is also amidst a wealth of heritage attractions, including St Nicholas Church - the largest parish church in England - built originally in the 1100’s, and then re-built between 1957 and 1960, after being nearly destroyed during the 1942 bombing. The birthplace of Anna Sewell, author of ‘Black Beauty’, stands aImost next to the church...
Thank goodness this famous church was rebuilt, like the Houses of Parliament in London, according to the original structure. To do otherwise is to guarantee that a building of rich and infinitely complex beauty is replaced by one of soul-shrinking modern plainness and triviality. To look at the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, and then to look at what replaced it, is a very painful experience. The present cathedral could have been designed by Tony Blair's cabinet, so empty and unengaging is it.
Interestingly enough, the scale of St Nicholas Church makes it comparable in size to Wakefield Cathedral in Yorkshire, illustrated here:
