Gill’s 2m x 1m artwork and poem respond to the River Wensum, exploring its winding path and the memories it carries through the city. In her accompanying reflective piece, she describes how slow hours spent walking the riverbank shaped her art, as did Dragon Hall’s historic vantage point — a building close to the water yet turned away from it, glimpsing passing vessels only through a narrow ‘squint hole’.
Together, the poem, artwork and reflection invite viewers to pause and sense the stories that drift through Norwich’s quiet artery.
The River Winding – A Poetic Reflection in the River
Wensum — winding — the river’s name is its nature
It curves like memory, like breath, like time unspooling
Along its banks, the world hushes.
Water threads through reeds,
voices scatter like petals,
and the river speaks in a language older than stone.
Close your eyes.
The ghosts rise — not to haunt, but to hum.
Rigging creaks as stone sails in from France,
wherries glide toward Norwich,
and the Cathedral begins to dream in chiselled rhythm.
Alehouse songs drift on the wind,
mill sails turn like slow thoughts,
and the river carries it all —
the weight of work, the hush of waiting,
the pulse of a city built on water.
The Dragon stands, watching but blind.
No windows face the river.
Only a squint hole — a narrow eye —
offered merchants a glimpse,
a whisper of arrival.
This artwork is a squint hole.
A series of glimpses
Fragments
Ghost-light impressions
Each one partial, suggestive,
like a story half-told, like a river winding through the mind.
Lean in
Look closer
The river remembers.
Gill on her inspiration for the piece
The River Wensum takes its name from the Old English Wendsum meaning ‘winding’. A word that curls and drifts much like the river itself as it threads through Norwich.
This artwork grew from slow hours spent walking its banks: listening to the river’s shifting voices, watching light tremble across its surface, and catching half-heard conversations that seem to drift as easily as the reeds. The whispers of the past…
Pause long enough, and the river begins to reveal its deeper layers. With eyes closed, the murmurs of ‘river ghosts’ rise — stories softened by centuries yet still carried in the current. One can almost hear the creak of rigging as stone from France reached Great Yarmouth, then travelled inland by Wherry; the steady rhythm of hammers shaping the Cathedral’s pale stone; the warm spill of song from the ale houses; the turning sails of mills that once lined the water’s edge.
The Wensum has always been the city’s quiet artery, and its memories move through this creative piece, just as the silt is stirred by a passing oar.
Dragon Hall anchors the work’s historical thread. Raised between 1427 and 1430 by merchant Robert Toppes, the hall stood close to the river yet turned its face away from it. With no windows opening onto the water, merchants waited in a kind of suspended breath for goods arriving from distant shores. Only a single ‘squint hole’ — a narrow, watchful aperture — offered the faintest glimpse of approaching vessels.
This artwork echoes that tension between concealment and revelation. Small, intimate vistas appear like scenes glimpsed through a squint hole: fleeting, suggestive, and rich with imagined histories. Each fragment invites the viewer to lean closer to peer into the partial view, and to sense the layered stories the river carries as it winds through time.
Textures and colour and words and harmony – the River Winding – the lifeblood of the fine city of Norwich.
Between the Lines
What untold stories lie buried in the archives of Norwich’s past? Which voices once echoed along King Street and through the yards surrounding Dragon Hall? What chapters of city life have slipped from memory, waiting to be brought to life again for others to experience and enjoy?
Blending historical research with creative practice, the Story Makers spent 12 weeks exploring archival sources and transforming fragments from the past into imaginative, personal and finely crafted pieces. Here, you are invited to encounter what they found: fragments lifted from washing lines and Victorian dresses; river‑soaked poetry; imagined pub conversations; great floods; and cramped yards lost to time and change. Explore their work in our digital collection.
Story Makers is made possible by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
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