Norwich is an ancient English city in the county of Norfolk in East Anglia. Its attractions include medieval churches, a Norman cathedral, defensive walls linking 13th-century gateways and watchtowers, a warren of narrow shopping streets, cobbled lanes lined with merchants’ houses dating back to 15th-century Tudor times, elegant town houses built in the 17th and 18th centuries, a covered market that has attracted traders since the 11th century, and a 900-year-old castle that is today home to Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery.
The 11th-century castle, once a royal fortress and later a prison, became the home of Norwich Museum in 1894 and houses the city’s collections of fine art, costumes, textiles, jewellery, silver, glass wares, ceramics and, since 1989, a collection of almost 3,000 British teapots, many of which are displayed in the Museum’s Twining Teapot Gallery. This is probably the largest collection of English ceramic teapots in the world and was acquired by the Castle Museum from two teapot collectors. Colonel Edward Bulwer and his wife started collecting teapots when Bulwer inherited more than 100 pots from his father in 1910 and, as the collection grew, the Colonel designed and built a teapot room at his home in Norfolk. In 1946, the Bulwars presented their entire collection of almost 600 pots, manufactured between 1700 and 1780, to Norwich Castle Museum. This already large number of ceramic pots was augmented in 1989 when the museum purchased an additional 2,000 or so English ceramic pots from Patricia and Philip Miller, whose collection dates from 1780 to the
