The Pre-Industrial Lowestoft Fish Office: Reading Socio-Political Events Through a Vernacular Building

Abstract

In December 2019, no. 329 Whapload Road — an unassuming brick, flint and cobble building facing the North Sea across Lowestoft’s former beach area — was added to the National Heritage List for England and afforded Grade II statutory protection. Previously believed to be a nineteenth-century net store, a ubiquitous structure along Whapload Road, the detailed multi-disciplinary research which underpins this article has challenged the existing interpretation of these buildings, revealing no. 329 Whapload Road to be a multi-function, multi-phase fish-processing building known locally as a ‘fish office’. This article will argue that the extant and lost buildings at the northern end of Whapload Road represent a specific and previously uncategorised building type: the pre-industrial Lowestoft fish office, of which no. 329 is the sole complete survivor. Moreover, the article will show that the building type represents a specific local response to the significant regional, national and international socio-political and economic events of the mid to late seventeenth century which preceded two centuries of unchecked expansion by the British herring fishery. The detailed analysis of a complete pre-industrial fish office, as presented here, set within its historical and landscape context, serves as a case study, broadening our understanding of the evolution of buildings associated with the eighteenth-century east coast herring fishery and how those buildings were shaped by dramatic local events, by local vernacular traditions and by the development of processes associated with the production of red herring.