title: Walgreens

text: In 2009 Walgreens threatened to leave the Medicaid program, the state and federal partnership to provide health insurance coverage to the poor, in Delaware over reimbursement rates. Walgreens was the largest pharmacy chain in the state and the only chain to make such a threat. The state of Delaware and Walgreens reached an agreement on payment rates and the crisis was averted.


title: Walgreens

text: In 2010 Walgreens stopped accepting Medicaid in Washington state, leaving its one million Medicaid recipients unable to get their prescriptions filled at these 121 stores.


title: Walgreens

text: On April 20, 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that Walgreens agreed to pay $7.9 million in a settlement. The fine related to allegations of violations of the federal Anti-Kickback Statute and the False Claims Act regarding beneficiaries of federal health care programs.


title: Walgreens

text: In January 2019, Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. agreed to pay more than $269 million to settle federal and state lawsuits that accused the corporation of overbilling federal healthcare programs.


title: Walgreens

text: Walgreens was named in a lawsuit by the United Food and Commercial Workers Unions and Employers Midwest Health Benefits Fund in the Northern District Court of Illinois in January 2012. The suit alleged that Walgreens and Par Pharmaceutical violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in "at least two widespread schemes to overcharge" for generic drugs.


title: Walgreens

text: In September 2012, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) accused Walgreens of endangering public safety and barred the company from shipping oxycodone and other controlled drugs from its Jupiter, Florida, distribution center. The DEA said that Walgreens failed to maintain proper controls to ensure it didn't dispense drugs to addicts and drug dealers. The DEA also said that six of Walgreens' Florida pharmacies ordered in excess of a million oxycodone pills a year. In contrast, in 2011 the average pharmacy in the U.S. ordered 73,000 oxycodone tablets a year according to the DEA. One Walgreens pharmacy located in Fort Myers, Florida, ordered 95,800 pills in 2009, but by 2011, this number had jumped to 2.2 million pills in one year. Another example was a Walgreens pharmacy located in Hudson, Florida, a town of 34,000 people near Clearwater, that purchased 2.2 million pills in 2011, the DEA said. Immediate suspension orders are an action taken when the DEA believes a registrant, such as a pharmacy or a doctor, is "an imminent danger to the public safety." All DEA licensees "have an obligation to ensure that medications are getting into the hands of legitimate patients," said Mark Trouville, former DEA special agent in charge of the Miami Field Division. "When they choose to look the other way, patients suffer and drug dealers prosper."


title: Walgreens

text: The Jupiter, Florida, distribution center, which opened in 2001, is one of 12 such distribution centers owned by Walgreens. Since 2009, Walgreens' Jupiter facility has been the largest distributor of oxycodone in the state of Florida, the DEA said. Over the past three years, its market share has increased, and 52 Walgreens are among the top 100 oxycodone purchasers in the state, the DEA said.


title: Walgreens

text: In 2013 United States Attorney Wifredo Ferrer said Walgreens committed "an unprecedented number" of recordkeeping and dispensing violations. Walgreens was fined $80 million, the largest fine in the history of the Controlled Substances Act at that time.


title: Walgreens

text: In November 2021, a federal jury found that Walgreens, along with CVS and Walmart, "had substantially contributed to" the opioid crisis. The trial lasted six weeks with the jury returning a verdict finding the pharmacies liable. It was the first trial where pharmacy companies defended themselves amidst the opioid epidemic.


title: Walgreens

text: In May of 2022, Walgreen's agreed to pay a settlement of $683,000,000 to the state of Florida concerning opioid sales. Walgreens did not admit to wrongdoing as part of the settlement.


title: Walgreens

text: Wisconsin's Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection fined Walgreens over differences between shelf price and scanned price and for signage in 2012. In 2013, Walgreens paid a $29,241 fine.


title: Walgreens

text: The New York State Attorney General announced in April 2016 that a settlement was reached in the complaint that Walgreens used misleading advertising and overcharged consumers. Walgreens would pay $500,000 in penalties, fees and costs, and change advertising and other practices.


title: Walgreens

text: A judge in Kansas City, Missouri, ordered Walgreens to pay a $309,000 fine for pricing discrepancies in 2015.


title: Walgreens

text: In December 2012, a judge ordered Walgreens to pay $16.57 million to settle a lawsuit claiming that over 600 stores were illegally dumping hazardous waste and unlawfully disposing of customer records containing confidential medical information.


title: Walgreens

text: A Santa Clara County Superior Court judge allowed Walgreens to pay $2.25 million in January 2018 to resolve a consumer protection lawsuit brought by Bay Area prosecutors alleging that the company sold expired baby food, infant formula, and over-the-counter drugs. The suit also alleged that Walgreens violated state law by charging more than the lowest posted or advertised price for items.


title: Walgreens

text: In June 2018, a staff pharmacist at a Walgreens in Peoria, Arizona, refused to give a woman medication to end her pregnancy. The medication was prescribed by a doctor after tests revealed that the pregnancy would end in a miscarriage. The woman said she was left "in tears and humiliated". Walgreens responded that its policy "allows pharmacists to step away from filling a prescription for which they have a moral objection".


title: Walgreens

text: In September 2018, Walgreens agreed to pay $34.5 million to settle a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation on charges of misleading investors on financial targets. The SEC alleged that former CEO Greg Wasson and then-CFO Wade Miquelon acted "negligently" in giving financial estimates.


title: Walgreens

text: In January 2019, Walgreens paid $269.2 million for two separate counts of defrauding the federal and 39 state governments in over-billing schemes.


title: Walgreens

text: In February 2020, Walgreens agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle a consumer protection lawsuit accusing the company of placing people's health at risk by permitting an unlicensed person to work as a pharmacist without an adequate background check. This person had handled over 745,000 prescriptions, which included filling over 100,000 prescriptions for controlled substances. The State of California, Alameda County, and Santa Clara County all took part in the investigation. When it was asked by the California Board of Pharmacy during the investigation, Walgreens was unable to furnish a copy of her employment application. Although there are records that the person had attended classes in a university pharmacy program, there are no records that she had completed her degree requirements that would allow her to take the pharmacist licensing exams.


title: Walgreens

text: In March 2021, a class action against Walgreens resulted in a settlement of $4.5 million. Walgreens was accused of wage theft and labor law violations of its employees in California between 2010 and 2017, including that Walgreens "rounded down employees' hours on their timecards, required employees to pass through security checks before and after their shift without compensating them for time worked, and failed to pay premium wages to employees who were denied legally required meal breaks."


title: Walgreens

text: In September 2021, a Walgreens pharmacist in Baltimore, Maryland, accidentally gave a 4-year old girl a full adult dosage of the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine instead of the intended Influenza vaccine. So far, the little girl has not suffered any major side effects. A Walgreens spokesperson said such mistakes are "extremely rare" and that the company's top priority is patient safety.


title: Walgreens

text: A few weeks later, a Walgreens pharmacist in Evansville, Indiana, accidentally gave a 4-year old boy, a 5-year old girl, and their parents a full adult dosage each of the Pfizer vaccine instead of intended flu vaccine. Unlike the Maryland girl, both of the Indiana children immediately got sick enough that the parents took them to a pediatric cardiologist for treatment. At the time of the injections, the FDA had not approve the use of the Pfizer vaccine to children below the age of 12. Although Pfizer was in the process of seeking approval for use in children ages five to 11 with the dosage that would be one third that for an adult, Pfizer had not asked permission to vaccinate children age four or younger. Walgreens refused to comment on the case when requested by news media.


title: Walgreens

text: In August 2022, the state of Tennessee sued Walgreens, alleging that the pharmacy fueled the state's opioid epidemic by failing to maintain effective controls against abuse of the prescription painkiller. The lawsuit claims that Walgreens willfully flooded the market with an oversupply of prescription narcotics in violation of public nuisance and consumer protection laws.


title: Walgreens

text: In August 2022, a federal judge in Cleveland awarded $650 million to Lake County and Trumbull County in a suit that included CVS and Walmart. Lawyers representing the counties said the companies were responsible for $3.3 billion in damages. Two other companies, Rite Aid and Giant Eagle, were also sued by the counties but settled before trial for an undisclosed amount.


title: Walgreens

text: Although milkshakes and malted milk had been around for some time before, Walgreens has claimed credit for the popularization of the malted milkshake (or at least its version of the malted milkshake, invented by Ivar "Pop" Coulson in 1922).


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: The collapse of the World Trade Center occurred during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, after the Twin Towers were struck by two hijacked commercial airliners. One World Trade Center (WTC 1, or the North Tower) was hit at 8:46 a.m. Eastern time and collapsed at 10:28 a.m. Two World Trade Center (WTC 2, or the South Tower) was hit at 9:03 a.m. and collapsed just before 9:59 a.m. The resulting debris severely damaged or destroyed more than a dozen other adjacent and nearby structures, ultimately leading to the collapse of 7 World Trade Center at 5:21 p.m. A total of 2,763 people were killed in the crashes, fires, and subsequent collapses, including 2,192 civilians, 343 firefighters, and 71 law enforcement officers as well as all the passengers and crew on the airplanes, which included 147 civilians and the 10 hijackers.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: In September 2005, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published the results of its investigation into the collapse. The investigators did not find anything substandard in the design of the twin towers, noting that the severity of the attacks was beyond anything experienced in buildings in the past. They determined the fires to be the main cause of the collapses, finding that sagging floors pulled inward on the perimeter columns, causing them to bow and then to buckle. Once the upper section of the building began to move downwards, a total progressive collapse was unavoidable.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: The cleanup of the World Trade Center site involved round-the-clock operations and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Some surrounding structures that were not hit by the airplanes still sustained significant damage, requiring them to be torn down. Demolition of the surrounding damaged buildings continued even as new construction proceeded on the Twin Towers' replacement, the new One World Trade Center, which was opened in November 2014.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: Upon completion in 1973, the Twin Towers were briefly the tallest buildings in the world, and at the time of the terrorist attacks they were still in the top five. One World Trade Center (WTC 1) the "North Tower" was, at , six feet taller than Two World Trade Center (WTC 2) the "South Tower", which stood tall. At the time of the attacks only the then recently completed Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and the Willis Tower (known then as the Sears Tower) in Chicago were taller. Built with a novel design that maximized interior space, the towers had a high strength to weight ratio as they utilized a new "framed tube" design that required 40 percent less steel than more traditional steel framed skyscrapers. In addition, atop WTC 1 stood a telecommunications antenna that was erected in 1978 bringing the total height of that tower to , though as a nonstructural addition, the antenna was not officially counted.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: The towers were designed as framed tube structures, which provided tenants with open floor plans uninterrupted by columns or walls. The buildings were square and on each side but had chamfered corners making the exterior of each building roughly wide. Numerous, closely spaced perimeter columns provided much of the strength to the structure, along with gravity load shared with the steel box columns of the core. Above the tenth floor, there were 59 perimeter columns along each face of the building spaced on center. While the towers were square, the interior cores were rectangular and were supported with 47 columns that ran the full height of each tower. All of the elevators and stairwells were located in the core, leaving a large column-free space between it and the perimeter that was bridged by prefabricated floor trusses. As the core was rectangular this created a long and short span distance to the perimeter columns.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: The floors consisted of lightweight concrete slabs laid on a fluted steel deck. A grid of lightweight bridging trusses and main trusses supported the floors with shear connections to the concrete slab for composite action. The trusses had a span of in the long-span areas and in the short-span area. The trusses connected to the perimeter at alternate columns, and were therefore on centers. The top chords of the trusses were bolted to seats welded to the spandrels on the perimeter side and a channel welded to interior box columns on the core side. The floors were connected to the perimeter spandrel plates with viscoelastic dampers, which helped reduce the amount of sway felt by building occupants.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: The towers also incorporated a "hat truss" or "outrigger truss" located between the 107th and 110th floors, which consisted of six trusses along the long axis of core and four along the short axis. This truss system allowed optimized load redistribution of floor diaphragms between the perimeter and core, with improved performance between the different materials of flexible steel and rigid concrete allowing the moment frames to transfer sway into compression on the core, which also mostly supported the transmission tower. These trusses were installed in each building to support future transmission towers but only the north tower was ultimately fitted with one.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: Though fire studies and even an analysis of the impacts of low speed jet aircraft impacts had been undertaken prior to their completion, the full scope of those studies no longer exists. Nevertheless, since fire had never before caused a skyscraper to collapse and aircraft impacts had been considered in their design, their destruction initially came as a surprise to some in the engineering community.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: The structural engineers working on the World Trade Center considered the possibility that an aircraft could crash into the building. In July 1945, a B-25 bomber that was lost in the fog had crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building. A year later, a C-45F Expeditor crashed into the 40 Wall Street building. Once again, fog was believed to have been the contributing factor in the collision. Leslie Robertson, one of the chief engineers working on the design of the World Trade Center, stated that he considered the scenario of the impact of a Boeing 707, which might be lost in the fog and flying at relatively low speeds while seeking to land at either JFK or Newark Airports. In an interview with the BBC two months after the building collapses, Robertson claimed that, "with the 707, the fuel load was not considered in the design, I don't know how it could have been considered." In the interview, Robertson stated that the main difference between the design studies and the event that ultimately caused the towers to collapse was due to the velocity of the impact, which greatly increased the absorbed energy, and was never considered during the construction process.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: During their investigation into the collapse, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) obtained a three-page white paper that stated the buildings would survive an aircraft-impact of a Boeing 707 or DC 8 flying at . In 1993, John Skilling, lead structural engineer for the WTC, during an interview conducted after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing remarked, "Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed", he said. "The building structure would still be there." In its report, NIST stated that the technical ability to perform a rigorous simulation of aircraft impact and ensuing fires is a recent development, and that the technical capability for such analysis would have been quite limited in the 1960s. In their final report on the collapses, the NIST stated that they could find no documentation that examined the impact of a high speed jet nor that of a large scale fire fueled by aviation fuel.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: Up until the mid 1970s, the use of asbestos for fireproofing was widespread in the construction industry. However, in April 1970, the New York City Department of Air Resources ordered contractors building the World Trade Center to stop the spraying of asbestos as an insulating material.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: According to NIST NCSTAR report, originally in 1969, BLAZE-SHIELD D fireproofing was used, which was a mixture of cement and asbestos fibers. When its use was discontinued, the spraying then proceeded with one of three different sprayed fire-resistive material (SFRM) insulation - BLAZE-SHIELD DC/F, BLAZE-SHIELD II or vermiculite plaster, which was coated on the trusses, perimeter columns, spandrels, and one or more surfaces of the core columns.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: After the 1993 bombing, inspections found fireproofing to be deficient. Prior to the collapses, the owners of the towers, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, were in the process of adding fireproofing, but had only been completed on 18 floors in 1 WTC, including all the floors affected by the aircraft impact and fires, and on 13 floors in 2 WTC, although none were directly affected by the aircraft impact.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: NIST concluded that the aircraft impact removed a significant portion of the fireproofing, contributing to the buildings' collapse. In WTC 1 the impact stripped the insulation off 43 of 47 core columns on more than one floor as well as floor trusses over a space of . In WTC 2 the impact removed insulation from 39 of the 47 columns on multiple floors and from floor trusses spanning an area of .


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: After the collapses, Leslie Robertson stated, "To the best of our knowledge, little was known about the effects of a fire from such an aircraft, and no designs were prepared for that circumstance. Indeed, at that time, no fireproofing systems were available to control the effects of such fires."


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: During the September 11 attacks, four teams of al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four different jetliners. Two of these jetliners, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, both Boeing 767s, were hijacked after takeoff from Boston's Logan International Airport. In its final moments, American Airlines Flight 11 flew south over Manhattan and crashed at roughly into the northern facade of the North Tower (WTC 1) at 8:46 am, impacting on the 93rd through 99th floors. Seventeen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 flew northeast, over New York Harbor, and crashed into the southern facade of the South Tower (WTC 2) at 9:03 am on the 77th through 85th floors at .


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: The impacts failed the exterior columns in the regions hit by the fuselage, engines, and fuel filled wing section (34 in the North Tower and 26 in the South Tower). Damage also extended to the tips of the wings and tailfin. In addition, several core columns were either severed or heavily damaged, especially in the path of the fuselage. About one third of the fuel was consumed in the initial impact and resulting fireball. The fireball from Flight 175's impact was also noticeably larger than the one from Flight 11's despite the former carrying less fuel, possibly because the off-center angle of impact allowed more of the fuel to explode outwards. Some fuel from the impact traveled down at least one elevator shaft and exploded on the 78th floor of the North Tower, as well as in the main lobby. The light construction and hollow nature of the structures allowed the jet fuel to penetrate far inside the towers, igniting many large fires simultaneously over a wide area of the impacted floors. The fuel from the planes burned at most for a few minutes, but the contents of the buildings burned over the next hour or hour and a half. Despite the towers' close proximity to one another, it is unclear whether or not either tower sustained any additional minor damage from the building next to it being struck and the explosion that followed, although it is known that the major debris from Flight 11 flew past the South Tower, while the more significant pieces of wreckage from Flight 175 similarly missed the already-burning North Tower. With both cases, some of these parts landed on other nearby buildings, resulting in further destruction.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: The way in which the planes hit made all the difference in determining which tower would fall sooner. Although the South Tower was the second building to be hit, more of its structural integrity was weakened by the fact that Flight 175 had struck the building faster and much lower down than Flight 11 did into the North Tower. This meant that there was far more structural weight pressing down on the damaged, burning section of the South Tower than there was in the North Tower, with a total of 25 floors above the South Tower's impact zone; by contrast, the North Tower only had 11. Not only did the North Tower collapse second, it did so after burning for 102 minutes, standing nearly twice as long as the South Tower, which only took 56 minutes to give way.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: Almost all the deaths in the Twin Towers occurred in the zones above the points of aircraft impact. As the North Tower had been struck directly midway into the structure, the three stairways in the tower core were all damaged or blocked by debris preventing escape to lower floors. In the South Tower, the impact was slightly off center to the central section of the tower and stairway A in the northwest portion of the central core was only partially blocked, and 14 to 18 civilians managed to escape from the point of aircraft impact and the floors above that. The exact numbers of who perished and where in some cases is not precisely known; however the National Institute of Standards and Technology report indicated that a total of 1,402 civilians perished at or above the impact point in the North Tower with hundreds estimated to have been killed at the moment of impact. In the South Tower, 614 civilians perished at the impacted floors and the floors above that. Fewer than 200 of the civilian fatalities occurred in the floors below the impact points but all 147 civilian passengers and crew on the two aircraft as well as all 10 terrorists perished, along with at least 18 people on the ground and in adjacent structures.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: All told, emergency personnel killed as a result of the collapse included 342 members of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY), 71 law enforcement officers including 23 members of the New York City Police Department (NYPD), 37 members of the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD), five members of the New York State Office of Tax Enforcement (OTE), three officers of the New York State Office of Court Administration (OCA), one fire marshal of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) who had sworn law enforcement powers (and was also among the 343 FDNY members killed), one member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and one member of the United States Secret Service (USSS). The total death toll for civilian and non-civilians is estimated to be 2,606 persons.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: The destruction of the Twin Towers has been called "the most infamous paradigm" of progressive collapse. Precedents include the 1968 Ronan Point collapse and 1973 Skyline Plaza disaster. Each collapse began with the local failure of a few structural components and progressed to encompass the whole of the structure. Such collapses are characterized by "the separation of structural components (including non-load bearing elements), the release of gravitational energy, and the occurrence of impact forces." The vertical impact force supplies the propagating action, the principal forces are parallel, and the primary load transfer is serial. The key element in the structure that failed was constituted by the combined "vertical load-bearing members of one entire storey." Excepting the top floors of the building, which would not have released sufficient gravitational energy to bring about a total collapse, the collapses could have begun with the failure of any story.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: Under these conditions, the towers collapsed symmetrically and more or less straight down, though there was some tilting of the tops of the towers and a significant amount of fallout to the sides. In both cases, the section of the building that had been damaged by the airplanes failed, which allowed the floors above the impact zone to fall freely onto the undamaged structure below. As the collapse progressed, dust and debris could be seen shooting out of the windows several floors below the advancing destruction, caused by the sudden rush of air compressed under the descending upper levels.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: During each collapse, large portions of the perimeter columns and the cores were left without any lateral support, causing them to fall laterally towards the outside, pushed by the increasing pile of rubble. Consequently, the walls peeled off and separated from the buildings by a large distance – about in some cases – hitting neighboring buildings and starting fires that would later lead to the collapse of Building 7. Some connections broke as the bolts snapped, leaving many panels randomly scattered. The first fragments of the outer walls of the collapsed North Tower struck the ground 11 seconds after the collapse started, and parts of the South Tower after 9 seconds. The lower portions of both buildings' cores (60 stories of WTC 1 and 40 stories of WTC 2) remained standing for up to 25 seconds after the start of the initial collapse before they too collapsed.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: Aside from the structural damage, the impacts also removed fireproofing from a large part of the impact zone. As a result, the structural steel heated rapidly. This had a number of results. Core columns were weakened, and also began to shorten due to creep. The hat truss resisted this by shifting a small amount of weight to the perimeter. Meanwhile, web diagonals of the 60 foot trusses supporting the long span tenant floor area began to buckle, causing the floors to sag by more than 2 feet. This pulled in the perimeter wall. Eventually, one entire wall buckled, and the building collapsed.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: WTC1 lasted almost twice as long as WTC2. ￼ This was due to the more symmetrical impact damage to the core, and due to the fires taking more than twice as long to reach the south side of the building which had fireproofing damage.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: When the columns failed, the entire building above fell onto the first intact floor beneath impact. The vertical capacity of the connections supporting an intact floor below the level of collapse was adequate to carry the load of 11 additional floors if the load was applied gradually and 6 additional floors if the load was applied suddenly (as was the case). Since the number of floors above the approximate floor of collapse initiation exceeded six in each WTC tower (12 floors in WTC 1 and 29 floors in WTC 2), the floors below the level of collapse initiation were unable to resist the suddenly applied gravitational load from the upper floors of the buildings.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: From there collapse proceeded through two phases. During the "crush-down" phase, the upper block destroyed the structure below in a progressive series of floor failures roughly one story at a time. Each failure began with the impact of the upper block on the floor plate of the lower section, mediated by a growing layer of rubble consisting mainly of concrete from the floor slabs. The energy from each impact was "reintroduced into the structure in [the] subsequent impact, ... concentrate[d] in the load-bearing elements directly affected by the impact." This overloaded the floor connections of the story immediately beneath the advancing destruction, causing them to detach from the perimeter and core columns. The perimeter columns peeled away and the cores were left without lateral support.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: This continued until the upper block reached the ground and the "crush-up" phase began. Here, it was the columns that buckled one story at a time, now starting from the bottom. As each story failed, the remaining block fell through the height of the story, onto the next one, which it also crushed, until the roof finally hit the ground. The process accelerated throughout, and by the end each story was being crushed in less than a tenth of a second.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: As the fires continued to burn, occupants trapped in the upper floors of the South Tower provided information about conditions to 9-1-1 dispatchers. At 9:37 a.m., an occupant on the 105th floor of the South Tower reported that floors beneath him "in the 90-something floor" had collapsed. The New York City Police Department aviation unit also relayed information about the deteriorating condition of the buildings to police commanders. Only 14 people escaped from the impact zone of the South Tower after it was hit (including Stanley Praimnath, who saw the plane coming at him), and only four from the floors above it. They escaped via Stairwell A, the only stairwell which had been left intact after the impact. Numerous police hotline operators who received calls from individuals inside the South Tower were not well informed of the situation as it rapidly unfolded. Many operators told callers not to descend the tower on their own, even though it is now believed that Stairwell A was most likely passable at and above the point of impact. At 9:52 a.m., the NYPD aviation unit reported over the radio that "large pieces may be falling from the top of WTC 2. Large pieces are hanging up there". With the warnings, the NYPD issued orders for its officers to evacuate. During the emergency response, there was minimal communication between the NYPD and the New York City Fire Department (FDNY), and overwhelmed 9-1-1 dispatchers did not pass along information to FDNY commanders on-scene. At 9:58 a.m., the South Tower collapsed, around 56 minutes after being struck.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: The collapse of the South Tower shattered windows and damaged other exterior elements along the southern and eastern facades of the North Tower, although this was insufficient to contribute to the building's subsequent collapse. After the South Tower fell, NYPD helicopters relayed information about the deteriorating conditions of the North Tower. At 10:20 a.m., the NYPD aviation unit reported that "the top of the tower might be leaning", and a minute later reported that the North Tower, "is buckling on the southwest corner and leaning to the south". At 10:28 a.m., the aviation unit reported that "the roof is going to come down very shortly" and indeed, the North Tower collapsed immediately thereafter, at 10:28 a.m., after burning for 102 minutes.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: After the South Tower collapsed, FDNY commanders issued orders for firefighters in the North Tower to evacuate. Due to radio communications problems, firefighters inside the towers did not hear the evacuation order from their supervisors on the scene, and most were unaware that the other tower had collapsed. 342 firefighters died in the Twin Towers, as a result of the collapse of the buildings. No one was able to escape the North Tower from the impact zone or above, as all stairwells and elevator shafts on those floors were destroyed or blocked. The collapsing towers generated enormous clouds of debris and dust that enveloped lower Manhattan; light dust reached as far as the Empire State Building, located away. The debris cloud from the North Tower collapse was also larger and more widespread than the South Tower's, which would have been the result of dust from the South Tower being kicked up by the collapse of the North.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: As the North Tower collapsed, heavy debris hit 7 World Trade Center, causing damage to the south face of the building and starting fires that continued to burn throughout the afternoon. Structural damage occurred to the southwest corner between Floors 7 and 17 and on the south facade between Floor 44 and the roof; other possible structural damage includes a large vertical gash near the center of the south facade between Floors 24 and 41. The building was equipped with a sprinkler system, but had many single-point vulnerabilities for failure: the sprinkler system required manual initiation of the electrical fire pumps, rather than being a fully automatic system; the floor-level controls had a single connection to the sprinkler water riser; and the sprinkler system required some power for the fire pump to deliver water. Also, water pressure was low, with little or no water to feed sprinklers.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: Some firefighters entered 7 World Trade Center to search the building. They attempted to extinguish small pockets of fire, but low water pressure hindered their efforts. Fires burned into the afternoon on the 11th and 12th floors of 7 World Trade Center, the flames visible on the east side of the building. During the afternoon, fire was also seen on floors 6–10, 13–14, 19–22, and 29–30. In particular, the fires on floors 7 through 9 and 11 through 13 continued to burn out of control during the afternoon. At approximately 2:00 pm, firefighters noticed a bulge in the southwest corner of 7 World Trade Center between the 10th and 13th floors, a sign that the building was unstable and might cave to one side or "collapse". During the afternoon, firefighters also heard creaking sounds coming from the building and issued uncertain reports about damage in the basement. Around 3:30 pm FDNY Chief Daniel A. Nigro decided to halt rescue operations, surface removal, and searches along the surface of the debris near 7 World Trade Center and evacuate the area due to concerns for the safety of personnel. At 5:20:33 pm EDT on September 11, 2001, 7 World Trade Center started to collapse, with the crumble of the east mechanical penthouse, while at 5:21:10 pm EDT the entire building collapsed completely. There were no casualties associated with the collapse.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: When 7 World Trade Center collapsed, debris caused substantial damage and contamination to the Borough of Manhattan Community College's Fiterman Hall building, located adjacent at 30 West Broadway, to the extent that the building was not salvageable. In August 2007, Fiterman Hall was scheduled for dismantling. A revised plan called for demolition in 2009 and completion of the new Fiterman Hall in 2012, at a cost of $325 million. The building was finally demolished in November 2009 and construction of its replacement began on December 1, 2009. The adjacent Verizon Building, an Art Deco building constructed in 1926, had extensive damage to its east facade from the collapse of 7 World Trade Center, though it was successfully restored at a cost of US$1.4 billion.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: Many of the surrounding buildings were also either damaged or destroyed as the towers fell. 5 WTC endured a large fire and a partial collapse of its steel structure and was torn down. Other buildings destroyed include St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, Marriott World Trade Center (Marriott Hotel 3 WTC), South Plaza (4 WTC), and U.S. Customs (6 WTC). The World Financial Center buildings, 90 West Street, and 130 Cedar Street suffered fires. The Deutsche Bank Building, the Verizon Building, and World Financial Center 3 had impact damage from the towers' collapse, as did 90 West Street. One Liberty Plaza survived structurally intact but sustained surface damage including shattered windows. 30 West Broadway was damaged by the collapse of 7 WTC. The Deutsche Bank Building, which was covered in a large black "shroud" after September 11 to cover the building's damage, was deconstructed because of water, mold, and other severe damage caused by the neighboring towers' collapse. Many works of art were destroyed in the collapse.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, numerous structural engineers and experts spoke to the media, describing what they thought caused the towers to collapse. Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a structural engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, explained that the high temperatures in the fires weakened the steel beams and columns, causing them to become "soft and mushy", and eventually they were unable to support the structure above. Astaneh-Asl also suggested that the fireproofing became dislodged during the initial aircraft impacts. He also explained that, once the initial structural failure occurred, progressive collapse of the entire structure was inevitable. César Pelli, who designed the Petronas Towers in Malaysia and the World Financial Center in New York, remarked, "no building is prepared for this kind of stress."


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: On September 13, 2001, Zdeněk P. Bažant, professor of civil engineering and materials science at Northwestern University, circulated a draft paper with results of a simple analysis of the World Trade Center collapse. Bažant suggested that heat from the fires was a key factor, causing steel columns in both the core and the perimeter to weaken and experience deformation before losing their carrying capacity and buckling. Once more than half of the columns on a particular floor buckled, the overhead structure could no longer be supported and complete collapse of the structures occurred. Bažant later published an expanded version of this analysis. Other analyses were conducted by MIT civil engineers Oral Buyukozturk and Franz-Josef Ulm, who also described a collapse mechanism on September 21, 2001. They later contributed to an MIT collection of papers on the WTC collapses edited by Eduardo Kausel called "The Towers Lost and Beyond".


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: Immediately following the collapses, there was some confusion about who had the authority to carry out an official investigation. While there are clear procedures for the investigation of aircraft accidents, no agency had been appointed in advance to investigate building collapses. A team was quickly assembled by the Structural Engineers Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers, led by W. Gene Corley, Senior Vice President of CTLGroup. It also involved the American Institute of Steel Construction, the American Concrete Institute, the National Fire Protection Association, and the Society of Fire Protection Engineers. ASCE ultimately invited FEMA to join the investigation, which was completed under the auspices of the latter.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: The investigation was criticized by some engineers and lawmakers in the U.S. It had little funding, no authority to demand evidence, and limited access to the WTC site. One major point of contention at the time was that the cleanup of the WTC site was resulting in the destruction of the majority of the buildings' steel components. Indeed, when NIST published its final report, it noted "the scarcity of physical evidence" that it had had at its disposal to investigate the collapses. Only a fraction of a percent of the buildings remained for analysis after the cleanup was completed: some 236 individual pieces of steel, although 95% of structural beams and plates and 50% of the reinforcement bars were recovered.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: FEMA published its report in May 2002. While NIST had already announced its intention to investigate the collapses in August of the same year, by September 11, 2002 (a year after the disaster), there was growing public pressure for a more thorough investigation. Congress passed the National Construction Safety Team bill in October 2002, giving NIST the authority to conduct an investigation of the World Trade Center collapses.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: FEMA suggested that fires in conjunction with damage resulting from the aircraft impacts were the key to the collapse of the towers. Thomas Eagar, Professor of Materials Engineering and Engineering Systems at MIT, described the fires as "the most misunderstood part of the WTC collapse". This is because the fires were originally said to have "melted" the floors and columns. Jet fuel is essentially kerosene and would have served mainly to ignite very large, but not unusually hot, hydrocarbon fires. As Eagar said, "The temperature of the fire at the WTC was not unusual, and it was most definitely not capable of melting steel." This led Eagar, FEMA and others to focus on what appeared to be the weakest point of the structures, namely, the points at which the floors were attached to the building frame.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: After the FEMA report had been published, and following pressure from technical experts, industry leaders and families of victims, the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology conducted a three-year, $16 million investigation into the structural failure and progressive collapse of several WTC complex structures. The study included in-house technical expertise, along with assistance from several outside private institutions, including the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Society of Fire Protection Engineers, National Fire Protection Association, American Institute of Steel Construction, Simpson Gumpertz & Heger Inc., Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, and the Structural Engineers Association of New York.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: The scope of the NIST investigation was focused on identifying "the sequence of events" that triggered the collapse, and did not include detailed analysis of the collapse mechanism itself (after the point at which events made the collapse inevitable). In line with the concerns of most engineers, NIST focused on the airplane impacts and the spread and effects of the fires, modeling these using the software program Fire Dynamics Simulator. NIST developed several highly detailed structural models for specific sub-systems such as the floor trusses as well as a global model of the towers as a whole which is less detailed. These models are static or quasi-static, including deformation but not the motion of structural elements after rupture as would dynamic models. So, the NIST models are useful for determining how the collapse was triggered, but do not shed light on events after that point.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: James Quintiere, professor of fire protection engineering at the University of Maryland, called the spoliation of the steel "a gross error" that NIST should have openly criticized. He also noted that the report lacked a timeline and physical evidence to support its conclusions. Some engineers have suggested that understanding of the collapse mechanism could be improved by developing an animated sequence of the collapses based on a global dynamic model, and comparing it with the video evidence of the actual collapses. The NIST report for WTC 7 concluded that no blast sounds were heard on audio and video footage, or were reported by witnesses.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: In May 2002, FEMA issued a report on the collapse based on a preliminary investigation conducted jointly with the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers under leadership of Dr. W. Gene Corley, P.E. FEMA made preliminary findings that the collapse was not primarily caused by actual impact damage from the collapse of 1 WTC and 2 WTC but by fires on multiple stories ignited by debris from the other two towers that continued unabated due to lack of water for sprinklers or manual firefighting. The report did not reach conclusions about the cause of the collapse and called for further investigation.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: In response to FEMA's concerns, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was authorized to lead an investigation into the structural failure and collapse of the World Trade Center twin towers and 7 World Trade Center. The investigation, led by Dr S. Shyam Sunder, drew not only upon in-house technical expertise, but also upon the knowledge of several outside private institutions, including the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers (SEI/ASCE), the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE), the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC), the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), and the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEAoNY).


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: The bulk of the investigation of 7 World Trade Center was delayed until after reports were completed on the collapse of the World Trade Center twin towers. In the meantime, NIST provided a preliminary report about 7 World Trade Center in June 2004, and thereafter released occasional updates on the investigation. According to NIST, the investigation of 7 World Trade Center was delayed for a number of reasons, including that NIST staff who had been working on 7 World Trade Center were assigned full-time from June 2004 to September 2005 to work on the investigation of the collapse of the twin towers. In June 2007, Shyam Sunder explained, "We are proceeding as quickly as possible while rigorously testing and evaluating a wide range of scenarios to reach the most definitive conclusion possible. The 7 WTC investigation is in some respects just as challenging, if not more so, than the study of the towers. However, the current study does benefit greatly from the significant technological advances achieved and lessons learned from our work on the towers."


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: In November 2008, NIST released its final report on the causes of the collapse of 7 World Trade Center. This followed their August 21, 2008 draft report which included a period for public comments. In its investigation, NIST utilized ANSYS to model events leading up to collapse initiation and LS-DYNA models to simulate the global response to the initiating events. NIST determined that diesel fuel did not play an important role, nor did the structural damage from the collapse of the twin towers, nor did the transfer elements (trusses, girders, and cantilever overhangs), but the lack of water to fight the fire was an important factor. The fires burned out of control during the afternoon, causing floor beams near Column 79 to expand and push a key girder off its seat, triggering the floors to fail around column 79 on Floors 8 to 14. With a loss of lateral support across nine floors, Column 79 soon buckled – pulling the East penthouse and nearby columns down with it. With the buckling of these critical columns, the collapse then progressed east-to-west across the core, ultimately overloading the perimeter support, which buckled between Floors 7 and 17, causing the entire building above to fall downward as a single unit. From collapse timing measurements taken from a video of the north face of the building, NIST observed that the building's exterior facade fell at free fall acceleration through a distance of approximately 8 stories (32 meters, or 105 feet), noting "the collapse time was approximately 40 percent longer than that of free fall for the first 18 stories of descent." The fires, fueled by office contents, along with the lack of water, were the key reasons for the collapse.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: The collapse of the old 7 World Trade Center is remarkable because it was the first known instance of a tall building collapsing primarily as a result of uncontrolled fires. Based on its investigation, NIST reiterated several recommendations it had made in its earlier report on the collapse of the twin towers, and urged immediate action on a further recommendation: that fire resistance should be evaluated under the assumption that sprinklers are unavailable; and that the effects of thermal expansion on floor support systems be considered. Recognizing that current building codes are drawn to prevent loss of life rather than building collapse, the main point of NIST's recommendations is that buildings should not collapse from fire even if sprinklers are unavailable.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: In 2003, Asif Usmani, Professor of Structural Engineering at University of Edinburgh, published a paper with two colleagues. They provisionally concluded the fires alone, without any damage from the airplanes, could have been enough to bring down the buildings. In their view, the towers were uniquely vulnerable to the effects of large fires on several floors at the same time. When the NIST report was published, Barbara Lane, with the UK engineering firm Arup, criticized its conclusion that the loss of fire proofing was a necessary factor in causing the collapses; "We have carried out computer simulations which show that the towers would have collapsed after a major fire on three floors at once, even with fireproofing in place and without any damage from plane impact." Jose L. Torero, formerly of the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, pursued further research into the potentially catastrophic effects of fire on real-scale buildings.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: The cleanup was a massive operation coordinated by the City of New York Department of Design and Construction. On September 22, a preliminary cleanup plan was delivered by Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Maryland. Costing hundreds of millions of dollars, it involved round-the-clock operations with many contractors and subcontractors. By early November, with a third of the debris removed, officials began to reduce the number of firefighters and police officers assigned to recovering the remains of victims, in order to prioritize the removal of debris. This caused confrontations with firefighters. Despite efforts to extinguish the blaze, the large pile of debris burned for three months, until the majority of the rubble was finally removed from the site. In 2007, the demolition of the surrounding damaged buildings was still ongoing as new construction proceeded on the World Trade Center's replacement, One World Trade Center.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: The collapse of the World Trade Center produced enormous clouds of dust that covered Manhattan for days. On September 18, 2001, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) assured the public that the air in Manhattan was "safe to breathe". In 2003 the EPA's inspector general found that the agency did not at that time have sufficient data to make such a statement. Dust from the collapse seriously reduced air quality and is likely the cause of many respiratory illnesses in lower Manhattan. Asbestosis is such an illness, and asbestos would have been present in the dust. Significant long term medical and psychological effects have been found among first responders including elevated levels of asthma, sinusitis, gastroesophageal reflux disease and post-traumatic stress disorder.


title: Collapse of the World Trade Center

text: Health effects also extended to residents, students, and office workers of Lower Manhattan and nearby Chinatown. Several deaths have been linked to the toxic dust, and the victims' names will be included in the World Trade Center memorial. More than 18,000 people have suffered from illnesses from the dust.


title: Norwich

text: Norwich () is a cathedral city and district of Norfolk, England, of which it is the county town. Norwich is by the River Wensum, about north-east of London, north of Ipswich and east of Peterborough. As the seat of the See of Norwich, with one of the country's largest medieval cathedrals, it is the largest settlement and has the largest urban area in East Anglia.


title: Norwich

text: The population of the Norwich City Council local authority area was estimated to be 144,000 in 2021, which was an increase from 143,135 in 2019. The wider built-up area had a population of 213,166 in 2019.


title: Norwich

text: Norwich claims to be the most complete medieval city in the United Kingdom. It includes cobbled streets such as Elm Hill, Timber Hill and Tombland; ancient buildings such as St Andrew's Hall; half-timbered houses such as Dragon Hall, The Guildhall and Strangers' Hall; the Art Nouveau of the 1899 Royal Arcade; many medieval lanes; and the winding River Wensum that flows through the city centre towards Norwich Castle.


title: Norwich

text: In May 2012, Norwich was designated England's first UNESCO City of Literature. One of the UK's popular tourist destinations, it was voted by "The Guardian" in 2016 as the "happiest city to work in the UK" and in 2013 as one of the best small cities in the world by "The Times Good University Guide". In 2018, 2019 and 2020, Norwich was voted one of the "Best Places To Live" in the UK by "The Sunday Times".


title: Norwich

text: The capital of the Iceni tribe was a settlement located near to the village of Caistor St Edmund on the River Tas about to the south of modern Norwich. After an uprising led by Boudica in about 60 AD, the Caistor area became the Roman capital of East Anglia named "Venta Icenorum", literally "marketplace of the Iceni". This fell into disuse about 450.


title: Norwich

text: The Anglo-Saxons settled the site of the modern city sometime between the 5th and 7th centuries, founding the towns of "Northwic" ("North Farm"), from which Norwich takes its name, and "Westwic" (at Norwich-over-the-Water) and a lesser settlement at Thorpe. Norwich became settled as a town in the 10th century and then became a prominent centre of East Anglian trade and commerce.


title: Norwich

text: It is possible that three separate early Anglo-Saxon settlements, one north of the river and two either side on the south, joined as they grew; or that a single Anglo-Saxon settlement, north of the river, emerged in the mid-7th century after the abandonment of the previous three. The ancient city was a thriving centre for trade and commerce in East Anglia in 1004 when it was raided and burnt by Swein Forkbeard the Viking king of Denmark. Mercian coins and shards of pottery from the Rhineland dating from the 8th century suggest that long-distance trade was happening long before this. Between 924 and 939, Norwich became fully established as a town, with its own mint. The word "Norvic" appears on coins across Europe minted during this period, in the reign of King Athelstan. The Vikings were a strong cultural influence in Norwich for 40 to 50 years at the end of the 9th century, setting up an Anglo-Scandinavian district near the north end of present-day King Street. At the time of the Norman Conquest, the city was one of the largest in England. The Domesday Book states that it had approximately 25 churches and a population of between 5,000 and 10,000. It also records the site of an Anglo-Saxon church in Tombland, the site of the Saxon market place and the later Norman cathedral. Norwich continued to be a major centre for trade, described officially as the Port of Norwich. Quern stones and other artefacts from Scandinavia and the Rhineland have been found during excavations in Norwich city centre. These date from the 11th century onwards.


title: Norwich

text: Norwich Castle was founded soon after the Norman Conquest. The Domesday Book records that 98 Saxon homes were demolished to make way for the castle. The Normans established a new focus of settlement around the Castle and the area to the west of it: this became known as the "New" or "French" borough, centred on the Normans' own market place, which survives today as Norwich Market, the largest permanent undercover market in Europe.


title: Norwich

text: In 1096, Herbert de Losinga, Bishop of Thetford, began construction of Norwich Cathedral. The chief building material for the Cathedral was limestone, imported from Caen in Normandy. To transport the building stone to the site, a canal was cut from the river (from the site of present-day Pulls Ferry) up to the east wall. Herbert de Losinga then moved his See there, to what became the cathedral church for the Diocese of Norwich. The Bishop of Norwich still signs himself "Norvic". Norwich received a royal charter from Henry II in 1158, and another from Richard "the Lionheart" in 1194. After a riot in the city in 1274, Norwich has the distinction of being the only complete English city to be excommunicated by the Pope.


title: Norwich

text: The first recorded presence of Jews in Norwich is 1134. In 1144, the Jews of Norwich were falsely accused of ritual murder after a boy (William of Norwich) was found dead with stab wounds. William acquired the status of martyr and was subsequently canonised. Pilgrims made offerings to a shrine at the Cathedral (largely finished by 1140) up to the 16th century, but the records suggest there were few of them. In 1174, Norwich was sacked by the Flemings. In February 1190, all the Jews of Norwich were massacred except for a few who found refuge in the castle. At the site of a medieval well, the bones of 17 individuals, including 11 children, were found in 2004 by workers preparing the ground for construction of a Norwich shopping centre. The remains were determined by forensic scientists to be most probably the remains of such murdered Jews, and a DNA expert determined that the victims were all related so that they probably came from one Ashkenazi Jewish family. The study of the remains featured in an episode of the BBC television documentary series "History Cold Case". A research paper from August 30, 2022 confirmed the remains were most likely Ashkenazi Jews. The paper found that many of the victims had certain medical disorders most often seen in Ashkenazi communities, suggesting that a population bottleneck had occurred among Ashkenazim before the 12th century. This challenged traditional views among historians that the bottleneck had happened between the 14th and 16th centuries.


title: Norwich

text: In 1216, the castle fell to Louis, Dauphin of France and Hildebrand's Hospital was founded, followed ten years later by the Franciscan Friary and Dominican Friary. The Great Hospital dates from 1249 and the College of St Mary in the Field from 1250. In 1256, Whitefriars was founded. In 1266 the city was sacked by the "Disinherited". It has the distinction of being the only English city ever to be excommunicated, following a riot between citizens and monks in 1274.


title: Norwich

text: As a penance, St Ethelbert's Gate, one of the entrances to the cathedral priory, was constructed by Norwich citizens. In 1278 the Cathedral received final consecration. In 1290 the city flooded. Austin Friary was founded in that year.


title: Norwich

text: The engine of trade was wool from Norfolk's sheepwalks. Wool made England rich, and the staple port of Norwich "in her state doth stand With towns of high'st regard the fourth of all the land", as Michael Drayton noted in "Poly-Olbion" (1612). The wealth generated by the wool trade throughout the Middle Ages financed the construction of many fine churches, so that Norwich still has more medieval churches than any other city in Western Europe north of the Alps. Throughout this period Norwich established wide-ranging trading links with other parts of Europe, its markets stretching from Scandinavia to Spain and the city housing a Hanseatic warehouse. To organise and control its exports to the Low Countries, Great Yarmouth, as the port for Norwich, was designated one of the staple ports under the terms of the 1353 Statute of the Staple.


title: Norwich

text: From 1280 to 1340 the city walls were built. At around , these walls, along with the river, enclosed a larger area than that of the City of London. However, when the city walls were constructed it was made illegal to build outside them, inhibiting the expansion of the city. Around this time, the city was made a county corporate and became the seat of one of the most densely populated and prosperous counties of England. Part of these walls remains standing today.


title: Norwich

text: Hand-in-hand with the wool industry, this key religious centre experienced a Reformation significantly different from that in other parts of England. The magistracy in Tudor Norwich unusually found ways of managing religious discord whilst maintaining civic harmony.


title: Norwich

text: The summer of 1549 saw an unprecedented rebellion in Norfolk. Unlike popular challenges elsewhere in the Tudor period, it appears to have been Protestant in nature. For several weeks, rebels led by Robert Kett camped outside Norwich on Mousehold Heath and took control of the city on 29 July 1549 with the support of many of its poorer inhabitants. Kett's Rebellion was particularly in response to the enclosure of land by landlords, leaving peasants with nowhere to graze their animals and the general abuses of power by the nobility. The uprising ended on 27 August when the rebels were defeated by an army. Kett was convicted of treason and hanged from the walls of Norwich Castle.


title: Norwich

text: Unusually in England, the rebellion divided the city and appears to have linked Protestantism with the plight of the urban poor. In the case of Norwich, this process was underscored later by the arrival of Dutch and Flemish "Strangers" fleeing persecution from the Catholics and eventually numbering as many as one-third of the city's population. Large numbers of such exiles came to the city, especially Flemish Protestants from the Westkwartier ("Western Quarter"), a region in the Southern Netherlands where the first Calvinist fires of the Dutch Revolt had spread. Inhabitants of Ypres, in particular, chose Norwich above other destinations. Perhaps in response to Kett, Norwich became the first provincial city to initiate compulsory payments for a civic scheme of poor relief, which it has been claimed led to its wider introduction, forming the basis of the later Elizabethan Poor Law of 1597–1598.


title: Norwich

text: Norwich has traditionally been the home of various minorities, notably Flemish and Belgian Walloon communities in the 16th and 17th centuries. The great "stranger" immigration of 1567 brought a substantial Flemish and Walloon community of Protestant weavers to Norwich, where they are said to have been made welcome. The merchant's house which was their earliest base in the city — now a museum — is still known as Strangers' Hall. It seems that the strangers integrated into the local community without much animosity, at least among the business fraternity, who had the most to gain from their skills. Their arrival in Norwich boosted trade with mainland Europe and fostered a movement towards religious reform and radical politics in the city. By contrast, after being persecuted by the Anglican church for his Puritan beliefs, Michael Metcalf, a 17th-century Norwich weaver, fled the city and settled in Dedham, Massachusetts.


title: Norwich

text: The Norwich Canary was first introduced into England by Flemings fleeing from Spanish persecution in the 16th century. Along with their advanced techniques in textile working, they brought pet canaries which they began to breed locally, eventually becoming in the 20th century a mascot of the city and the emblem of its football club, Norwich City F.C.: "The Canaries".


title: Norwich

text: Printing was introduced to the city in 1567 by Anthony de Solempne, one of the strangers, but it did not take root and had died out by about 1572.


title: Norwich

text: Norwich's coat of arms was first recorded in 1562. It is described as: "Gules a Castle triple-towered and domed Argent in base a Lion passant guardant [or Leopard] Or." The castle is supposed to represent Norwich Castle and the lion, taken from the Royal Arms of England, may have been granted by King Edward III.


title: Norwich

text: In the English Civil War, across the Eastern Counties, Oliver Cromwell's powerful Eastern Association was eventually dominant. However, to begin with, there had been a large element of Royalist sympathy within Norwich, which seems to have experienced a continuity of its two-sided political tradition throughout the period. Bishop Matthew Wren was a forceful supporter of Charles I. Nonetheless, Parliamentary recruitment took hold. The strong Royalist party was stifled by a lack of commitment from the aldermen and isolation from Royalist-held regions. Serious inter-factional disturbances culminated in "The Great Blow" of 1648 when Parliamentary forces tried to quell a Royalist riot. The latter's gunpowder was set off by accident in the city centre, causing mayhem. According to Hopper, the explosion "ranks among the largest of the century". Stoutly defended though East Anglia was by the Parliamentary army, there were said to have been pubs in Norwich where the king's health was still drunk and the name of the Protector sung to ribald verse.


title: Norwich

text: At the cost of some discomfort to the Mayor, the moderate Joseph Hall was targeted because of his position as Bishop of Norwich.


title: Norwich

text: Norwich was marked in the period after the Restoration of 1660 and the ensuing century by a golden age of its cloth industry, comparable only to those in the West Country and Yorkshire, but unlike other cloth-manufacturing regions, Norwich weaving brought greater urbanisation, mainly concentrated in the surrounds of the city itself, creating an urban society, with features such as leisure time, alehouses and other public forums of debate and argument.


title: Norwich

text: Norwich in the late 17th century was riven politically. Churchman Humphrey Prideaux described "two factions, Whig and Tory, and both contend for their way with the utmost violence." Nor did the city accept the outcome of the 1688 Glorious Revolution with a unified voice. The pre-eminent citizen, Bishop William Lloyd, would not take the oaths of allegiance to the new monarchs. One report has it that in 1704 the landlord of Fowler's alehouse "with a glass of beer in hand, went down on his knees and drank a health to James the third, wishing the Crowne [sic] well and settled on his head."


title: Norwich

text: Writing of the early 18th century, Pound describes the city's rich cultural life, the winter theatre season, the festivities accompanying the summer assizes, and other popular entertainments. Norwich was the wealthiest town in England, with a sophisticated system of poor relief, and a large influx of foreign refugees. Despite severe outbreaks of plague, the city had a population of almost 30,000. This made Norwich unique in England, although there were some 50 cities of similar size in Europe. In some, like Lyon and Dresden, this was, as in the case of Norwich, linked to an important proto-industry, such as textiles or china pottery, in some, such as Vienna, Madrid and Dublin, to the city's status as an administrative capital, and in some such as Antwerp, Marseilles and Cologne to a position on an important maritime or river trade route.


title: Norwich

text: In 1716, at a play at the "New Inn", the Pretender was cheered and the audience booed and hissed every time King George's name was mentioned. In 1722 supporters of the king were said to be "hiss'd at and curst as they go in the streets," and in 1731 "a Tory mobb, in a great body, went through several parts of this city, in a riotous manner, cursing and abusing such as they knew to be friends of the government." However the Whigs gradually gained control and by the 1720s they had successfully petitioned Parliament to allow all adult males working in the textile industry to take up the freedom, on the correct assumption that they would vote Whig. But it had the effect of boosting the city's popular Jacobitism, says Knights, and contests of the kind described continued in Norwich well into a period in which political stability had been discerned at a national level. The city's Jacobitism perhaps only ended with 1745, well after it had ceased to be a significant movement outside Scotland. Despite the Highlanders reaching Derby and Norwich citizens mustering themselves into an association to protect the city, some Tories refused to join in, and the vestry of St Peter Mancroft resolved that it would not ring its bells to summon the defence. Still, it was the end of the road for Norwich Jacobites, and the Whigs organised a notable celebration after the Battle of Culloden.


title: Norwich

text: The events of this period illustrate how Norwich had a strong tradition of popular protest favouring Church and Stuarts and attached to the street and alehouse. Knights tells how in 1716 the mayoral election had ended in a riot, with both sides throwing "brick-ends and great paving stones" at each other. A renowned Jacobite watering-hole, the "Blue Bell Inn" (nowadays "The Bell Hotel"), owned in the early 18th century by the high-church Helwys family, became the central rendezvous of the Norwich Revolution Society in the 1790s.


title: Norwich

text: Britain's first provincial newspaper, the "Norwich Post", appeared in 1701. By 1726 there were rival Whig and Tory presses, and as early as mid-century, three-quarters of the males in some parishes were literate. The Norwich municipal library claims an excellent collection of these newspapers, also a folio collection of scrapbooks on 18th-century Norwich politics, which Knights says are "valuable and important". Norwich alehouses had 281 clubs and societies meeting in them in 1701, and at least 138 more were formed before 1758. The Theatre Royal opened in 1758, alongside the city's stage productions in inns and puppet shows in rowdy alehouses. In 1750 Norwich could boast nine booksellers and after 1780 a "growing number of circulating and subscription libraries". says: "[All this] made for a lively political culture, in which independence from governmental lines was particularly strong, evident in campaigns against the war with America and for reform... in which trade and the impact of war with Revolutionary France were key ingredients. The open and contestable structure of local government, the press, the clubs and societies, and dissent all ensured that politics overlapped with communities bound by economics, religion, ideology and print in a world in which public opinion could not be ignored."


title: Norwich

text: Amid this metropolitan culture, the city burghers had built a sophisticated political structure. Freemen, who had the right to trade and to vote at elections, numbered about 2,000 in 1690, rising to over 3,300 by the mid-1730s. With growth partly the result of political manipulation, their numbers did at one point reach one-third of the adult male population. This was notoriously the age of "rotten" and "pocket" boroughs and Norwich was unusual in having such a high proportion of its citizens able to vote. "Of the political centres where the Jacobin propaganda had penetrated most deeply only Norwich and Nottingham had a franchise deep enough to allow radicals to make use of the electoral process." "Apart from London, Norwich was probably still the largest of those boroughs which were democratically governed," says , describing other towns under the control of a single fiefdom. In Norwich, he says, a powerful Anglican establishment, symbolised by the Cathedral and the great church of St Peter Mancroft was matched by scarcely less powerful congeries of Dissenters headed by the wealthy literate body [of Unitarians] worshipping at the Octagon Chapel.


title: Norwich

text: In the middle of political disorders of the late 18th century, Norwich intellectual life flourished. Harriet Martineau wrote of the city's "literati" of the period, including such people as William Taylor, one of England's first scholars of German. The city "boasted of her intellectual supper-parties, where, amidst a pedantry which would now make laughter hold both his sides, there was much that was pleasant and salutary: and finally she called herself "The Athens of England"."


title: Norwich

text: Despite Norwich's longstanding industrial prosperity, by the 1790s its wool trade had begun facing intense competition, at first from Yorkshire woollens and then, increasingly, from Lancashire cotton. The effects were aggravated by the loss of continental markets after Britain went to war with France in 1793. The early 19th century saw de-industrialisation accompanied by bitter squabbles. The 1820s were marked by wage cuts and personal recrimination against owners. So amid the rich commercial and cultural heritage of its recent past, Norwich suffered in the 1790s from incipient decline exacerbated by a serious trade recession.


title: Norwich

text: As early in the war as 1793, a major city manufacturer and government supporter, Robert Harvey, complained of low order books, languid trade and doubling of the poor rate. Like many of their Norwich forebears, the hungry poor took their complaints onto the streets. Hayes describes a meeting of 200 people in a Norwich public house, where "Citizen Stanhope" spoke. The gathering "[roared its] applause at Stanhope's declaration that the Ministers unless they changed their policy, deserved to have their heads brought to the block; – and if there was a people still in England, the event might turn out to be so." Hayes says that "the outbreak of war, in bringing the worsted manufacture almost to a standstill and so plunging the mass of the Norwich weavers into sudden distress made it almost inevitable that a crude appeal to working-class resentment should take the place of a temperate process of education which the earliest reformers had intended."


title: Norwich

text: At this period opposition to Pitt's government and their war came – in their case almost unanimously – from a circle of radical Dissenting intellectuals of interest in their own right. They included the Rigby, Taylor, Aitkin, Barbold, and Alderson families – all Unitarians - and some of the Quaker Gurneys (one of whose girls, Elizabeth, was later, under her married name of Fry, to become a noted campaigner for prison reform). Their activities included visits to revolutionary France (before the execution of Louis XVI), the earliest British research into German literature, studies on medical science, petitioning for parliamentary reform, and publishing a highbrow literary magazine called "The Cabinet", in 1795. Their blend of politics, religion and social campaigning was seen by Pitt and Windham as suspicious, prompting Pitt to denounce Norwich as "the Jacobin city". Edmund Burke attacked John Gurney in print for sponsoring anti-war protests. In the 1790s, Norwich was second only to London as an active intellectual centre in England, and that it did not regain that level of prominence until the University of East Anglia was established in the late 20th century.


title: Norwich

text: By 1795, it was not just the Norwich rabble who were causing the government concern. In April of that year, the Norwich Patriotic Society was founded, its manifesto declaring "that the great end of civil society was general happiness; that every individual had a right to share in the government." In December the price of bread reached a new peak, and in May 1796, when William Windham was forced to seek re-election after his appointment as war secretary, he only just held his seat. Amid the disorder and violence that was such a common feature of Norwich election campaigns, it was only by the narrowest margin that the radical Bartlett Gurney ("Peace and Gurney – No More War – No more Barley Bread") failed to unseat him.


title: Norwich

text: Though informed by issues of recent national importance, the bipartisan political culture of Norwich in the 1790s cannot be divorced from local tradition. Two features stand out from a political continuum of three centuries. The first is a dichotomous power balance. From at least the time of the Reformation, Norwich was recorded as a "two-party city". In the mid-16th century, the weaving parishes fell under the control of opposition forces, as Kett's rebels held the north of the river, in support of poor clothworkers. Indeed there seems to be a case for saying that with this tradition of two-sided disputation, the city had steadily developed an infrastructure, evident in its many cultural and institutional networks of politics, religion, society, news media and the arts, whereby argument could be managed short of outright confrontation. Indeed, at a time of hunger and tension on the Norwich streets, with alehouse crowds ready to have "a Minister's head brought to the block", the Anglican and Dissenting clergy exerted themselves to conduct a collegial dialogue, seeking common ground and reinforcing the well-mannered civic tradition of earlier periods.


title: Norwich

text: In 1797 Thomas Bignold, a 36-year-old wine merchant and banker founded the first Norwich Union Society. Some years earlier, when he moved from Kent to Norwich, Bignold had been unable to find anyone willing to insure him against the threat from highwaymen. With the entrepreneurial thought that nothing was impossible, and aware that in a city built largely of wood the threat of fire was uppermost in people's minds, Bignold formed the "Norwich Union Society for the Insurance of Houses, Stock and Merchandise from Fire". The new business, which became known as the Norwich Union Fire Insurance Office, was a "mutual" enterprise. Norwich Union would later become the country's largest insurance giant.


title: Norwich

text: From earliest times, Norwich was a textile centre. In the 1780s the manufacture of Norwich shawls became an important industry and remained so for nearly a hundred years. The shawls were a high-quality fashion product and rivalled those of other towns such as Paisley, which had entered shawl manufacturing in about 1805, some 20 or more years after Norwich. With changes in women's fashion in the later Victorian period, the popularity of shawls declined and eventually manufacture ceased. Examples of Norwich shawls are now sought after by collectors of textiles.


title: Norwich

text: Norwich's geographical isolation was such that until 1845, when a railway link was established, it was often quicker to travel to Amsterdam by boat than to London. The railway was introduced to Norwich by Morton Peto, who also built a line to Great Yarmouth. From 1808 to 1814, Norwich had a station in the shutter telegraph chain that connected the Admiralty in London to its naval ships in the port of Great Yarmouth. A permanent military presence was established in the city with the completion of Britannia Barracks in 1897. The Bethel Street and Cattle Market Street drill halls were built around the same time.


title: Norwich

text: In the early 20th century, Norwich still had several major manufacturing industries. Among them were the large-scale and bespoke manufacture of shoes (for example the Start-rite and Van Dal brands, Bowhill & Elliott and Cheney & Sons Ltd respectively), clothing, joinery (including the cabinet makers and furniture retailer Arthur Brett and Sons, which continues in business in the 21st century), structural engineering, and aircraft design and manufacture. Notable employers included Boulton & Paul, Barnards (iron founders and inventors of machine-produced wire netting), and the electrical engineers Laurence Scott and Electromotors.


title: Norwich

text: Norwich also has a long association with chocolate making, mainly through the local firm of Caley's, which began as a manufacturer and bottler of mineral water and later diversified into chocolate and Christmas crackers. The Caley's cracker-manufacturing business was taken over by Tom Smith in 1953, and the Norwich factory in Salhouse Road closed in 1998. Caley's was acquired by Mackintosh in the 1930s and merged with Rowntree's in 1969 to become Rowntree-Mackintosh. Finally, it was bought by Nestlé and closed in 1996, with all operations moving to York after a Norwich association of 120 years. The demolished factory stood where the Chapelfield development is now. Caley's chocolate has since reappeared as a brand in the city, though it is no longer made there.


title: Norwich

text: HMSO, once the official publishing and stationery arm of the British government and one of the largest print buyers, printers and suppliers of office equipment in the UK, moved most of its operations from London to Norwich in the 1970s. It occupied the purpose-built 1968 Sovereign House building, near Anglia Square, which in 2017 stood empty and due for demolition if a long-postponed redevelopment of Anglia Square went ahead.


title: Norwich

text: Jarrolds, established in 1810, was a nationally well-known printer and publisher. In 2004, after nearly 200 years, the printing and publishing businesses were sold. Today, the company remains privately owned and the Jarrold name is best recognised as being that of Norwich's only independent department store. The company is also active in property development in Norwich and has a business training division.


title: Norwich

text: The city had a long tradition of brewing. Several large breweries continued into the second half of the 20th century, notably Morgans, Steward & Patteson, Youngs Crawshay and Youngs, Bullard and Son, and the Norwich Brewery. Despite takeovers and consolidation in the 1950s and 1960s, only the Norwich Brewery (owned by Watney Mann and on the site of Morgans) remained by the 1970s. That too closed in 1985 and was then demolished. Only microbreweries remain today.


title: Norwich

text: It was stated by Walter Wicks in his book that Norwich once had "a pub for every day of the year and a church for every Sunday". This was in fact significantly under the actual amount: the highest number of pubs in the city was in the year 1870, with over 780 beer-houses. The Licensing Act of 1872 had several detrimental effects for landlords and customers, with the total pub numbers dropping to 634. A "Drink Map" produced in 1892 by the Norwich and Norfolk Gospel Temperance Union showed 631 pubs in and around the city centre. By 1900, the number had dropped to 441 pubs within the City Walls. The title of a pub for every day of the year survived until 1966, when the Chief Constable informed the Licensing Justices that only 355 licences were still operative, with the number still shrinking: over 25 had closed in the last decade. In 2018, about 100 pubs remained open around the city centre.


title: Norwich

text: Norwich suffered extensive bomb damage during World War II, affecting large parts of the old city centre and Victorian terrace housing around the centre. Industry and the rail infrastructure also suffered. The heaviest raids occurred on the nights of 27/28 and 29/30 April 1942; as part of the Baedeker raids (so-called because Baedeker's series of tourist guides to the British Isles were used to select propaganda-rich targets of cultural and historic significance rather than strategic importance). Lord Haw-Haw made reference to the imminent destruction of Norwich's new City Hall (completed in 1938), although in the event it survived unscathed. Significant targets hit included the Morgan's Brewery building, Colman's Wincarnis works, City Station, the Mackintosh chocolate factory, and shopping areas including St Stephen's St and St Benedict's St, the site of Bond's department store (now John Lewis) and Curl's (later Debenhams) department store.


title: Norwich

text: 229 citizens were killed in the two Baedeker raids with 1,000 others injured, and 340 by bombing throughout the war — giving Norwich the highest air raid casualties in Eastern England. Out of the 35,000 domestic dwellings in Norwich, 2,000 were destroyed, and another 27,000 suffered some damage. In 1945 the city was also the intended target of a brief V-2 rocket campaign, though all these missed the city itself.


title: Norwich

text: As the war ended, the city council revealed what it had been working on before the war. It was published as a book – "The City of Norwich Plan 1945" or commonly known as "The '45 Plan" – a grandiose scheme of massive redevelopment which never properly materialised. However, throughout the 1960s to early 1970, the city was completely altered and large areas of Norwich were cleared to make way for modern redevelopment.


title: Norwich

text: In 1960, the inner-city district of Richmond, between Ber Street and King Street, locally known as "the Village on the Hill", was condemned as slums and many residents were forced to leave by compulsory purchase orders on the old terraces and lanes. The whole borough demolished consisted of some 56 acres of existing streets, including 833 dwellings (612 classed as unfit for human habitation), 42 shops, four offices, 22 public houses and two schools. Communities were moved to high-rise buildings such as Normandie Tower and new housing estates such as Tuckswood, which were being built at the time. A new road, Rouen Road, was developed instead, consisting mainly of light industrial units and council flats. Ber Street, a once historic main road into the city, had its whole eastern side demolished. About this time, the final part of St Peters Street, opposite St Peter Mancroft Church, were demolished along with large Georgian townhouses at the top of Bethel Street, to make way for the new City Library in 1961. This burnt down on 1 August 1994 and was replaced in 2001 by The Forum.


title: Norwich

text: A controversial plan was implemented for Norwich's inner ring-road in the late 1960s. In 1931, the city architect Robert Atkinson, referring to the City Wall, remarked that "in almost every position are slum dwellings put up during the last 50 years. It would be a great adventure to clear them all out and open up the road following the wall which has always been a natural highway. Do this, and you will have a wonderful circulating boulevard all around the city and its cost would be comparatively nothing." To accommodate the road, many more buildings were demolished, including an ancient road junction – Stump Cross. Magdalen Street, Botolph Street, St George's Street, Calvert Street and notably Pitt Street, all lined with Tudor and Georgian buildings, were cleared to make way for a fly-over and a Brutalist concrete shopping centre – Anglia Square – as well as office blocks such as an HMSO building, Sovereign House. Other areas affected were Grapes Hill, a once narrow lane lined with 19th-century Georgian cottages, which was cleared and widened into a dual carriageway leading to a roundabout. Shortly before construction of the roundabout, the city's old Drill Hall was demolished, along with sections of the original city wall and other large townhouses along the start of Unthank Road (named after the Unthank family, local landowners). The roundabout also required the north-west corner of Chapelfield Gardens to be demolished. About a mile of Georgian and Victorian terrace houses along Chapelfield Road and Queens Road, including many houses built into the city walls, was bulldozed in 1964. This included the surrounding district off Vauxhall Street, consisting of swathes of terrace housing that were condemned as slums. This also included the whole West Pottergate district, which contained a mix of 18th and 19th-century cottages and terraced housing, pubs and shops. Post-war housing and maisonettes flats now stand where the Rookery slums once did. Some aspects of The '45 Plan were put into action, which saw large three-story Edwardian houses in Grove Avenue and Grove Road, and other large properties on Southwell Road, demolished in 1962 to make way for flat-roofed single-story style maisonettes that still stand today. Heigham Hall, a large Victorian manor house off Old Palace Road was also demolished in 1963, to build Dolphin Grove flats, which housed many Norwich families displaced by slum clearance.


title: Norwich

text: Other housing developments in the private and public sector took place after the Second World War, partly to accommodate the growing population of the city and to replace condemned and bomb-damaged areas, such as the Heigham Grove district between Barn Road and Old Palace Road, where some 200 terraced houses, shops and pubs were all flattened. Only St Barnabas church and one public house, The West End Retreat, now remain. Another central street bulldozed during the 1960s was St Stephens Street. It was widened, clearing away many historically significant buildings in the process, firstly for Norwich Union's new office blocks and shortly after with new buildings, after it suffered damage during the Baedeker raids. In Surrey Street, several grand six-storey Georgian townhouses were demolished to make way for Norwich Union's office. Other notable buildings that were lost were three theatres (the Norwich Hippodrome on St Giles Street, which is now a multi-storey car park, the Grosvenor Rooms and Electric Theatre in Prince of Wales Road) The Norwich Corn Exchange in Exchange Street (built 1861, demolished 1964), the Free Library in Duke Street (built 1857, demolished 1963) and the Great Eastern Hotel, which faced Norwich Station. Two large churches, the Chapel Field East Congregational church (built 1858, demolished 1972) was pulled down, as well as the 100-foot tall Presbyterian church in Theatre Street, built in 1874 and designed by local architect Edward Boardman. It has been said that more of Norwich's architecture was destroyed by the council in post-war redevelopment schemes than during the Second World War.


title: Norwich

text: In 1976 the city's pioneering spirit was on show when Motum Road in Norwich, allegedly the scene of "a number of accidents over the years", became the third road in Britain to be equipped with sleeping policemen, intended to encourage adherence to the road's speed limit. The bumps, installed at intervals of 50 and 150 yards, stretched 12 feet across the width of the road and their curved profile was, at its highest point, high. The responsible quango gave an assurance that the experimental devices would be removed not more than one year after installation.


title: Norwich

text: From 1980 to 1985 the city became a frequent focus of national media due to squatting in Argyle Street, a Victorian street that was demolished in 1986, despite being the last street to survive the Richmond Hill redevelopment. On 23 November 1981, a minor F0/T1 tornado struck Norwich as part of a record-breaking nationwide tornado outbreak, causing minor damage in Norwich city centre and surrounding suburbs.


title: Norwich

text: Norwich has been governed by two tiers of local government since the implementation of the Local Government Act 1972. Norfolk County Council manages services such as schools, social services and libraries across Norfolk. Norwich City Council manages services such as housing, planning, leisure and tourism.


title: Norwich

text: Norwich elects 13 county councillors to the 84-member county council. The city is divided into single-member electoral divisions, with county councillors elected every four years. Norwich City Council consists of 39 councillors elected to 13 wards. Each year (except in the year of county council elections) one councillor in every ward is elected for a four-year term. Ward boundary changes caused all 39 seats to be contested in the 2019 Norwich City Council election. Since the 2019 election, the distribution of seats is Labour 27, Green Party 9, and Liberal Democrats 3, with Labour retaining overall control.


title: Norwich

text: The ceremonial head of the city is the Lord Mayor; though now simply a ceremonial position, in the past the office carried considerable authority, with executive powers over the finances and affairs of the city council. The office of Mayor of Norwich dates from 1403 and was raised to the dignity of lord mayor in 1910 by Edward VII "in view of the position occupied by that city as the chief city of East Anglia and of its close association with His Majesty". The title was regranted on local government reorganisation in 1974. From 1404 the citizens of Norwich, as a county corporate, had the privilege of electing two sheriffs. Under the Municipal Corporations Act 1835 this was reduced to one and became a ceremonial post. Both Lord Mayor and Sheriff are elected for a year's term of office at the council's annual meeting, but the term of office was temporarily extended to two years for the periods 2019-2021 and 2021-2023, the normal annual elections having been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic in the years 2020-2022.


title: Norwich

text: In October 2006, the Department for Communities and Local Government produced a Local Government White Paper inviting councils to submit proposals for unitary restructuring. Norwich submitted its proposal in January 2007, which was rejected in December 2007, as it did not meet all the rigorous criteria for acceptance. In February 2008, the Boundary Committee for England, was asked to consider alternative proposals for the whole or part of Norfolk, including whether Norwich should become a unitary authority, separate from Norfolk County Council. In December 2009, the Boundary Committee recommended a single unitary authority covering all Norfolk including Norwich.


title: Norwich

text: However, it was announced in February 2010 that despite a December 2009 recommendation of the Boundary Committee, Norwich would gain separate unitary status. The proposal was resisted notably by Norfolk County Council and the Conservative opposition in Parliament. Reacting to the announcement, Norfolk County Council said it would look to challenge the decision in the courts. A letter was leaked to the local media, in which the Permanent Secretary for the Department for Communities and Local Government noted that the decision did not meet all the criteria and that the risk of it "being successfully challenged in judicial review proceedings is very high." The Shadow Local Government and Planning Minister, Bob Neill, stated that if the Conservative Party won the 2010 general election, it would reverse the decision.


title: Norwich

text: After the 2010 general election, Eric Pickles was appointed Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government in a Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government. There were press reports that he instructed his department to take urgent steps to reverse the decision and maintain the status quo in line with the Conservative Party manifesto. However, the unitary plans were backed by the Liberal Democrat group on the city council and by Simon Wright, Liberal Democrat MP for Norwich South, who would lobby the party leadership to allow the changes to go ahead.


title: Norwich

text: The Local Government Act 2010 to reverse the unitary decision for Norwich (and Exeter and Suffolk) received Royal Assent in December 2010. The disputed award of unitary status had meanwhile been referred to the High Court, which ruled it unlawful and revoked it in June 2010; the city failed to attain unitary status.


title: Norwich

text: Since 1298 Norwich has returned two members of Parliament to the House of Commons. Until 1950 the city was an undivided constituency, returning two MPs. Since that date, the area has been two single-member constituencies: Norwich North and Norwich South. Both proved to be marginal seats in recent elections until 2010, switching between the Labour and Conservative parties.