Great Yarmouth grew up on a spit of sand between the River Yare and the North Sea. Space was tight, ground was precious, and so the medieval town developed a pattern unlike any other in England: three long parallel streets running north to south, with the Rows crossing them at right angles. There were once 145 Rows in all, numbered rather than named. They were narrow even by medieval standards - some scarcely wide enough for two people to pass - and they were lined with houses that ran in long thin strips back from each main street, so that wealthy merchants and poor labourers lived alongside each other in different rooms of what had once been single grand homes.

The surviving Row Houses on South Quay were not built as the tenements they became. They began as merchants' residences - sizeable buildings that one wealthy family occupied entirely. Over the centuries, as the town's fortunes shifted and the herring trade fluctuated, the houses were sub-divided. Walls went up where there had been none; staircases were added so that separate families could reach separate floors; windows were closed off or punched through. By the early twentieth century the merchant houses had become tenements, with multiple families sharing space that had once accommodated one. The two surviving examples are preserved at different stages of this story - one closer to its original merchant grandeur, the other showing the marks of generations of sub-division.

The German Luftwaffe bombed Great Yarmouth heavily during the Second World War. The town was the last significant target German aircraft could reach before turning home across the North Sea, and it took the punishment that geography assigned it. Many Rows were destroyed outright; others were so damaged that the bombsites became part of the post-war landscape for years. When peace came, planners looked at the remaining medieval fabric and saw, in many cases, slums to be cleared. Post-war demolition finished what the bombs had begun. The Rows shrank from 145 to a handful. The surviving South Quay houses were saved because their merchant ancestry was clearly visible beneath the tenement modifications - their preservation was a deliberate choice.

English Heritage manages the Row Houses today, alongside the nearby Greyfriars Cloisters - another rare survival from medieval Yarmouth. Step inside and the rooms speak in layers: 17th-century panelling under 19th-century wallpaper, original fireplaces fitted with Victorian grates, staircases inserted into spaces that were never meant to hold them. The houses are intentionally not restored to a single moment. Instead they preserve the story of their own changing fortunes - from prosperous merchant home to crowded working tenement, from wartime survival to twentieth-century preservation. Outside, where there were once 145 Rows, the town has rebuilt itself in different patterns. The South Quay houses remain among the very few places where you can stand in a Yarmouth Row as it actually was.