The name 'Lynn' may come from the Welsh llyn meaning pool, or from the Anglo-Saxon lean meaning tenure, but either way it points to water. The town grew on a tidal pool of the Great Ouse, just south of where the river spills into The Wash. By the 14th century, Lynn had about 6,000 people, which made it large by the standards of the time, and it was already the chief port for the Hanseatic League's trade with eastern England. The 1475 Hanseatic Warehouse still stands on the riverside - one of only two remaining Hanseatic League buildings in England. Until 1537, the town was called Bishop's Lynn, governed from Norwich. Then Henry VIII took it from the church and renamed it King's Lynn. The name stuck.

On the Purfleet quay, the 1683 Custom House by Henry Bell looks more Dutch than English - a small classical jewel placed where ships once came in to declare their cargo. In front of it stands a statue of George Vancouver, the navigator who was born in this town in 1757 and who later charted the Pacific coast from California to Alaska. His name landed on a Canadian city, a Canadian island, an American city, and the local shopping centre. The town has kept his birthplace claim with quiet insistence ever since. Wander the old quays and the shop fronts give way to brick and pantile warehouses, the kind built when grain from the Fens was barged downriver and shipped out to Amsterdam and Hamburg.

The Saturday Market Place sits at the south end of the old town, anchored by St Margaret's Church - now King's Lynn Minster - whose central tower fell in 1741 and was rebuilt as one of England's earliest Gothic revival projects. Behind it stands the chequered flint-and-stone Trinity Guildhall of 1421, one of England's oldest civic buildings. A short walk away is the St George's Guildhall of 1406, which the University of East Anglia has confirmed is, in all probability, the only working theatre in the world that hosted William Shakespeare. He performed here in 1593. The hall came close to demolition in 1945 but was rescued by Alexander Penrose and given to the National Trust in 1951, when Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother reopened it and launched the King's Lynn Festival.

Walk between markets - Tuesday or Saturday or Friday country produce - and you pass independent shops including one that famously sells only eggs. The town faces the Wash, that fourfold tidal estuary infamous for its dangerous shifting sands. Fishing for brown shrimp and cockles continues today as it has for centuries. From the bus station, the Coastliner 36 runs along the North Norfolk coast, hourly in winter, half-hourly in summer, passing Brancaster, Burnham Market, Wells-next-the-Sea, Cromer. Eleven miles south of town stands Denver windmill, six storeys of grain-grinding machinery built in 1835. Eleven kilometres further, sleepy Shouldham Thorpe has a tiny church largely rebuilt around 1860. Lynn is not the metropolis it once was. But it is still the door to the Fens, the Wash, and the North Norfolk coast - and that doorway is well worth walking through.