In 1878 a Norwich saddler named John Loynes brought his small boat-hire business to Wroxham, eight miles northeast of the city, where the River Bure looped past a bridge and widened into Wroxham Broad. He had no way to know he was inventing an industry. Within a generation, the East Norfolk Railway had reached the village, holidaymakers were stepping off trains to step onto wherries, and the British inland boating holiday had been born here. Today the village - or really the twin villages of Wroxham and Hoveton, split by the river - claims the title Capital of the Broads. The claim is contested. So is the geography. Most of the things people call 'Wroxham' are actually across the bridge in Hoveton.
Wroxham Bridge is the second most difficult bridge to navigate on the entire Broads system, after Potter Heigham. It is low, the arch is narrow, the current does interesting things underneath, and a pilot station sits on the Hoveton side offering to take your boat through for twelve pounds each way. The current stone-and-brick bridge dates from 1619, replacing a 1576 bridge that replaced something probably wooden before that. Generations of hire-boat skippers have learned the same lesson the same way: misjudge the bridge, lose your aerial. Or worse. On busy summer afternoons the queue of boats on either side gives the village a peculiar maritime traffic jam, somewhere between Venice and the M25.
About a mile downstream from the bridge, the Bure opens into Wroxham Broad - 34 hectares of shallow water, average depth a metre and a third, home to the Norfolk Broads Yacht Club. Sailing dinghies criss-cross the broad in summer, racing weeks fill the calendar, and the racing line through the two channels between broad and river is well understood by locals and routinely misjudged by visitors. An island in the middle was restored between 2000 and 2005 to reverse erosion damage; sedge and reed regrew, and by 2005 kingfishers and Cetti's warblers were nesting again. In 2004, while dredging the project, volunteers turned up an unexploded Second World War hand grenade. The army bomb disposal team took care of it.
Near Wroxham Bridge - technically on the Hoveton side, like much of 'Wroxham' - stands Roys of Wroxham, founded in 1899 and self-described since the 1930s as the world's largest village store. It started as a small grocery and now occupies a sprawl of buildings on both sides of the road: department store, supermarket, garden centre, hardware, toys, food hall. The Roy family still owns much of the commercial property around the bridge. The accolade 'world's largest village store' is the kind of small-print English claim that depends on what counts as a village. Wroxham parish has fewer than 1,600 people. Roys takes the corresponding pride.
Above the river on a steep slope stands the parish church of St Mary the Virgin, a Norman foundation with a twelfth-century south doorway that the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described as 'barbaric and glorious' - rare praise from a man trained to measure his words. The doorway is stained blue, ornamented with seven orders of carved arches and three pairs of shafts. Inside the churchyard is the Trafford Mausoleum, built in 1831 by Anthony Salvin in a mediaeval style two centuries out of date. The local manor house nearby shows Dutch influence in its stepped gables - East Anglia's old trade routes to the Low Countries left their mark on the bricks.
Wroxham and Hoveton have grown into each other across the river. Most local commercial activity sits in Hoveton, including Roys, the post office, the Hotel Wroxham, and the railway station - confusingly called Hoveton & Wroxham, formerly just Wroxham, on the Bittern Line from Norwich to Sheringham. The Bure Valley Railway, a narrow-gauge heritage line, runs nine miles from Wroxham to Aylsham, the longest of Norfolk's sub-standard-gauge railways. Add Barton House Railway, a passenger-carrying miniature steam line in a riverside garden, and the area carries a railway heritage almost out of proportion to its size. The boats, though, remain the main business. They always have.
Wroxham lies at 52.706°N, 1.412°E in the middle Bure valley, about 8 miles northeast of Norwich. Best viewed at 1,500-3,000 ft AGL to see Wroxham Broad opening off the river south of the village. Norwich International (EGSH) is 7 nm southwest. The Bure makes a distinctive S-curve through Wroxham, with the broad off to the southeast - a clear visual landmark. The clusters of hire-boat moorings line the river banks in summer.