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The yards, courts and passages of the Old North End fishing quarter of King's Lynn housed, for hundreds of years, the teeming population of the Northenders.

This unique and totally enclosed community lived within the shadow of the fishermen's church - St. Nicholas' Chapel. The construction of St Nicholas Chapel, The Fishermen's Chapel as it was commonly known, was begun in 1146, but it was sometime between 1380 and 1420 that a major refurbishment and enlargement took place leaving us with the magnificent building which exists today. With its great west window, stern consistory court and the carved wooden angels in the roof each with arms outstretched and playing instruments, it is the largest and most splendid chapel-of-ease in England.

The Northend had its own shops, smithies, boat-builders, sail makers, chandlers, rope and twine makers, public houses and school. The men, wearing their distinctive Lynn 'ganseys', moleskin trousers, sea boots and caps, fished and lived in the same manner for centuries. Some of the families (still fishing today) can be traced back even earlier than the reign of Queen Elizabeth 1. The women with their long black skirts, shawls and men's caps (sometimes smoking a clay pipe) would spend every spare minute knitting their menfolk's 'ganseys' and making or mending the nets in their tiny living rooms. Times were always hard in the North End.

To the end the Northenders remained a community separate from the rest of the town. They seldom married outside North End, most of the great fishing families intermarried. As always within a fishing community breadwinners were lost at sea, but the orphaned children would be supported and raised by grandparents or other members of the family. The community looked after its own.