ABOUT NORDELPH

Our village is a small (170 dwellings) community in the west of the county of Norfolk in the UK. It can be found in the peaty-soiled low-lying

area known as the Fens. For those who like precision (or who have access to Google Earth), it may be found at 52° 35' N and 00°17' E -- placing it close to the Greenwich meridian, but just into the Eastern hemisphere by a whisker.



The village straddles two transport arteries: the main road between Downham Market, the local market town 4 miles to the East and Wisbech, just into the neighbouring county of Cambridgeshire and self-styled 'Capital of the Fens', 8 miles to the West, and Well Creek, a man-made

waterway, now used solely for leisure traffic, but linking the extensive inland waterways of the Midlands with those of the Fens.

Historically, this has been an agricultural community. The peat is a rich medium for the fruit and vegetables for which the area is famous, and which are catalogued in our website. But with the increasing mechanisation and industrialisation of farming, it has ceased to be a sustainable community. What has been lost over time -- the shops, businesses, community activities -- are chronicled in the feature Forgotten Village on this website, but if you wish to postpone your look at that page until you have absorbed this text, our 'Quick Tour' feature accessed through the button to the right of the heading will lead you through the pages that tell our story.

Our website celebrates the history and culture of the area, and its division into three main sections -- Nordelph Past, Present and Future (Web Matters is largely 'small print' and contact details) -- reflects not only our concerns, but also the history of the website itself. It didn't begin as a reflective website chronicling community affairs, instead it was the spearhead of a campaign to avoid being overlooked.

In 2004, British Telecom announced that it was abandoning its hitherto piecemeal approach to upgrading UK telecommunications to accommodate high-speed Broadband, and declared that over the next few years, all telephone exchanges would be enabled -- except for a few that served communities deemed too small to warrant the investment. Nordelph was one of those, and they were not happy!

Under the slogan 'The Village that is too small for Broadband', we nagged, shouted, pressured and made ourselves a nuisance. The fight -- and its eventual success -- are documented on this website too, along with a growing series of pages about how we make use of technology. TV and radio reception is also poor in the Fens!

But Broadband came, and one spin-off benefit is that it allows us to post more ambitious material on this website. A recent addition to this catalogue is the opportunity to drive through Nordelph vicariously, via our video snapshots of the village.

But this is not the only way to explore our community and our website. The 'Quick Tour' button below will take you on a journey through some ten pages of the site, giving you a sample of what's there. The same button appears on each page you wisit, and will take you from page to page until you end up with our 'comments and contact' form.

QUICK TOUR

You don't have to use the button -- you can follow any link that catches your interest on the page or in the index frames to the left, or you can change sections by clicking on the tabs above.