Just because you’re from Norfolk doesn’t automatically mean you’re inbred

We don’t all have webbed feet


There’s no escaping stereotypes and when it comes to the UK and Norfolk takes a bit of a battering. It might have a quaint coastline, royal estate and historic towns, but people from the county tend to be viewed as backward and generally just a laughing stock. Inbred and weirdo farmers is the main caricature, except none of us have loads of extra fingers and it really is time to give us a break.

Tell someone at university that you are from Norfolk, and apart from wondering where the hell that is, you’ll be ridiculed for coming from a county notorious for being an inbreeding haven. Shagging our relatives is seen as common practice. ‘Naarwich’ is the capital of the webbed-footed tribes, and beastiality is another one of our weekly hobbies.

So imagine the shock on someone’s face after they have been told that not every Norfolker is some sort of part-human, part-duck specimen, but actually functions as a normal human-being who can know people outside of their immediate family network. Unbelievably, people live in separate houses. Lo and behold, people from Norfolk also leave the county from time to time.

Not inbred

Fair enough, it’s a pain in the arse to get to, the roads feel prehistoric and you’ll probably be stuck behind a tractor all the way there.  There’s also a sizeable amount of farms and enough pension homes to conduct a Bingo World Championship, so it’s easy to see where these stereotypes popped up from.

Comedians mostly make jokes about the Norfolkian people being ignored by the rest of the country and the gibbering dialect too. Jimmy Carr even once remarked: “If you tell a girl you like her, but she says ‘I love you more like a brother’, suggest a weekend in Norfolk” – cue rolling of the eyes.

Norwich, despite having a population of around 200,000 compared to 551,000 in Sheffield, does has a night life and the University of East Anglia (UEA) is not an imaginary place. Young people can be found there. Norwich’s main clubbing hot spot, Prince of Wales Street, even came out as fourth on a list of 50 places across England for requiring drinkers to go to hospital after a night out. Whilst not exactly something to brag about, Norwich’s night life is similar to other cities in the sense that people actually go out and enjoy themselves. A social life is possible in Norfolk, since we are not constantly having domestic orgies and attending to the poultry after all.

While the accents aren’t exactly southern or northern, they’re unique and people should really start listening harder.

Whilst taking great pride in being ‘Nelson’s County’, as well as being home to the largest concentration of medieval churches in the world (659, if you were bursting to know) it hardly adds to the positive perception of Norfolk. It is a place that I am proud to call home. Colman’s Mustard, Stephen Fry, Cromer Crabs – what’s not to love? Attachment to where you grow up is obvious and I am being horrendously biased here, but I would say that ‘bootiful Narfalk’ is a really fine place.

For any fellow ‘inbreds’ out there, embrace the fact that you are from the remote depths of the East. Oh, and a bit of advice, probably best not to make your social media profile picture one of you and your sibling.