Martham

The Green and Its Food Stops

The green at Martham is not a tidy oblong of grass but a wide open space edged by houses, shops and pubs, with the road running around it. Most of what you will need during a stay sits on it or just off it.

JC's Bistro, at number 7, does breakfasts, cakes and coffee. Taylors, at 53, is a family fish-and-chip shop. Royal China cooks Pekinese food a few doors along, and Martham Kebab & Pizza covers the late end of the evening. One of the two East of England Co-op stores stands on the green and keeps the Post Office; the other is on Repps Road and stocks a range of locally sourced produce.

The King's Arms has held its place at 15 The Green for more than two hundred years. A letting advertisement for it ran in the Norfolk Chronicle in September 1793. Inside there is a sports bar with a pool table and jukebox, a quieter lounge, a dining room, and a garden at the back.

The Victoria and St Mary the Virgin

The Victoria Inn, over on Repps Road, reopened for the summer of 2025. One recent visitor called it "a very friendly local pub where the locals go," which is roughly the whole of its ambition.

Above the houses stands the church of St Mary the Virgin, known locally as the Cathedral of the Fleggs. It is Grade I listed: a later-fourteenth-century west tower, a nave and aisles from the middle of the fifteenth, and a chancel that was pulled down and rebuilt in 1855–61.

Church Treasures and the Broad

Inside are a hammerbeam roof with carved angels at the ends of the beams, a wrought-iron rood screen, and an octagonal font carved with the Seven Sacraments, its eighth panel given over to the Last Judgement. Set in the floor is a 1487 heart brass to Robert Alen. The man who designed the original chancel, Robert Everard, also designed the spire of Norwich Cathedral. When the ground was opened in 1999, the foundations of a much earlier round tower came to light. William Tilney Spurdens described the church in 1853 as "a Perpendicular Structure, of great magnificence but now much neglected."

North of the houses the land falls away to the River Thurne and Martham Broad, a national nature reserve with clear water. You reach it on foot, from public footpaths rather than a visitor centre.

Footpaths and Recreation

Footpath No. 2 runs a little over two miles from the staithe to West Somerton, past river, broad and marsh, and can be joined to a Somerton path for a circular return. It is a narrow dirt track that turns muddy and slippery after rain. The open water holds holly-leaved naiad and stoneworts; the marshes around it can turn up swallowtails, otters, Chinese water deer, barn owls and, in some years, common cranes.

For a shorter outing there is the Coronation Recreation Ground, six acres bought in 1953 with a playing field, a games court, a skate and BMX park and a children's playground.

Nearby Outings and a Lost Shop

Horsey Windpump, sixty-one steps to Broadland views, lies up the B1159; Hickling Broad and the beach and dunes at Winterton-on-Sea are within reach, and Great Yarmouth lies nine miles south. No train reaches Martham any more — the station opened in 1878 and lost its last train in 1959 — so you come by car or on the Sanders bus, the 6 and X6, which run through to Great Yarmouth one way and North Walsham the other.

Chapman's butchers on the green closed in 2023 after at least a hundred and twenty-five years. Philip Dowe had joined it in 1977, aged fourteen, taken it over in 1996, and retired when it shut. Planning permission now allows the old shop to be folded into the house next door, which is called The Walnuts.