Norfolk Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
49 free Norfolk trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Norfolk is the county that is 'very flat' only on the map. Its coast faces three ways, its biggest lakes turned out to be man-made, and its capital once claimed a pub for every day of the year. Few English counties pack in so many stories that sound invented and turn out to be true. These 49 questions range across Norwich and its cathedral, castle and football club, the Broads and the north coast, the royal estate at Sandringham, the market towns of Thetford, Swaffham and King's Lynn, and the writers, admirals, reformers and comic creations the county has produced. It suits pub quiz hosts, anyone who grew up in Norfolk and wants to test the family, and visitors curious about what lies beyond the beaches. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you leave knowing a little more than you arrived with.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which condiment has Colman's of Norwich milled since Jeremiah Colman set up at Stoke Holy Cross mill in 1814?
Mustard
Mustard got its Colman's tang from a blend of brown and white seeds, and the firm outgrew its watermill, moving to a huge works at Carrow in Norwich that ran for 160 years.
Q 02Which comedian plays Alan Partridge, the Norwich radio host who lives in a roadside hotel pitching TV ideas?
Steve Coogan
Steve Coogan first voiced Partridge in 1991 as the hapless sports reporter on the Radio 4 news spoof On the Hour, and the sitcom I'm Alan Partridge later won two BAFTAs.
Q 03Which birds did Bernard Matthews rear in the 35 rooms of Great Witchingham Hall, later selling them on TV as 'Bootiful'?
Turkeys
Turkeys hatched in the dining room while Matthews and his wife lived in two unheated rooms of the hall. His own 1980 advert put the Norfolk-accented 'Bootiful' into the national consciousness.
Q 04Which Dickens novel uses Great Yarmouth as a key setting and has it called 'the finest place in the universe'?
David Copperfield
David Copperfield gives the line to the hero's nurse Peggotty as she brings him to the town; Dickens stayed at the Royal Hotel on Yarmouth's Marine Parade while working on the novel.
Q 05How were clocks set under 'Sandringham time', introduced by Edward VII to lengthen shooting days?
Half an hour ahead of GMT
Half an hour ahead of GMT stayed the rule under George V, until Edward VIII, on becoming king in 1936, ordered the estate's clocks put back to Greenwich time.
Q 06Norwich Castle's Norman keep served what purpose from 1220 until 1887, seven years before it became a museum?
A gaol
A gaol, or prison, filled the keep for more than 650 years, and in the 1790s the architect John Soane had its inner walls taken out to fit in cells for the felons.
Q 07Which north Norfolk village has Britain's only independently run lighthouse, East Anglia's oldest still working?
Happisburgh
Happisburgh's light was marked for closure by Trinity House in the late 1980s, but villagers campaigned to save it and a 1990 Act of Parliament set up their own trust to run it.
Q 08Despite its name, Wells-next-the-Sea in north Norfolk now sits roughly how far from the North Sea after silting?
About a mile
About a mile of marsh and a confined channel now separate the town from open water, after a mile-long bank built in 1859 reclaimed some 800 hectares of saltmarsh.
Q 09Which Norfolk resort, unusually for a town on England's east coast, has a seafront facing west across The Wash?
Hunstanton
Hunstanton's westward outlook gives it a sight rare on England's east coast, the sun setting over the sea, and its beach cliffs are striped red and white.
Q 10Which BBC sitcom shot its exteriors in Thetford, whose buildings doubled for the seaside town of Walmington-on-Sea?
Dad's Army
Dad's Army shot most of its outdoor scenes on the Army's Stanford training area beside the town, and Thetford now keeps a museum to the show in part of its Guildhall.
Q 11Which political radical, active in both the American and French revolutions, was born in Thetford, Norfolk, in 1737?
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense argued for American independence and whose Rights of Man answered Edmund Burke, is commemorated by a statue in Thetford.
Q 12Norwich City's nickname honours the local history of breeding which bird, perched on a ball in the club badge?
Canary
Canary breeding was a local passion, and by 1907 the Canaries had replaced the club's first nickname, the Citizens, as light blue and white shirts gave way to yellow.
Q 13In the 1993–94 UEFA Cup, Norwich City became the only English club to win at the Olympiastadion against which side?
Bayern Munich
Q 21Which Wymondham landowner led the 1549 rebels who camped on Mousehold Heath and seized Norwich over land enclosures?
Robert Kett
Robert Kett began as a target: rebels came to tear down his own enclosure fences, but instead of resisting he agreed with them and offered to lead the rising.
Q 22What did 16th-century Norwich call the Dutch and Flemish Protestant refugees who became a third of its population?
The Strangers
The Strangers fled Catholic persecution, with the people of Ypres in particular choosing Norwich, and the city's Strangers' Hall keeps the name.
Q 23What was dug from Grime's Graves, the complex of Neolithic mine shafts in Norfolk's Breckland near Brandon?
Flint
Bayern Munich lost 2–1 to Norwich in the club's only European campaign, which ended a round later against Inter Milan.
Q 14Which University of East Anglia building, designed by Norman Foster, appears in Avengers: Age of Ultron?
The Sainsbury Centre
The Sainsbury Centre also hosted scenes for Ant-Man, Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Homecoming, all shot in the mid-2010s.
Q 15Which prison reformer, born into Norwich's Quaker Gurney family in 1780, was on the Bank of England £5 note until 2017?
Elizabeth Fry
Elizabeth Fry was horrified to find women and children crammed into Newgate Prison in 1813 and later funded a school for the children held there; her girlhood home, Earlham Hall, now belongs to the University of East Anglia.
Q 16Which Swardeston-born nurse was executed in occupied Belgium in 1915 for helping some 200 Allied soldiers escape?
Edith Cavell
Edith Cavell treated wounded soldiers from both sides without discrimination, and her grave lies in the grounds of Norwich Cathedral.
Q 17Anna Sewell, born in Great Yarmouth in 1820, wrote which novel about a horse, the only book she ever published?
Black Beauty
Black Beauty was written, its author said, to induce kindness to horses; a Norwich publisher bought the copyright outright, and she died at Old Catton within months of its release.
Q 18Which sports-car maker founded by Colin Chapman moved in 1966 to Hethel, a former airfield in Norfolk?
Lotus
Lotus laid out its Hethel test track on sections of RAF Hethel's wartime runway.
Q 19Norwich Union, the insurer founded in 1797, merged with CGU in 2000 into a group renamed what in 2002?
Aviva
Aviva was an invented palindrome adopted by shareholder vote in April 2002, replacing the clumsy merger name CGNU plc.
Q 20Julian of Norwich, whose Revelations of Divine Love is the earliest surviving English book by a woman, lived as what?
An anchoress
An anchoress lived in permanent seclusion, and Julian's cell was attached to St Julian's Church in Norwich, where the mystic Margery Kempe came to seek her counsel.
Flint was the toolmaker's raw material, shaped into axes and arrowheads, and it stayed so cheap beside metal that mining may have carried on into the Bronze and Iron Ages.
Q 24What stood at the centre of Seahenge, the Bronze Age timber circle on Holme beach that the press named in 1998?
An inverted oak stump
An inverted oak stump sat inside a ring of timbers felled in 2049 BC, when the site was surrounded by salt marsh rather than sea.
Q 25Which Iron Age objects, over 150 in gold and other alloys, make up Norfolk's Snettisham Hoard, found from 1948?
Torcs
Torcs, the Iron Age neck rings, came out of the ground in more than 150 pieces; French coins buried with them date the hoard to about 70 BC, and its quality suggests royal treasure of the Iceni.
Q 26King's Lynn keeps England's only surviving warehouse of which medieval trading alliance?
The Hanseatic League
The Hanseatic League dominated North Sea trade when Lynn ranked among England's most important ports, and Hanse House, its warehouse, still stands on the town's South Quay.
Q 27George Vancouver, born in King's Lynn in 1757, first went to sea as a boy under which famous captain?
James Cook
James Cook took him on his second and third voyages, and Vancouver returned in the 1790s in command of his own expedition, charting the Pacific coast where a Canadian city now bears his name.
Q 28Which resort, signposted 'Gem of the Norfolk Coast', has a lifeboat station on its pier and a brown crab named after it?
Cromer
Cromer's crab fishery is the main income of its fishermen, and the pier also carries the Pavilion Theatre.
Q 29Howard Carter, who opened Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, spent much of his childhood in which Norfolk market town?
Swaffham
Swaffham was his parents' home town, and Howard Carter, a sickly child, was sent there from London to be raised by relatives.
Q 30Which queen, mother of Edward III, lived at Castle Rising in Norfolk after her fall from power in 1330?
Isabella of France
Isabella of France extended the castle buildings and kept a regal lifestyle there, entertaining her son on several occasions.