In Search of Mustard in Norwich

October 10, 2025·41 min·3 clips

John Osborne discovers the forgotten mustard legacy of Norwich after the factory's closure.

Norwich keeps mustard in its red bricks. John Osborne starts with those bricks, a school on a hill, and the odd pull of a local history that seems to grab him harder than the others. Mustard is not his usual subject. While researching a theatre show about Norwich, he gets pulled into the Colmans story and the people around it. This is civic history before it is food history. The episode follows streets and buildings into the factory culture that grew up around mustard making in the 1800s. Caroline is the person who changes the room. Her work providing hot meals, stew and coffee for Colmans workers gives the story warmth, and something more physical than heritage talk. People were hungry. Someone fed them. A meal becomes welfare, betterment and a statement that workers were people, not just labour. Jeremiah James gets the familiar credit, but the conversation makes the case that Caroline belongs beside him, especially when there is no plaque or statue for either of them. That absence sits there, quietly annoying. It asks how a city remembers the work that shaped its streets, habits and pride. Hannah then opens up the machinery of it all: tins, packaging, fine sieves, even silk for the mesh. Mustard powder leads to silkworms and super milling, which is a pleasingly strange route to take. By the end, the story comes back to pride among growers and workers today, and to the idea that looking after a workforce never fully left Norwich.

As heard by us

A Norwich mustard history with red bricks, worker welfare and the dangerous ingenuity behind a famous condiment.

A walk through Norwich turns into a compact history of Colmans mustard, starting with red brick streets and the sense that the city still carries the old factory story.

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Why you'd press play

Follow Norwich mustard from a red-brick school up the hill into the lives and labour behind a local legacy.

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