# Norfolk

URL: https://performanceandprestige.co.uk/car-hire/norfolk

Performance & Prestige has no depot, branch or rental counter in Norfolk and holds no premises there. Every lease is delivered to an address you choose and collected from it afterwards.

Norfolk has no motorway anywhere inside it, which tells you most of what you need to know about both the journey in and the pleasure of driving once you are here. We deliver into Norwich and the villages around it, out to Aylsham, Holt, Blakeney, Wells, Burnham Market, Brancaster and Hunstanton along the north coast, south to Wymondham and Diss, and west towards King's Lynn and the fen edge. The coast villages are flint, narrow and largely without off-street parking, and the countryside behind them is some of the emptiest good road in England. Over a longer agreement that combination works particularly well: the car is genuinely usable here on a weekday morning in a way it is not in a city. We hold no premises in Norfolk and there is nothing for you to travel to.

Typical delivery: The approach does most of the work. The A11 runs dual carriageway as far as Norwich, the A47 across the county largely does not, and the last part of any journey here is spent behind something agricultural on a single carriageway. On the coast the A149 is narrow, slow and busy through the season. The address matters too, because a flint cottage on a village street is a different proposition from a house with a gravel sweep behind a gate. A person sets the window against all of that and confirms it with you before anything is committed.

Two local problems come up repeatedly. The first is the coast village with no drive: Burnham Market, Blakeney, Wells and their neighbours have narrow streets, short kerbs and pay-and-display bays that fill early, so we agree a specific spot and a time rather than circling. The second is the unsurfaced approach. Several of the best-known beach accesses are gravel or sand drives with grass overflow, and blown sand lies across the coast roads after a windy week. Inland, the fen and marsh lanes have deep drainage dykes right at the verge with nothing between them and the tarmac, so there is no room to move over for anybody.

Postcode areas covered: NR, PE, IP.

## Does having no motorway actually matter?

It matters for the journey in and it is an advantage afterwards. Everything arrives on A roads, the last section is single carriageway, and an overtaking opportunity behind a tractor is worth waiting for rather than forcing. Once the car is here, though, the county is full of wide, quiet, well-sighted roads that almost nobody is using at eight on a weekday morning. That is the argument for keeping a car like this in Norfolk rather than somewhere with better motorway access: the roads you actually want are the ones on the doorstep.

## What are the fen and marsh roads like?

Unlike anywhere else in England, and they demand respect. They run dead straight for long distances across drained ground, with a deep dyke immediately at the edge of the carriageway and no barrier of any kind, and they finish in sudden right-angle bends at field boundaries where the road follows the drain rather than the destination. The surface undulates where the peat has shrunk beneath it. There is nothing to break a crosswind, and in autumn the sugar beet harvest puts a great deal of mud on the road. Straight is not the same as easy out there.

## Where do people actually drive to from here?

The north coast road from Hunstanton through Brancaster and Holkham to Cley and Cromer, which is slow, pretty and full of places worth stopping at. The Sandringham estate roads and the lanes behind them are quiet and beautifully surfaced. Thetford Forest is the fast, empty option to the south, and the Broads is the one to think twice about, because those lanes are dead ends leading to staithes with nowhere to turn and low bridges that were not built with anything modern in mind.

## Can a car like this be parked on the north coast?

With planning, yes. The village car parks in Burnham Market, Wells and Blakeney are small and full by mid-morning through the season. Holkham's beach approach is a long unsurfaced drive with grass overflow parking at the end of it, which is not where you want a wide low car after a wet week. Verge parking on the A149 is enforced in places and thoughtless everywhere else. If the house you are staying in has a drive or a barn, use it. Otherwise take the handover somewhere with hard standing and be realistic about the beach.

## Which weeks and weekends get busy?

School holidays and the second-home weekends, which have a rhythm of their own: the roads in fill on a Friday afternoon and empty again on Sunday evening, and the north coast feels like a different county between those two points. The Royal Norfolk Show fills the roads west of Norwich while it runs, and the seaside carnival weeks do the same to individual towns. Give us the dates when you enquire and we will set the handover on the quiet side of whatever is happening that week.

## Do you cover Suffolk, the fen towns and the Cambridgeshire edge?

Bury St Edmunds, Newmarket, Southwold, Aldeburgh and Woodbridge are part of the same run, as are King's Lynn, Ely, Downham Market and the fen towns west of them. Newmarket is worth a word of warning: racehorses have their own signalled crossings over the public roads there, and they have priority, so a car in a hurry through the town is a car in the wrong place. Delivery in Norfolk and collection somewhere else entirely is one arrangement, priced against the two addresses rather than against a radius drawn on a map.

*Pre-launch note: the driver criteria, deposits, excesses and mileage allowances quoted here are read from Performance & Prestige's own catalogue data, which is still being confirmed with the owner and the insurer. Read them as the shape of the figures rather than as a quotation. What binds is your written quote and your agreement.*