By Douglas Blyde

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We never touched the TVs. Not the one in the saloon, which rose like a theatre set in the wrong play, nor the dark temptations bolted to each cabin wall. Clean Sweep, a luxury craft to rent by Broom Boats in Norfolk, offers everything, then quietly suggests you want none of it: less screen, more sky.

Broom Boats has been anchored by the Yare in Brundall since 1898, long before pleasure became something you summoned with a swipe. Charles John Broom began with sailing cruisers for gentlemen, launching a hire fleet by 1912. In the interwar years came 30-foot motor cruisers; during the war, Admiralty contracts. Even today, boats are still made by hand beside the Yare — resin in the air, sanders purring over hulls, and fittings laid out in careful order — a tradition adapted to the language of glassfibre and stainless steel.

In August 2024, a new chapter opened. Broom Boats was acquired by Clive and Victoria Richardson — the husband-and-wife team behind Horning Pleasurecraft and Broads Holidays. “It was a bold move,” Victoria told me. “We’ve come a long way, but there’s still so much more to do.”

Clive has Broads in his bloodline — a fifth-generation boatman descended from Robert Kemp, wherry builder and publican of The Lady of the Lake. His father, Bobby Richardson, built fleets, pilot boats, fisheries protection vessels, and gunboats for Kuwait. In 1974, he sold the original hire business to the Rank Organisation, before returning to boatbuilding in Catfield and Acle. Clive rose through the engineering ranks at Stalham and now designs the next generation of Broads cruisers — restoring the family legacy not by speaking of heritage, but by making it.

Clean Sweep was built for the former owner of Broom and his two very large dogs. She carries walkaround double beds, air con, Wi-Fi, and a galley which might tempt you to move in. There’s a dishwasher, microwave, and capacious fridge freezer — the works.

After a raid on Blofield Farm Shop — tomatoes smelling of themselves, raspberries bleeding on your fingers — Clean Sweep slipped beneath an August sky, sighing into the world at her own pace. At 42 feet, she should feel unwieldy, but she doesn’t. The bow thruster murmurs her nose into place; the stern thruster nudges her tail with balletic grace. Even the tightest mooring becomes a dance, my wife taking the stern line while our daughter, grinning, helps pass the bow rope ashore.

Light shifted as we moved: yellow to pewter, pewter to gold. Norwich Yacht Station appeared ahead — staffed, secure, and a short stroll from the stout ruins of Cow Tower and the interactive Museum of Norwich. Few Broads-goers make it to Norwich. But from Broom’s marina, it’s barely an hour to the heart of the city.

Norwich is a patchwork: glass malls against the cool stone of a 900-year-old cathedral, a castle built to intimidate now housing art and the famously unsettling ‘dead zoo’. Norfolk’s long relationship with water runs through it all. Nelson was born thirty miles west; the county shaped the man before he shaped history.

I spent years here, prowling wine merchants while allegedly studying English and American Literature at UEA. The Brutalist ziggurats rose from the Yare Valley like imagined cities, Denys Lasdun’s long teaching wall set into the slope with horizontal precision. The campus became the model for The History Man, its politics and freedoms immortalised in concrete.

We climbed Elm Hill’s crooked spine, then slid into a booth at The Ivy for steak tartare and Campari-pepped Sunset Martinis, showcasing Bournemouth-based Ivy Icons winner, Ben Davies. Other drinks lean local: Black Shuck vodka, and beers from Duration. The building — an elegant wedge of Portland stone — has lived many lives: London and Provincial Bank, Barclays, and GAP, before its soft banquettes and seafood linguine, served with a flourish by long-time waitress, Lauren while Jamiroquai plays. Its architect, George Skipper, left his mark all over Norwich, most famously with the art nouveau Royal Arcade and Jarrolds.

Overlooking the all-encompassing market, that department store’s façade recalls an Edwardian liner in full steam. In its Bay Seafood Bar, tucked beyond ceramics and glassware, the lineage is plain: the same turn-of-the-century confidence rendered in civic stone. Here came Brancaster oysters, a trio of home-cured salmons, lollipop prawns sharpened by the spice-memory of Thai chef, Phuk, and a boozy Frangelico chocolate pot — chased with Moongazer Norfolk amber ale.

We left with a lavish hamper: Flint & Vine Fumé — a Bungay Bacchus of mineral poise — and Norfolk Dapple, a clothbound cow’s milk cheese the colour of a barn owl’s wing.

That afternoon, as the tide fell low enough to allow us beneath the city’s bridges, we set off towards Reedham, gliding through marshland where sky becomes river, and river becomes sky. Clean Sweep revealed her true nature here: built with a substantial beam and length, yet handled with the grace of a skiff half her size. Somewhere in the reeds, a bittern boomed — its deep, breathy note like a distant foghorn — the Broads’ own heartbeat. From the flying bridge, I kept her steady while our daughter speculated whether herons were statues and my wife read out place names from the chart, the three of us moving together like a crew who knew the river’s moods.

The sugar factory at Cantley rose slowly from the horizon, first a faint geometry against the sky, then a white citadel set in the flatness, its chimneys like organ pipes tuned to the music of the season. The air began to change long before we reached it — a warm, clinging sweetness which was part caramel, part earth after rain, carrying on the wind like the incense of a strange, secular faith. In beet season, the harvest is drawn in from the surrounding fields, swallowed by steel and steam, transformed into crystal. Barges once left here for the sea; now lorries take the sugar away.

From Cantley, the Yare wound on until Reedham, its waters patrolled by Norfolk’s only vehicular chain ferry, still saving drivers a 30-mile detour. Overlooking Maetherea’s partially submerged Iron Reef sculpture, the ferryman, sipping ginger ale, welcomed us aboard, showed us the controls, then steered us back for a pint of Swallowtail from Humpty Dumpty Brewery at the Ferry Inn. Evening closed aboard with steak on the sundeck from Paul’s Family Butchers in Norwich market, eaten while the river light blazed crimson, then softened to dusk.

We left Reedham in mist clinging like a reluctant ghost. Clean Sweep carved southwest along the Waveney, past wind-stoked reed beds whispering secrets older than the villages they surround, into the pool of Oulton Broad, with its funfair, before retracing our bow to Somerleyton. The river grows quieter here, other than the chatter of reed warblers, while marsh harriers patrol like landlords. It’s easy to forget this landscape is man-made — medieval peat cutters overreached, and the water simply returned.

Somerleyton Staithe appeared like a Victorian watercolour: a grassy bank with Herringfleet Mill across the marshes, its black-tarred octagon silhouetted against the sky. Built around 1820 to drain the marshes, the smock mill once pumped 9,000 litres of water a minute, and is the last of its kind in the Broads. It doubled as the Dutch landscape in Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner. The swallows still return.

From the staithe, a half-hour walk inland leads past hedgerows heavy with blackberries, through a village so primped it borders on the implausible — thatched cottages, even a straw-roofed school, butterflies adrift in the brambles. Then Somerleyton Hall rises — part Jacobean manor, part Italianate fantasy — reimagined by railway magnate, Sir Samuel Morton Peto in the 1840s, who knew wealth without beauty is only arithmetic. Its gardens are a dream of order and scent: a vast wisteria walkway, sweet pink apples in the edible garden, a clipped yew maze, and dragonflies casting shadows. A place half imagined, yet entirely there.

The Jarrolds hamper had also held a bottle of Winbirri, its red dubbed ‘Norfolk Rioja’ by a wine friend. At Bramerton, we moored beside The Water’s Edge, whose name is literal. Before supper, we hiked to Winbirri Vineyard, along streams, past wind-bent hedges and the odd mansion. The site was once worked by Lee Dyer’s father, a wholesale fruit and veg distributor.

“That’s where I got my feel for the land,” Lee said. Before wine, he worked in energy sales. “Hated every minute.” Now, he does everything — pruning, bottling, designing labels — with Storm, his Staffordshire bull terrier, padding behind. He poured Bacchus — sharp, tropical, with a flash of lime —then two Dornfelders: a persistent, supple red and a sparkling rosé, pale and sherbety, deliberately light on lees to keep it playful. “I’ve always backed reds,” he said. “At one point, we were doing forty percent — nationally it was five.” He spoke of soil, light, and patience — and his refusal to fine or filter. Norfolk isn’t just growing grapes; it’s growing up.

The Water’s Edge is now run by Jill Tickle, a seasoned publican from Scotland, returning to the view she first saw as a child. The locals dress up to come here, finding beers such as Hooked On Vista — a pale ale from Hook Norton and Woodforde’s — and lobsters which often sell out, so it’s best to call ahead. Also ask for chef’s own-label hot sauce, Scruffy P’s, so good there’s hope it will be bottled.

Toast, tea, and 40 minutes back to Brundall over waters so still they seemed to hold their breath. It was over. But the boat — like the Broads — had worked its magic. We had slowed. We had noticed: the light on water, how time moves differently when you allow it. The TVs stayed silent. Better that way.

Clean Sweep had been our companion and moving meditation, carrying us through this watery world with such gentle competence that we forgot to worry about anything except where to moor for lunch. In a world obsessed with speed, she offered days which expanded to fit us, and nights which folded themselves around the sound of water against the hull.

The Broads National Park covers 117 square miles of rivers, lakes, and marshland – roughly the size of Malta – all of it is waiting to slow you down. To explore the unique landscape, browse a range of hire cruisers at broomboats.com