Staff from North Norfolk District Council share origin of viral clogs found in charity shop
The mystery behind an unusual pair of shoes has been solved after a viral social media post left people baffled.
A woman was out charity shopping in Norwich with her daughter on November 18, when she came across what she believes is one of her weirdest finds yet – a pair of North Norfolk District Council (NNDC) wooden clogs.
Hannah, who happens to work for Norfolk County Council, said: “We went into the YMCA charity shop on St Stephens, which is one of our favourites, and my daughter spotted them and I just said, ‘What the hell is that?’ ”
Upon discovering the shoes, Hannah snapped a photo and posted it to her X – formerly Twitter – account @buntyhoven, which gained a lot of attention.
The post, captioned: "What's up, babe? You've hardly worn your North Norfolk District Council clog...", currently has almost 8,000 likes and 500 reposts.
However, the find did not go unnoticed by the organisation themselves, as they replied to Hannah’s post with one of their own.
Joe Ferrari, communication and pr manager for NNDC, said: “We managed to find a couple of staff members who had a pair of those clogs at home, and we said it would be quite funny if we just posted a picture that said that we’re wearing ours.”
Felix Brueggemann, a communications officer who wore the clogs in the post, was told jokingly by Joe that “his feet have never been so famous”.
So how did the wooden shoes come to be? Well, in 2019 the NNDC delivered a £19 million sand-scaping scheme at Bacton and Walcott, which involved putting thousands of tons of sand back onto the beach and reshaping it to defuse wave energy.
Communities in Bacton and Walcott were being put at high risk due to the rate at which the dunes were eroding.
Joe said: “It was quite innovative because it wasn’t old-fashioned sea walls, it was sand-scaping – which is Dutch engineering expertise – so we partnered with Dutch maritime contractors Van Oord.
“At the completion of the work, we were delighted to receive from them a set of gifts, one of them was a lovely traditional Dutch blue and white plate, which still hangs in the council offices, and the others were several sets of specially-made clogs. One clog had the NNDC’s logo on it and the other had the Van Oord logo on it.”
If you were hoping to travel to the charity shop and snag the merchandise yourself, you are out of luck as Hannah returned a couple of days later and bought them for £3 (plus a 10p bag).
She said: “I brought them home, I put them on and I clomped around my front room in them.
“I didn’t tell my daughter, so she got through the door and I was sat at the dining room table wearing them. She absolutely lost it and she put them on – it was hysterical.”
As for the fate of the clogs, Hannah is currently hanging onto them but is considering putting them up for auction in the future to raise some money for the YMCA.
Joe added: “It’s been nice to build our channels and get a bit more awareness of us and our district, which is always good as we’re tucked away on the eastern side of the country.
“It’s also great for us to remember what was a really successful partnership that protects our coastline from something that we and West Norfolk Council have against erosion.”