The activities of the city's government produced an extraordinarily full series of manuscript records which are held at the Norfolk Record Office. A selection of the archival material was published in a two-volume work edited by William Hudson and John Tingey at the start of the twentieth century. The city's material and topographical records are equally accessible. Large-scale investigations into the early development of the city began in 1971 with the creation of an interdisciplinary research group known as the Norwich Survey. The Survey was responsible for the archaeological excavation of 31–51 Pottergate (site 149N). Destroyed by a citywide fire in 1507, this row of tenements preserved evidence of the living standards of moderately prosperous Norwich families (see chapters 2 and 4). Helen Sutermeister, a documentary researcher for the Survey, made early inroads into the subject of the health and well-being of Norwich's residents whilst preparing her doctoral thesis (unfinished at her untimely death). Specifically, she addressed the use and development of the city's waterways and cisterns, refuse collection, human remains, sanctions against ‘measly’ (i.e. leprous) pigs and putrid food, lead-poisoning and the impact of Norwich's housing revolution on living standards. The publication of James Campbell's maps of the medieval city in The Atlas of Historic Towns series in 1975 complemented the Survey's work. His legacy is evident in the fact that maps and plans have been situated at the forefront of the subsequent historiography of the city.

After the cessation of the Norwich Survey, aspects of its research aims were developed by the Norfolk Archaeological Unit (superseded by NAU Archaeology) and by members of the Centre of East Anglian Studies (CEAS) at the University of East Anglia. The subject of ‘health and place’ has often recurred in publications by both groups. For example, Carole Rawcliffe (CEAS) has examined the social and cultural importance of pollution, exercise through labour, and cleanliness to the medieval ruling elite of Norwich, and has recently published a monograph on the same themes on a national stage for the period 1250–1530. Simultaneously, from evidence of legal documents, the zoning of industry and from tithing rolls, Elizabeth Rutledge has drawn inferences about the damage inflicted by noxious trades upon local air quality and waterways, and about the ease with which infectious diseases may have been transmitted in densely occupied tenements.