The Custom House, Purfleet Quay, King's Lynn - 01553 763 044 kings-lynn.tic@west-norfolk.gov.uk

Llyn is Celtic for a lake or pool (possibly referring to the nearby Wash. The "King's" distinguished it from the smaller West Lynn on the other side of the Ouse.

King's Lynn is a town and port in Norfolk, England. The town has been known variously as Bishop's Lynn and Lynn Regis, while it is frequently referred to by locals as simply Lynn, the Celtic word for lake. King's Lynn is the third largest settlement in Norfolk, after the city of Norwich and the town of Great Yarmouth.

Sandringham House, the Norfolk residence of the British Royal Family, is 6 miles (9.7 km) north-east of King's Lynn. It is known as the birthplace of George Vancouver (1757-1798), an officer in the Royal Navy, who was the first person to explore the Pacific coast of the modern day Canadian province of British Columbia; the American states of Alaska, Washington, and Oregon; and the southwest coast of Australia. It is also the place of the first school attended by Diana, Princess of Wales.

While it is believed there has been some form of habitation at King's Lynn for over a thousand years, it was not until St Margaret's Church was founded in 1101 by Bishop Herbert de Losinga that the town started appearing on records. The town would originally have been named something like Llyn, after the Brythonic (Celtic) for "lake". Later, it acquired the prefix "Bishop's" as the town was part of the manor of the Bishop of Norwich in the 12th century.

By the 14th century, the town ranked as the third port of England and is considered as important to England in Medieval times as Liverpool was during the Industrial Revolution. It retains two buildings that were warehouses of the Hanseatic League that were in use between the 15th and 17th centuries. They are the only remaining building structures of the Hanseatic League in England.

When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1538, the town and manor became royal property. As a result, the town became renamed King's Lynn and Lynn Regis (which means the same thing in Latin); it was King's Lynn which stuck. The town became prosperous from the 17th century through the export of corn; the fine Customs House was built in 1683 to the designs of local architect Henry Bell. In 1708 an 11-year-old girl and her 7-year-old brother were convicted of theft of a loaf of bread in King's Lynn and sentenced to death by hanging[citation needed], a sentence which was carried out publicly from the South Gates of the town to make an example out of them. At the time of the hangings, Sir Robert Walpole, generally regarded as having been the first Prime Minister of Great Britain, was Member of Parliament for King's Lynn.

The town went into decline after this period, and was only rescued by the relatively late arrival of railway services in 1847 – with services mainly provided by the Great Eastern Railway (subsequently London and North Eastern Railway) and its fore-runners (such as the Lynn and Dereham Railway). Train services operated between King's Lynn and Hunstanton, Dereham and Cambridge.

The town was also served by the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway, which had offices in the town at Austin Street, and an important station at South Lynn (now dismantled) which was also its operational control centre until this was relocated to Melton Constable. The M&GN lines were closed to passengers in February 1959. Lynn was one of the first towns in Great Britain to be bombed from the air by a Zeppelin in 1915, the Savage's Iron Works, where aeroplane parts where being made, being the target.

In the post-Second World War period, King's Lynn was designated a London Expansion Town and its population roughly doubled as thousands of people were relocated from the capital.

In 1987, the town became the first in the UK to install town centre CCTV (though Bournemouth had previously used CCTV in non-central locations). The single most numerous crime prosecuted as a result of this comprehensive system is men urinating in public on their way home at night from pubs.

In 2006 King's Lynn formally became Great Britain's first member of Die Hanse – the modern-day equivalent of the Hanseatic League.