MESSAGE FROM STEPHEN FRY

'Welcome to Norwich, a fine city' – as painful a sound to the ears of a Norvicensian as 'Very flat, Norfolk,' or 'Ha' you got a light, bor?' But, like many clichés, it is also a fact. Norwich is a fine city. None finer.

But there are several great regional capitals in Britain, so why should Norwich push itself forward to take the title of European Capital of Culture?

If there is another city in the United Kingdom with a school of painters named after it, a music festival of world renown, a matchless modern art gallery, a university with a reputation for literary excellence which can boast Booker Prize-winning alumni and the poet laureate as creative writing professor, one of the grandest Romanesque cathedrals in the world, a magnificent castle museum, an Elizabethan theatre that has made an invaluable contribution to Shakespearean scholarship, an extraordinary new state-of-the-art public library ...then I have yet to hear of it.

Norwich, home of Britain's first ever newspaper, is the capital of the ancient kingdom of Anglia, the hub of a region that gave the world Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, perhaps the most influential book of the last millennium. From Kett's Rebellion, by way of Horatio Nelson and the terrible toll taken on the Norfolk Regiment in Japan, Norfolk and Norwich have played their part in the military and political history of the nation, too. Yet it is true to say, without paranoia or bitterness, that Norwich and East Anglia have long been underestimated and underrepresented in the wider United Kingdom.

The word 'culture' covers Delia Smith's restaurant at the home ground of the football club, as well as the city's museums and the great conductors who come for its annual festival... as in a yoghurt so should it be with a city: the culture must be live to be of value.

At a time when Britain is trying harder than ever in its history to resolve its identity vis à vis the tensions between the town and the countryside, Norwich is an enduring symbol of how urban and rural life can exist without contradiction. The city might without exaggeration be considered the pattern and exemplar of all that 'British culture' means – that uniquely successful admixture of the urban and rural, uniting the most modern in design and ideas with unrivalled continuity in its centuries of matchless architecture, secular and ecclesiastic.

'Sodom, Gomorrah, London and Norwich,' says a character in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair – Norwich is not now, nor ever has been, a twee provincial backwater. It has a café society, an adventurism and an openness to the new that stems from an unrivalled connection between its citizenry, local press and cultural institutions. Whether or not it earns the official recognition, the Fine City is, and will be, a great and enduring Capital of Culture.