We look back at what was happening in Norwich this week five, 10, 15 and 20 years ago through the front pages of the Evening News.

20 years ago

• A growing army of poison-resistant brown rats are on the march across Norwich, pest control experts warned today.

A long spell of warm weather has been blamed for most of the increase but bird-lovers, too, have been unwittingly helping the rodents by the liberal use of bird food.

'There are more rats coming to the surface,' said city council pescontrol manager Dave Samuel.

• Norfolk man Brian Goldsmith-Carr was today making a 'miracle recovery' after he caught the full force of the bomb blast in the Olympic Games city, Atlanta.

Mr Goldsmith-Carr, former landlord of the White Lion pub at Brooke, was out of bed and sitting in a chair today after nine hours of emergency brain surgery.

He had been on a holiday of a lifetime with his partner Chris Hankinson when the bomb exploded just 30 yards away from him after a rock concert in the Centennial Olympic Park.

• Parents were urged today to take more control of their teenage children after dark as alarming evidence emerged of alcohol abuse by young people.

Casualty unit doctors in Norwich have reported a frightening rise in the number of drunken teenagers ending up in hospital.

Children as young as 13 have been left at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital by friends after they have drunk so much alcohol that they have lost consciousness.

15 years ago

• Police are to take drastic measures to combat the growing menace of football hooliganism in Norwich.

Undercover officers will infiltrate the stands at Carrow Road next season, the Evening News can reveal today.

Last season football-related arrests more than doubled in the city to 57, which is why officers will take part in covert operations to gather information which could lead to thugs being convicted and banned from football for three years.

• Furious tenants of a tower block have been sent letters from Norwich City Council ordering them to remove flower boxes from their window sills.

First it was a ban on bouncy castles, next it was the chop for dangerous conker trees - now the council has called time on people's window boxes.

A council officer ordered the ban over fears that the local authority could be sued if the boxes fall and cause damage or injury.

• A grandfather was today fighting for his life after medics repeatedly failed to find a tumour the size of a dinner plate in his stomach - and instead diagnosed him as suffering from constipation.

For the past 12 months, Ivan Larkowsky, 76, has visited GPs complaining of searing pains in his stomach.

On July 19 Mr Larkowsky was rushed to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital suffering from terrible abdominal pain, but doctors failed to identify the

tumour and sent him home.

10 years ago

• Fans groups piled pressure on Norwich City today to loosen the purse strings and splash cash on new players.

With just 10 days before the Canaries travel to Leeds United for the opening game of the season, the club has still to add a single new face to a squad most accept is in urgent need of strengthening.

Fans want to know why so little cash is being made available to manager Nigel Worthington – to whose defence the board rallied so loyally last

season – particularly given the club is in the second year of the parachute payments triggered by relegation from the Premiership.

• Plans for a towering incinerator on the outskirts of Norwich have been dealt what could be a fatal blow after council chiefs ditched the firm that want to build it.

In a huge step forward in the Evening News long-running campaign to halt the Costessey incinerator, it has emerged Norfolk County Council has

withdrawn the proposal by Waste Recycling Group.

The council had picked the company – the only bidder which wanted to tackle the county's mounting rubbish crisis by incineration – in 2005.

• Children fleeing war zones for a new life in Britain are being found abandoned on Norfolk roadsides.

Officials at County Hall are spending about £500,000-a-year to house the desperate youngsters, who are usually discovered by police along the

A11 and A47.

Now the authorities are bracing themselves for an influx of refugees from the conflict in Lebanon.

• The father-of-two who was riding this motorbike when it was catapulted into the air and landed on the roof of a car today revealed his amazement that he survived the accident.

David McCatchey, 45, is still in hospital more than four weeks after the crash at the junction of Winchcomb Road and Guardian Road, Norwich. Other motorists simply drove around him as he lay in the road after the rush hour accident.

• Thousands of Norwich's council tenants are living in sub-standard conditions because the authority has failed to meet targets to improve its housing stock.

An alarming new report has revealed that Norwich City Council is lagging behind Government targets to regenerate its housing stock, with more than one in three falling short of the mark.

Now people needing urgent improvements to their homes fear they might be left waiting for at least five years before the work is carried out.

Five years ago

• A Norwich man has won his battle to get NHS funding for a heart procedure which offers him his only chance of getting better.

For Norman Sandell, each breath is a struggle because of his leaking heart valve.

Heart specialists told him his only hope of improvement was to have a MitraClip device fitted, but it needed special approval and he was initially refused funding by NHS Norfolk.

• A Norwich couple have spoken of how proud they are of their inspirational young daughter, who never stopped smiling despite having both her legs and fingers amputated as she battled meningitis.

Brian and Vicky Matthews' little girl Grace has endured more medical trauma than most people will ever have to go through in a lifetime yet, despite everything, she is a happy four-year-old who loves jumping up and down on her trampoline and playing with her five-year-old big brother Thomas.

• Since it was started more than a decade ago Future Projects has helped numerous young people and benefited the whole community.

It has been praised by the home secretary, one of its founders was made an MBE, and from just two volunteers working on the streets of North Earlham it has grown to become a school and helped teenagers excluded from countless mainstream schools and projects to gain GCSEs and go on to better things.

However, another organisation has been awarded a contract to provide alternative education, leaving not just the school arm, Future Education, but the whole project with doubts about its future.

• A Norwich football venue used by more than 2,500 people a week is to get a £250,000 revamp including a full-sized floodlit pitch.

Building work will start next Monday to expand and modernise Norwich Football Development Centre, based at Bowthorpe Park.

The extension will include a full-size grass pitch, a purpose-built classroom, a meeting room and office.