Swaffham is a market town and also civil parish in the Breckland District and English county of Norfolk. It is positioned 12 miles (19 kilometres) east of King's Lynn as well as 31 miles (50 kilometres) west of Norwich. The civil parish has a location of 11.42 sq mi (29.6 km2) and in the 2001 census had a population of 6,935 in 3,130 households, which increased to 7,258, in 3,258 homes, at the 2011 census. For the purposes of city government, the parish drops within the area of Breckland. On the west side of Swaffham Market Place are a number of old structures which for years housed the historic Hamond's Grammar School, as a plaque on the wall of the main building describes. The Hamond's Grammar School building more recently concerned function as the sixth form for the Hamond's High School, yet that use has because discontinued. Harry Carter, the grade school's art educator of the 1960s, was accountable for a multitude of the carved town indicators that are currently located in a number of Norfolk's towns as well as towns, consisting of Swaffham's own sign commemorating the famous Pedlar of Swaffham, which remains in the corner of the marketplace area just opposite the old-fashioned's gateways. Carter was a distant cousin of the excavator as well as egyptologist Howard Carter that invested a lot of his childhood years in the community.