Norden trained at the Thanet School of Art and the Royal College of Art, gaining his Diploma in 1937, the same year that the younger John Ward and Jehan Daly joined, then going on to teach at the Sidney Cooper School of Art in Canterbury between 1938 and 1947. He was Principal of both the Maidstone College of Art and the School of Art in Folkestone, where he lived and worked. A year after exhibiting his first picture at the Royal Academy (A Kentish Woodland), he published a Practical Guide to Perspective in 1953. He was close friends with Gordon Davies and John Ward and would often assist Ward with perspective; his picture of John Ward Working was shown at the RA in 1962, while Ward’s portrait of Norden was exhibited there in 1981.
