Walking by Train

Nottingham Midland Station (detail from an early-twentieth-century postcard)

I love London.

Thankfully, it's easy to travel there from Nottingham.

Assuming advance booking and flexibility in timings, it is possible to purchase return train travel from Nottingham to ONE OF THE GREATEST CITIES ON EARTH for less than £40.

When I travel to London, I will sometimes walk from my home in Sherwood to Nottingham railway station and then, upon arrival in the capital, walk from St Pancras to whichever part of London it is that I'm aiming for.

When this method is used, a journey from my front door to, say, Trafalgar Square, is really not so experientially different from a journey from home to the Old Market Square (with a bus assuming the role of the train for the latter).

In both scenarios, I walk to the place from which my means of conveyance will depart, hop on board, sit down, wait for a bit, hop off at the other end and carry on walking to my final destination.

The fastest trains from Nottingham to London take less than an hour and forty minutes. If, like me, you are as happy as a sand boy when travelling by rail, the time flies by, and before you know it you are stepping off the train and making your way through the magnificent surrounds of St Pancras station.

Unless I am staying overnight, very little additional preparation time is required for a journey to London as opposed to a trip into Nottingham city centre. The practical considerations are, by-and-large, the same.

Author Will Self went through a phase of embarking on what he called airport walks. When on an airport walk, he would walk from his home in Stockwell to, say, Heathrow, catch a plane and walk all the way from the airport at the other end to his final destination.

On the subject of an airport walk to New York, he commented, 'It had worked, ...walking to New York.  It had done exactly what I wanted it to do: the Atlantic had been siphoned off, the continental shelf jacked up, and Hayes, Middlesex, had been rammed unceremoniously into South Ozone Park [areas adjacent to the airports at either end of his journey].'

We Nottinghamians can adopt a rail-based version of the same practice in order to accomplish the unceremonious ramming of Nottingham city centre into the district of St Pancras, thus significantly reducing (or eliminating altogether) the psychological gap between Nottingham and London. In the mind, the latter becomes an extension of the former.

I last travelled to London a few days ago. After arriving at St Pancras, I walked away from the station and wound my way through Bloomsbury towards Soho, where I partook of an alcoholic beverage in a pub with a storied past. I then moseyed on down to the National Gallery and spent a pleasant hour-or-so admiring various paintings. After a ritualistic pitstop at Five Guys for some cajun fries, I headed east on an Elizabeth Line train for the last of the day's activities - an evening in the august presence of writer Iain Sinclair.

A splendid day out.

Sublime metropolis!

When a man is uninterested in London, he is devoid of life.

St Pancras Station (detail from From Pentonville Road Looking West: Evening, by John O'Connor, 1884)

A Fleeting Glimpse

This postcard view shows the two castellated tunnel portals at Red Hill, in Thrumpton, and the viaducts that lead towards them. The western tunnel and portal (on the right here) were built first, between 1838 and 1840, with their eastern counterparts following several decades later.

Somewhat counterintuitively, heading south on the train and having left Nottinghamshire behind us somewhere in the Attenborough area, we re-enter our beloved county halfway across the mighty Trent, luxuriating in its homely embrace for a precious extra few minutes before crossing the border into Leicestershire.

The two elaborate tunnel portals are listed at Grade II, as are the less impressive south portals. Several online sources state that the fancy design of the original north portal was due to the fact that the railway passed (as it presumably still does) through the Thrumpton Hall estate.

When I pass this spot on the train, while other passengers are faffing around on social media, making last-minute adjustments to spreadsheets or engaging in gormless phone conversations, I can usually be found pointing my phone camera at the window, trying to to capture a halfway decent shot of whichever portal we happen to be approaching (usually the western one).

Occasionally, I get lucky(ish).

They really are beautiful features. I intend to visit the site on foot at some point, to see if I can gain access to them, though there is no indication online that anyone has actually succeeded in doing this.

The postcard at the top of this post was sent in 1909 - a year that saw the opening of the first UK branch of Woolies (in Liverpool) and the introduction of the old age pension scheme.

It is interesting to note that the state retirement age was initially set at 70 - this at a time when the average UK life expectancy was between 50 and 55 years.

The extent to which such matters were occupying the mind of the person who sent the postcard is unrecorded, but their missive does reveal that they were at Trent station (which lay to the south of Long Eaton and closed in 1968), where they were part-way through a two-hour wait, having just missed their train by two minutes.

Ah, the slings and arrows of British rail travel.

Sadly, no postcards were available for purchase when my fellow Beeston and Nottingham-bound passengers and I were deposited at East Midlands Parkway shortly after midnight on our return journey and pointed in the direction of a rail replacement bus.

Of course, two-hour waits and delays caused by rail replacement buses are really quite minor matters when set against the infinity of nothingness that awaits us all in but a few short years.

So, virgins, philanderers and strumpets alike, gather ye rosebuds while ye may, for old time is indeed a-flying.

Dead Pets Society

Lord Byron's Dog 'Boatswain' (1803–1808) (The Newfoundland)
by Clifton Thomson, 1808
Nottingham City Museums & Galleries

Several weeks ago, one of my periodic raids on the Oxfam branch at Mapperley Top resulted in the acquisition of a handsome tome entitled Lord Byron's Best Friends.

The book concerns itself primarily with the dogs that Byron owned during his lifetime - most famously, Boatswain, who is buried at Newstead Abbey beneath an elaborate memorial. After Boatswain's death, Byron stipulated that, upon his own demise, he should be buried in the same tomb as his faithful friend. However, the sale of Newstead Abbey put paid to that idea.

Pleased with my purchase, I had followed my usual route home via Woodthorpe Grange Park, where, in an area next to the Grange, I was surprised to happen upon a feature that had hitherto escaped my attention - a headstone containing the words 'IN MEMORY OF POLLY'.

I concluded that 'Polly' must have been a pet - probably a dog - belonging to one of the former owners of the Grange. Subsequent online searches, however, drew a blank.

Fast forward to yesterday and, upon visiting the grave site again, I fortuitously encountered a member of the Friends of Woodthorpe Park, who not only confirmed that Polly had indeed been a dog, but told me that another dog, Tim, was buried in the same area. Memorials to the two dogs had been placed there, he informed me, by the last person to live at the Grange before it was sold (along with the estate) to Nottingham Corporation in 1921. That person was John Godfree Small, who was Mayor of Nottingham in 1915 and 1917.

Tim's headstone had been removed due to damage inflicted on it by vandals, but is due to be reinstated later this year.

Perhaps it's appropriate, then, that Woodthorpe Park has, these days, been largely taken over by man's best friend. Personally, I'd rather not have to live with dogs pissing and shitting everywhere, but they seem to have a jolly old time and make their owners (for the most part) happy, so I shall try to be less curmudgeonly about such matters in future.

Liberation

 [Written in 2022]

Drawn by the siren call of ephemera, and arriving on the scene courtesy of a municipal cattle wagon, I find myself back in my old stomping ground.

Lenton Lane presents itself in all its beguiling, offbeat, weekend glory. Over the canal and I'm in the thick of it.

I pass by Poplars Court, home to such mysterious entities as InTouch, Motive and Formpipe Life Science Ltd, offering, respectively, 'Your entire conveyancing transaction on one cloud platform', 'Public Relations and Link Building strategies for ambitious e-commerce brands' and '...a combination of products and services designed specifically for the Life Science sector to simplify complex process and technology environments to deliver our customers' compliance and quality goals within their regulatory framework'. Yawn. When did life become so full of people wanting to suck every last bit of, well, life out of it?

E-scooters litter the pavements as I walk past the huge premises of Trent Vineyard ('For Jesus. For Nottingham. For you.') Trent Vineyard is a modern church at the wave-your-hands-in-the-air end of the spectrum. Its 'Senior Pastors' are John and Debby Wright, who are also National Directors of Vineyard Churches UK & Ireland. I'm going to venture that these guys are not short of a bob or two.

Narrowly avoiding the lightning bolt that turns a nearby fence into a smoking heap of charred timber, I continue onwards. To my right are the headquarters of another institution whose success is based on fantasy scenarios - Games Workshop.  As well as the studios and offices of creative folks and administrative types, the site includes Warhammer World, which contains an exhibition centre, an events hall, and even a bar.

I make my way over the railway bridge and around a bend in the road, reaching the point where the River Leen, having been ignominiously forced under the railway, emerges to be, erm, ignominiously forced into an artificial channel. Actually, I love artificial channels, so there are no complaints from me. I pause, as I do whenever I pass this spot, to spend a while watching the holy water of Nottingham's true river flow gently towards the Trent. On this occasion, a young heron provides extra visual interest, stalking the cascades in search of fish.

The University of Nottingham's Kings Meadow campus, which houses 'many of the University's professional services and business support departments' and was previously a television studio complex, is the next site of interest.

Perhaps the buildings retain some memory trace of my previous visits. On this site, I've roasted under studio lights, sat in an office as the University tried to weasel its way out of a grievance I'd filed against one of its managers, had my 5G microchip implanted and researched nineteenth century city centre burial vaults.

It's a complicated relationship.

I continue happily on my way. This area, in its out-of-hours guise, makes no demands of me. Its topographical and temporal liminality is enchanting. It is, to use a South African academic's words, 'aesthetically confounding' and 'existentially liberating'.

A directional sign points towards a path between some trees, but I resist the temptation to follow it. Another sign, on a nearby business unit, declares, 'We'll help you make it happen'. I crunch my way over some windfallen crab apples and pass by The Pizza Factory, thanking my lucky stars that I don't have to spend most of my waking hours working on a production line.

The traffic on Clifton Boulevard is surprisingly well muted by the tree line on the opposite side of the road. I'm aware that at some point I must have walked over a culverted section of the Tottle Brook, which last saw daylight in Dunkirk and will re-emerge in another part of the industrial estate on its way to the Trent.

Pristine Ferraris at the Greypaul dealership present an incongruous sight. A Pizza Factory Topping Operative's pipe dream.

'Get the look for less at Tile Mountain!'

More cars. So many cars.

Midlands Tool and Plant Hire. Screwfix. Formula One Autocentres. Men welcome, women tolerated.

Lenton Lane morphs into Queen's Drive and I morph back into me. There's a bus to catch, food to buy, laundry to dry.

It was nice while it lasted.

Reincarnation

An advert from the 1925 publication Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Past & Present

I'd not been of drinking age for many years when the Old Corner Pin served its last beverage in 1989 - the end of a fairly lengthy era.

I don't remember being bowled over by the place. I'm pretty sure I'd have had a far superior experience when footballer Jimmy Cantrell was the proprietor.

Born near Chesterfield, Cantrell played as a forward for Aston Villa, Notts County and Tottenham Hotspur, winning the 1919-20 Second Division title and 1920-21 FA Cup with the latter, before finishing his playing days with Sutton Town.

A skilled golfer, after his time as licensee at the Old Corner Pin (from 1921 onwards) and a couple of other local pubs, he became steward at the Chilwell Manor Golf Club before retiring in 1947. He died in 1960, aged 78.

The building that once housed the Old Corner Pin, meanwhile, has played host to a Disney store, Etam and Miss Selfridge, and is currently occupied by the Nationwide Building Society.

Time marches on. I wonder what its next incarnation will be?

The Old Corner Pin building in 2024

'What's a typewriter, grandad?'

I spotted this advert in an edition of the Nottingham Official Handbook that was published c. 1949.

Many younger people will not have encountered, let alone used, a typewriter. It marks a person out as 'getting on a bit' if they can remember using one. As I'm in the latter category myself, the clickety-clack of a manual typewriter isn't an entirely alien concept.

I decided to find out a little more about the Bar-Lock Typewriter Company.

The Bar-Lock typewriter was invented by Charles Spiro, an American, in the 1880s. Its name refers to a feature which used a set of metal pins to ensure that each individual typebar was properly aligned and locked into position when it arrived at the contact point.

The works mentioned in the advert were in Basford. The company's products must have been held in high regard, because in early 1928 it placed adverts announcing that it had 'been honoured with the Royal Warrant of Appointment as Typewriter Manufacturers to H.M. King George V.'

The Nottingham Journal, reporting on a visit of the Nottingham Society of Engineers to the factory in September 1948, informed its readers that, 'Every 18 minutes, a new standard typewriter is completed at the factory of the Bar-Lock Typewriter Company, Nottingham. This rate of production means that 160 finished machines are turned out each week. Up to a month ago, 70 per cent went to the export market, but it is now hoped that more will reach the home market, and next month production of portable models, stopped since 1940, will begin. With certain adjustments the standard machines are sent to all parts of the world, including the Argentine, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland and the Malay States... Each machine contains over 2,000 parts, and more than 10,000 operations are needed.'

Over 500 people were employed at the Basford works at the beginning of the 1950s.

The company became known as Byron Business Machines in 1953 and had a somewhat convoluted history thereafter, in various guises.

The Basford factory is long gone, but it is recalled in the name of Barlock Road, which runs between Arnold Road and Valley Road.

A circa late 1930s OS map showing the location of the typewriter works, overlaid on the present-day street pattern (source: Nottinghamshire Insight Mapping)

Detail from a 1936 image, showing, in the centre, the Bar-Lock works, facing onto Barlock Road (source: Britain from Above)

View from Barlock Road looking towards where the frontage of the factory used to be

View towards the former location of the factory, taken from a position to the north of where it once stood

Past Glories

Player's Horizon factory, August 2018

[An earlier version of this piece appeared online in 2018]

The now vanished Player's Horizon cigarette factory on Lenton Industrial Estate had its official opening on 1 November 1972, accompanied by much fanfare, including the performance of a specially-commissioned orchestral piece called Horizon Overture by Joseph Horovitz.

At the time of the official opening, over 1,100 people worked at Horizon, with a projection that over 2,000 would be employed there a year later.

The huge factory won awards for its architecture, with one set of award judges noting that it made a 'noble addition to the industrial area of Nottingham'. However, aesthetically speaking, it had as many enemies as friends, and the managing director of property agent Innes England once referred to it as 'probably the ugliest building in Nottingham'. For my part, I thought it was a hugely impressive and - certainly from the point of view of Nottingham's industrial and social history - important building.

Following the cessation of cigarette production at Horizon in 2016, hard-nosed commercial considerations won the day. The site was decommissioned in 2018, listed status proved elusive and demolition of the factory was complete by the end of 2019. Quite remarkable given that when, in 2012, the Nottingham Post produced a special edition of its Bygones publication to mark Horizon's 40th anniversary, it noted that it produced 'around 50 per cent of the UK market and 120 million cigarettes a day, generating billions in tax revenue for the Exchequer' (along with, presumably, a not-insubstantial contribution to the woes of the NHS).

Horizon during demolition, December 2018
(enhanced photograph)

As of late 2023, the site is home to PowerPark - a speculative development of six warehouse units, all of which lie empty.

That's progress for you.

But let's rewind to happier times.

In the early 1970s, Player's, as part of the Imperial Tobacco Group, sponsored all manner of sporting and cultural events, but the real big-hitter was that epitome of glamour and excitement, Formula One.

Having originally become involved with motor racing in the late 1960s, Player's most successful promotional vehicles (excuse the pun) were the iconic John Player Special (or JPS)-liveried cars that plied their trade around the grand prix circuits of the world in the 1970s and 1980s in the hands of such renowned drivers as Emerson Fittipaldi, Mario Andretti, Nigel Mansell and Ayrton Senna.

When the Horizon factory opened, mutton-chopped Fittipaldi, from Brazil, having made his F1 debut in 1970, was the reigning world champion (the youngest to have achieved the distinction at that time), having beaten Jackie Stewart into second place over the course of 12 races between 23 January and 8 October 1972.

On 18 and 19 December 1972, Fittipaldi - presumably still basking in the glory of his championship victory whilst also having one eye on the upcoming 1973 season (due to start on 28 January) - paid a visit to Nottingham as a guest of Player's, accompanied on the first day by his wife, Maria Helena, and the Team Lotus F1 Competitions Manager, Peter Warr (later to become Lotus team manager following the death of Colin Chapman).

Peter Warr, Maria Helena Fittpaldi and Emerson Fittipaldi at the Player's medical department in Nottingham in December 1972 (source: Player's Post, 10 January 1973)

'Get your coats...'
Emerson meets some Player's marketing girls
(source: Player's Post, 10 January 1973)

An itinerary was prepared, including tours of the Player's factories, and the Guardian Journal reported in an article in its 18 December edition that, 'A specially cleared running track round the [Horizon] factory will be laid out for the young Brazilian to show off to employees the car which helped to make him the youngest ever world champion.' The article went on to say that, '...it is hoped that 26-year-old Fittipaldi will top 100 m.p.h. for the benefit of the watching employees.'

In spite of foggy weather, the demonstration drive took place as planned. The in-house staff newspaper Player's Post reported afterwards that Fittipaldi thought he had reached 100 mph, and also noted that he had 'spun off for the first and only time in 1972.' Fittipaldi joked, 'I think we have the John Player Grand Prix here next year.' It must have been a thrilling sight for those lucky enough to have been in attendance. Assistant managing director Geoffrey Kent gained further bragging rights by having the Fittipaldis stay over at his house in Gonalston.

Emerson Fittipaldi about to set off on his Horizon demonstration drive (source: Guardian Journal, 19 December 1972)

Fittipaldi's teammate for the following season was to be Swede Ronnie Peterson, who Fittipaldi thought would be 'very competitive'. These words were to prove prophetic, as Peterson finished the 1973 season only three points behind Fittipaldi, having won four grand prix to Fittipaldi's three. Both, though, were eclipsed by Jackie Stewart, who claimed the last of his three Formula One championship titles.

Fittipaldi won the Formula One world championship once more, with McLaren in 1974, before finally hanging up his F1 driving boots in 1980 to go racing in America. His marriage to Maria Helena ended in the early 1980s. Ronnie Peterson died following an accident at the 1978 Italian grand prix, while Peter Warr stayed with Lotus until 1989 and died in 2010.

It is said that, on quiet nights, on the site where Horizon once stood, the distant growl of a Ford Cosworth V8 F1 engine can sometimes be heard.

A place never forgets.

PowerPark, on the former site of Horizon, October 2023