A Portion of Meaning

'When I was walking I felt as if I had some portion of the meaning of things.'

Charles Bukowski

The best way to truly grasp the nature of a place is to walk through or around it. There is simply no substitute. If we move any faster than walking pace through any environment, it is not possible to consider it in any meaningful way.

Walking through a space (a method I like to call cross-section walking) and walking around a space (circumnavigation) offer two very different, but extremely effective ways of exploring and understanding the urban environment and registering the effect that a specific area (or even an individual feature of that area) can have on our thoughts, feelings and emotions.

Circumnavigation (interpreted as 'The act of travelling all the way around something') has long held an almost mystical appeal for humanity. The first circumnavigation of the Earth (which was by ship, of course) took place from 1519 to 1522. The first by air was achieved in 1924, taking 175 days, and the first complete orbit of the Earth in a spacecraft happened in 1961, lasting 1 hour and 48 minutes.

The date of the first pedestrian circumnavigation of the Earth is somewhat less certain due to varying recognition criteria, difficulties surrounding independent verification and the occasional bit of cheating. The earliest candidate, Konstantin Rengarten (a Russian), completed his walk in 4 years, 1 month and 13 days, between August 1894 and September 1898.

Barring a round-the-world trip by plane, train and ship in my youth, my greatest circumnavigational achievement to date was a 3-day walk around the boundary of the City of Nottingham in 2021. This journey gave me a far deeper insight into 'the matter of Nottingham' than I had previously managed in several decades of local wandering.

It seemed appropriate to test out the effectiveness of circumnavigation as an investigative, experiential tool on an even smaller scale, and a walk around the external perimeter and environs of the centre of retail gravity that is the Victoria Centre offered the perfect opportunity.

It's difficult to imagine the sense of excitement and anticipation that surrounded the Victoria Centre project during its gestation and realisation. Before the shopping centre, the 13-acre site was occupied by Nottingham Victoria railway station, which opened in 1900. The development of the station itself had necessitated the demolition of around 1,300 houses and 24 pubs.

In fact, the layers of the site's history (or at least part of it) go far deeper. Scott Lomax, the City Archaeologist, has written about a place called Whiston, which, he says, 'is believed to have been located between Huntingdon Street and York Street' [1] and 'had existed since at least 1217, when the earliest reference to the area was made.' [2] It is unclear whether Whiston was an extended part of the medieval town, a suburb, or an independent settlement.

All of these considerations lend a palpable sense of the past to a stroll around these parts.

The Victoria Centre was the largest commercial development outside of London to have been carried out by a private developer [3]. It was calculated that construction of the centre would require 20,000 lorry-loads of concrete and 6.5 million bricks [4]. Interestingly, early designs and drawings show a cinema (where McDonalds on Milton Street is now) and an adjacent urban motorway called Sheriff's Way, with three lanes in each direction [5].

Planning permission was granted in 1965, the railway station closed in 1967 and construction started in 1968. The Nottingham Evening Post and News of 13 October 1969, reporting on a site visit by HRH the Duchess of Kent, spoke of 'The Pride of Nottingham - our vast, space-age £15m Victoria "mini-city"'. The shopping centre finally opened in 1972 and the rest is history...

It's a bright, warm evening when I set out on my epic 0.96-mile/1881-step circumnavigation of the Victoria Centre, with an elevation gain of 14 feet in prospect.

The main entrance, my starting point, is a confused soup of pedestrians heading this way and that. I'm striding against the tide and am mightily relieved when I finally break free of the retail event horizon and begin to make my way along Lower Parliament Street in the direction of Pryzm (originally the Palais de Dance, also previously known as Ritzy, The Palais and Oceana). Workers and shoppers form shambolic queues next to bus stops, the great homeward migration interrupted only by the occasional e-scooter or kamikaze food delivery cyclist. You need your wits about you on these mean pavements. It's every man/woman/all points in-between for him/her/theirself.

All but one of the original occupants of the units on this stretch are long gone. Greens Cameras, the Milton's Head and Prince Albert pubs, James Baker (whatever that was) and The Golden Egg are all just a memory, but Boots has survived. The latter is a reassuring presence, even if you don't actually shop there - a thread of continuity in an ever-changing world, its Nottingham credentials still just about intact, even though it is now a subsidiary of a company whose headquarters are in Deerfield, Illinois.

I continue onwards, past some horse chestnut trees. Newcastle Street and Clare Street, to my left, were, until recently, roads to nowhere, cut off in their prime by the railway station. The redevelopment currently in progress in the area may or may not change that. Newcastle Street has always been the strangest of the two in modern times, a more-or-less redundant presence hemmed in by an immense blue brick wall on one side and an exterior wall of the (now former, truncated) Argos premises to the other. The blue brick wall tapered inward at the street's end, leaving a person-sized gap that was blocked by a fence. There are echoes of Nottingham's literary past here. William and Mary Howitt once lived in a building opposite where Wilko is now, and held regular literary gatherings there. William Wordsworth was among the many visitors.

A row of recently-opened takeaway outlets, no doubt prompted by the increasing student presence in the area, hold little interest and I round the corner into Glasshouse Street. It occurs to me that this is as much a walk around the perimeter of the old railway station site as it is around that of the shopping centre and flats. I try to conjure up an image of steam trains passing through, but it's too much of an imaginative stretch.

I'm now experiencing the grimmest part of the walk. The scene is dominated by the Victoria Centre car park entrance/exit ramps and the seemingly endless stream of traffic making its way from one end of Glasshouse Street to the other. This is one of those parts of the city centre where you become fully aware of the extent to which pedestrians have been marginalised in the insane quest to accommodate motor vehicles at any cost. It's not a place in which to linger.

The Victoria Centre flats break cover. One section is, at 75 metres, Nottingham's tallest building (though not its tallest structure - that award goes to the 91-metre high Eastcroft Incinerator chimney stack). To my mind, the flats complex is an elegant presence, but it is far from universally admired by the general populace. Its light is hidden under a bushel for the most part. The flats, a metaphysical counterbalance to the cathedral of consumption in which they are marooned, are a redemptive presence.

As a child, I remember being drawn towards places like the Victoria Centre. They were bright, shiny and full of wares that I might, just might, be able to persuade my parents to buy me.  Now that I am older and wiser, I recognise the Victoria Centre for what it is:  a place of exploitative superficiality and ennui populated by brain-washed, assimilated human beings who really should know better.

Leaving Glasshouse Street to its motorist masters, my mood lifts when I catch a first glimpse of 'the hole' - that is, the northern part of the excavated area that once contained the railway station and its associated infrastructure. For many years after the construction of the shopping centre, this area lay empty, a wondrous sight that I always hoped would be left in its 'natural' state, perhaps to be used as a park, or, failing that, an open air venue for bars, restaurants and the like. Instead, an ugly multi-storey car park  took over most of the space. Thank goodness, then, that the wheels began to come off the retail wheelbarrow before a proposed Victoria Centre extension that would have covered the area over completely came to pass. Due to this good fortune, one of the most visible reminders of the railway - the alluring sight of the south portal of the 1,189-yard Mansfield Road Tunnel - remains. For now, at least.

I turn left onto Woodborough Road, walk past the north entrance to the bus station (a shadow of its predecessor, though significantly less troubled by exhaust fumes and general filth), turn left again onto Mansfield Road and find myself on the home straight.

The Dice Cup board game cafe is doing a roaring trade, all is well at the Rose of England (Yorker in old money) and I soon arrive at the most notable remnant of the railway station - its clock tower; a handsome feature without which the frontage of the station would have been a little on the dull side.

It seems quite miraculous that the clock tower was retained as part of the new development, with its drive towards 'space-age' modernity, but thank goodness it was. An advert placed by the developer, Capital and Counties Property Co. Ltd, in the previously-mentioned 13 October 1969 edition of the Nottingham Evening Post and News, features a photo of the upper part of the clock tower next to the words, 'Time stands still in Europe's most modern shopping centre', and sets out the developer's purported rationale for its retention:

'We left the old clock tower standing on the spot where it has stood since the 19th century - while all around it we are building a shopping centre designed for the 21st century...We believe it's time England had all the benefits of a modern world; the convenience, the comforts and the efficiency. But at the same time, we believe there's always time for personal touches that preserve this country's charm and sense of tradition. That's what the old clock tower stands for.'

Utter baloney, of course, but whatever the true reason for the survival of the clock tower, which will quite conceivably outlast the shopping centre, we should be thankful for small mercies.

Ah yes, the shopping centre. As I wander around its exterior, I find myself repelled by its suggested presence. Out here on the streets, I have a sense of freedom, of possibility, but the centre itself I know to be suffocatingly prescriptive - a space where we must conform to very specific modes of behaviour.

Trying to fit these two very different environments together in my mind is like trying to touch one magnet against another. There is no dialogue between the Victoria Centre and the outside world. If any sort of relationship does exist, it is dysfunctional and dissonant.

In no time at all, I'm back at my starting point.

I've been left with a sense that both I and the area of land that I have just circumnavigated are unwitting victims of a previous generation's insatiable desire for 'the convenience, the comforts and the efficiency'.

It's a zero-sum game.

[1] Scott Lomax, Nottingham: The Buried Past of a Historic City Revealed (Pen & Sword Archaeology, 2020), p110

[2] Ibid.

[3] The Nottingham Observer, November 1967

[4] Victoria Centre Bulletin No. 3, July 1969

[5] The Nottingham Observer, November 1967