I’ve been back on the wandering trail again.
After spending much of the last few weeks walking around places that formed the backdrop to my childhood, I decided to head into Sneinton. The route would take me through the streets towards Colwick Country Park, loop around near Colwick Hall, hopacross into Bakersfield and then take me through the now increasingly familiar Colwick woods before eventually depositing me back in Sneinton again.
Sneinton is an interesting place to revisit because, growing up in Nottingham, it was one of those areas that came with a certain ‘reputation’.
Nottingham has several of them – although some have names that are frankly guilty of false advertising. To the unwary visitor, The Meadows sounds delightful. St Ann’s could be the quiet cloisters of an Oxbridge college. Forest Fields or Hyson Green evoque imagery of idyllic greenery, and Bestwood could probably be marketed as an exclusive new housing development without changing the name.
Sneinton, on the other hand, always sounded exactly like it appeared.
Particularly when pronounced properly. Not Sneen-ton like your sat nav might say, or somebody encountering the name for the first time might reasonably attempt, but Snenton. Preferably delivered quickly and in a Nottingham accent.
As kid in the 1980s I remember it as a slightly run-down inner-city area of Victorian terraces with a substantial Asian community, the sort of place that felt busy and slightly chaotic without necessarily being somewhere you’d choose to visit unless you had a reason.
We did have a reason.
For several years my brother and I attended Nottingham Olympic Judo Club on St. Stephen’s Road, under the watchful eyes of our senseis John Mewett and Dave Lawrence. Consequently Sneinton became somewhere we visited regularly, Mum dutifully taking us on Saturdays, although my mental map of it was probably little more than the journey there, the dojo itself and whatever I happened to notice through the car window along the way.
Walking down St. Stephen’s Road again, I deliberately went looking for it. It’s flats now.
There’s something oddly disconcerting about discovering that a building which occupies a perfectly solid place in your memory has simply ceased to perform the function you assigned to it. Somewhere behind those windows somebody might now go to bed in the spot where I first mastered tsuri goshi, or might take a leisurely dump where at birthday parties hosted there we’d abuse the giant inflatables to embark on ‘moonrides’ – nearly putting some of the smaller guests through the ceiling at one point!
The street itself immediately triggered another memory though. The faces.
As a child I’d noticed many of the houses around here had human faces staring out from the stonework. They’re still there. Stern-looking carved heads tucked beneath the decorative stonework around front doors, apparently watching generations of Sneintonians go about their daily business.
I always wondered who they were. Kings? Local dignitaries? The people who built the houses? Particularly unfortunate former residents who had annoyed the architect?
It turns out I’m far from the first person to notice them. Sneinton has quite a collection of these carved heads and St. Stephen’s Road is apparently particularly well endowed with them. Some look vaguely like ancient warriors, others like rather severe Victorian interpretations of people from the past, but as far as I can establish there isn’t a neat answer to the question that occupied the younger me.
They’re just… faces.
Which is simultaneously disappointing and rather wonderful. They’ve probably been staring at children walking past whilst wondering who they were for considerably longer than I’ve been alive.
Sneinton itself looked surprisingly familiar too.
The Victorian streets remain. It still feels densely packed and bustling and proudly multicultural. The Asian community I remember from childhood is still very evident, particularly the Pakistani influence, but there are now Eastern European shops and businesses mixed amongst it too. Languages and people have changed while the streets containing them largely haven’t.
That’s perhaps what I found most interesting. Sneinton hasn’t really become somewhere else. It’s simply accumulated more Sneinton.
That isn’t to say nothing has changed. Slightly off my walking route is Sneinton Market, which has undergone a transformation that would have seemed utterly implausible to the younger me. Today it’s a fashionable little enclave of independent businesses, food, drink and creative spaces. This is emphatically not the Sneinton Market I remember.
My Sneinton Market was somewhere you went to buy something electrical for 99p while accepting there was a reasonable possibility it might stop being electrical before you got it home. For some reason I have a particularly vivid memory of headphones with orange foam earpieces. They were cheap, probably sounded dreadful and presumably survived until approximately Wednesday.
Nobody was drinking artisan coffee whilst I was buying them.
The funny thing about walking Sneinton today, though, is just how quickly the city starts to disappear.
Heading along the green route eastwards, tightly packed streets give way to twitchels and finally more open space and tree-lined footpaths until suddenly you’re in Colwick Country Park. It’s remarkably easy to forget how close the Trent Valley and all that greenery are to this part of inner Nottingham.
The park itself is comparatively young. It opened in the late 1970s after former gravel workings were landscaped, but the land you’re walking through has a much longer history. The wider estate around Colwick Hall stretches back centuries, and this was parkland long before anyone thought of creating a country park. That might explain one of the things I stumbled across.
In amongst the trees I found an old brick wall, smothered in ivy and pierced by what looks very much like a former gateway. There’s no grand building immediately behind it, no helpful plaque explaining what it once enclosed and nothing obvious to tell the passing walker why it’s there at all.
Naturally, I love this. Abandoned things and mystery. That’s very much my jam!
I don’t know exactly what it is. Given the history of the surrounding land, it may be a surviving fragment associated with the old Colwick Hall estate, but for now I’d rather leave a question mark beside it than manufacture a history simply because it would be convenient to have one. Sometimes finding something you can’t immediately explain is half the fun of wandering.
More annoyingly, I also discovered afterwards I’d walked agonisingly close to the abandoned St. John the Baptist church near Colwick Hall without realising it was there. Had I known, there is absolutely no possibility I’d have walked past it – that one is going onto the list for another day.
From Colwick Park my route eventually carried me over towards Bakersfield and back through Colwick Woods, somewhere I’ve already written about. This time the woods weren’t the destination, they were simply somewhere I happened to pass through on the way back to the car. Oddly, I quite liked that.
Having recently spent a chunk of time trogging around them for childhood memories, this time I could just walk through them again. They’d returned to being part of the landscape rather than a historical exhibit I’d constructed in my own head.
Then, eventually, Sneinton swallowed me again.
There was one more familiar landmark waiting near the end of the walk, although at the moment you’d be forgiven for not immediately recognising it.
Green’s Windmill is currently swaddled in white sheeting while maintenance work takes place, looking less like one of Nottingham’s most distinctive landmarks and more like somebody has put an enormous bag over it. Underneath all that material, though, is another place that reaches straight back into my childhood.
The windmill was another memorable if not regular haunt.
As children, of course, it was simply the windmill. Somewhere Mum or Dad could take us, somewhere you could look inside, look at the scientific exhibits in the museum or – more likely – decamp to the children’s play area and burn off excess energy. Only later do you discover that the place has a rather more remarkable story.
The original tower mill was built by George Green Sr in the early nineteenth century, and his son George worked there before becoming one of Nottingham’s more unlikely contributors to the history of science. With relatively little formal education, Green produced mathematical work on electricity and magnetism that was largely overlooked during his lifetime but would eventually become enormously influential. Today Green’s theorem and Green’s functions carry the name of a Nottingham miller’s son around the world.
Which makes the fact that I basically knew the place as somewhere that was fun to play with plasma balls or on the playground perhaps more than a little ignorant!
So next time you’re tempted to think disparaging thoughts about Sneinton, remember that one of the most important mathematical physicists of the nineteenth century emerged not from some grand academic institution, but from a miller’s family on a Nottingham hillside.
After the Greens, their mill had a rather eventful afterlife: falling out of use, losing its sails, suffering a fire and spending decades as an abandoned shell before being restored and reopened in the 1980s. Which isn’t far off when I first encountered it.
Perhaps that’s the thing I hadn’t appreciated about Sneinton when I was younger. I knew it as somewhere slightly rough around the edges where we went to judo. I knew the terraces, the Asian shops, the market selling questionably inexpensive electrical goods, the windmill on the hill and those mysterious stone faces staring down from the houses.
I hadn’t really noticed how many different landscapes and stories were squeezed together around it.
Within one walk I’d passed Victorian terraces, the ghosts of my old judo club, Pakistani and Eastern European shops, a country park, mysterious estate walls, lakes, the edge of an old country house, ancient woodland and the temporarily bagged up remains of a windmill that once belonged to a largely self-taught mathematical genius.
And yet somehow it all fits together.
As a kid I used to joke that Sneinton (Snenton, remember) sounded exactly like what it was. Walking around it again all these years later, I’m not entirely sure what I thought that meant. It’s untidy in places, of course. But it’s also colourful, busy, old, multicultural. Occasionally it’s beautiful, and occasionally perhaps lacking a bit of care. It has changed enormously in some ways, and hardly at all in others.
Perhaps the little stone faces opposite the old dojo on St. Stephen’s Road understand it better than I do.
They were there when I walked past them as a boy on my way to judo. The windmill was up on the hill. They’re both still there now, while the dojo has become flats, the market has discovered artisan food, new communities have arrived and I’ve somehow become the middle-aged bloke wandering around taking photographs of all of it.
I still don’t know who the faces are supposed to be.
But I do rather like the fact they’re still watching.
Goddammit 
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