Posts Tagged With: nottingham

Goose Fayre and the Rebel Town

Posted on September 15, 2026 by Alan

We didn’t visit Colyton.

In fact, until a few days ago I knew virtually nothing about it. We were simply driving through Devon on our way to Lyme Regis when a roadside sign caught my attention.

Goose Fayre.

Now, as a Nottingham boy, I have certain proprietary instincts where those two words are concerned. Admittedly ours is generally spelled Fair, rather than Fayre, but that’s beside the point. Goose Fair is Nottingham. Seven hundred-odd years of history, the Forest Recreation Ground, fairground rides appearing on the skyline, mushy peas with mint sauce, and the annual certainty that it will rain at some point.

So seeing a Goose Fayre advertised in Devon was enough to make me wonder what was going on.

Then another sign appeared.

Colyton — Devon’s Most Rebellious Town.

Steady on.

Now they’re nicking Nottingham’s other thing.

Because Nottingham likes to think of itself as a rebellious place too. Robin Hood provides the largely mythical version, but there is plenty of real history behind it: kings and castles, Luddites and Chartists, and the very real rioters who burned Nottingham Castle during the turmoil surrounding the 1831 Reform Bill — assorted people, in other words, with a tendency to become rather cross when someone tells them what to do.

Two signs had lodged themselves in my head.

We carried on to Lyme Regis, and had a lovely day!

And I subsequently disappeared down a rabbit hole later whilst chilling out.

So why is Colyton rebellious?

It turns out Colyton has considerably more justification for the boast than I had imagined.

The answer takes us to 1685 and the death of Charles II. His brother succeeded him as James II, giving England something that made a substantial part of the population deeply uncomfortable: an openly Catholic king.

One possible alternative was James Scott, Duke of Monmouth.

Monmouth was Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son. Protestant, charismatic and popular in parts of the country, he had no legitimate claim to the throne unless you accepted disputed claims that his parents had secretly married.

Monmouth decided that he did.

On 11 June 1685 he landed with a small force at Lyme Regis, raised his standard and called upon people to join him against James II.

Which was the point at which I realised that our destination that day wasn’t merely incidental to the story at all.

We’d been travelling towards the place where the rebellion began.

And just a few miles away, Colyton answered Monmouth’s call in extraordinary numbers.

One hundred and five men and boys from the town joined the rebellion.

For a small community, that was an enormous commitment. Colyton had a strong tradition of Protestant Nonconformity and religious dissent, and when a Protestant challenger to James appeared almost on its doorstep, a significant proportion of its able-bodied men apparently decided that overthrowing the king seemed like a reasonable use of their summer.

Suddenly Devon’s Most Rebellious Town didn’t seem quite such an extravagant claim.

Unfortunately for them, it didn’t go well.

Monmouth’s improvised army marched through the West Country before meeting the royal army at Sedgemoor in Somerset on 6 July 1685.

The rebels were defeated.

Monmouth was captured and executed.

Then came the retribution.

Judge George Jeffreys presided over the proceedings that became infamous as the Bloody Assizes. Hundreds of captured rebels were condemned to death or transportation.

Colyton paid heavily for its enthusiasm.

Seven of its rebels were eventually executed in the town itself.

The rebellion was over.

James II had won.

For about three years.

Which is where Nottingham comes back in

At this point my two roadside signs had already provided a perfectly satisfying little historical diversion.

Colyton had its Goose Fayre. Colyton had its rebellious history. Nottingham had ours.

Nice coincidence.

Except the more I looked at the rebellion, the more the two places began to intertwine.

To explain why requires going backwards before going forwards.

In August 1642, Charles I came to Nottingham.

There, on what was then known as the Castle Hill, he raised his royal standard. It’s now called Standard Hill, it has a plaque and everything!

It’s traditionally regarded as the symbolic beginning of the English Civil War.

The symbolism is slightly complicated by the fact that Nottingham itself was hardly a dependable Royalist stronghold. The town subsequently sided with Parliament and Nottingham Castle was held for Parliament by Colonel John Hutchinson.

Still, the image remains: a Stuart king raising his standard at Nottingham and calling upon his subjects to rally to him.

Forty-three years later, his grandson Monmouth raised another standard at Lyme Regis.

This time the call was to rebel against Charles I’s son.

And the men of Colyton answered it.

Charles I had been executed in 1649. His son Charles II had eventually been restored to the throne. Charles II’s brother James II succeeded him. Charles II’s illegitimate son Monmouth then tried to overthrow his uncle.

The Stuart family tree was not exactly conducive to peaceful government.

But the symmetry gets better.

Because although Monmouth and the Colyton rebels failed in 1685, another attempt to remove James II followed just three years later.

This one succeeded.

Back to Nottingham

In November 1688, William of Orange landed in England.

The event we now rather politely call the Glorious Revolution was underway.

James’s support began to collapse, and uprisings broke out in his opponents’ favour.

One of the places where they gathered was Nottingham.

On 22 November, the nobility, gentry and common people assembled there issued a declaration complaining that their religion, liberties and properties were threatened by James’s government and declaring their support for William.

Nottingham became a rendezvous for the Midlands rising.

Even more remarkably, James II’s own daughter Anne fled her father’s court and ultimately joined his opponents there.

Think about that sequence for a moment.

1642: Nottingham.

Charles I raises his standard, summoning support for a Stuart king whose authority is being challenged.

1685: Lyme Regis and Colyton.

Charles I’s grandson raises his standard against Charles I’s son. More than a hundred people leave one small Devon community to join him.

They lose.

1688: Nottingham.

Opponents of that same son of Charles I gather in the place where his father had raised the royal standard.

This time James II loses.

The Nottingham declaration supported William of Orange, James’s Protestant son-in-law, and James’s own daughter joined the opposition.

Within weeks James had fled England.

The men of Colyton had backed the wrong rebellion by three years.

Of geese and rebels

None of this answers the question that started the whole thing.

What was a Goose Fayre doing in Devon?

The slightly disappointing answer is that Nottingham does not, in fact, possess exclusive historical rights to geese.

Autumn fairs involving livestock were once commonplace, and geese were traditionally driven considerable distances to market at the appropriate time of year. Nottingham’s Goose Fair is extraordinary not because nobody else ever had one, but because ours survived and evolved into the enormous event it is today.

Colyton’s modern Goose Fayre is a community revival of its own old fair tradition.

So there doesn’t appear to be some lost historical connection between the two Goose Fairs.

Which, actually, I rather like.

Because the connection I thought I’d spotted wasn’t there.

Instead I found a much better one.

A Devon town’s claim to a Goose Fayre caught the attention of someone from Nottingham. Its claim to rebelliousness made me look twice.

Then I followed that rebellion back to Lyme Regis, where we happened to be going in the first place, through the catastrophically dysfunctional Stuart dynasty, and eventually all the way back to Nottingham.

We never visited Colyton.

We just drove past the signs.

Sometimes that’s all it takes.

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Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?

Posted on September 6, 2026 by Alan

I have two of Mr Naylor’s medals.

He didn’t leave them to me. After he died, I found them among the things in his house after his belongings had been picked through by fairly distant relatives.

I couldn’t bear the thought of them simply disappearing. They were wrapped in waxed paper, tucked inside a small, battered cardboard box marked OHMS.

I knew they must have meant something to him.

So I kept them.

More than twenty years later, I found myself looking at them properly.

There are two: a Defence Medal and a War Medal 1939–45. Unlike the First World War medals I’d been looking at as part of some family-history research, neither has its recipient’s name stamped around the edge. But the box does have a name and address:

Mr A. Naylor
67 Fernleigh Ave
Westdale Lane
Mapperley
Nottingham

Which is odd.

Because Mr N lived at number 71.

Which naturally prompted some questions that I just can’t help trying to unpick.

We moved to Fernleigh Avenue when I was a child – probably around 8 years old – and my earliest memory of the Naylors involves a guinea pig.

Ours had escaped and, exercising the sort of navigational judgement you might expect from a guinea pig, had ended up next door.

Mrs Naylor was lovely. Larger than life, certainly compared with her husband, and wonderfully welcoming as we attempted to retrieve our fugitive pet from her garden.

Mr Naylor was much quieter.

In fact, in those earliest memories he was almost a supporting character to Mrs N. He was just Mr Naylor, although over the years that became shortened to Mr N.

I don’t think I even knew Mrs Naylor’s first name back then.

I do now.

She was Dorothy.

Dorothy Naylor died in 1988, which means it can’t have been very long after we moved to Fernleigh Avenue. And with her death something changed. Not immediately or dramatically, but the quieter half of the couple next door gradually became somebody we knew much better.

Mr N became a fixture.

He was a Derby County supporter, which was unfortunate given that he had moved into a Nottingham Forest-supporting household’s sphere of influence.

He particularly enjoyed asking about the football when Forest had not done very well. These enquiries were invariably delivered with an innocence that fooled nobody. His calm delivery belied a wicked sense of humour.

As it turns out, he had earned the right.

Mr N really was from Derbyshire.

His full name was Archibald Naylor, and he was born on Christmas Day, 1906.

That was something else I once knew and had forgotten. Mr N’s birthday was Christmas Day.

The records put his birthplace at Ilkeston. His father, Henry William Naylor, came from Loscoe and was a self-employed confectioner.

In 1921, Archie was fourteen.

This is where researching somebody you actually knew becomes slightly peculiar.

The Mr N of my memory is an old man. I can picture him perfectly well in his house next door. I can hear the mischievous enquiries about Forest. But until now I’d never had cause to imagine fourteen-year-old Archie Naylor.

He had a job.

He was an errand boy for a hairdresser called W. Annable.

There is something wonderful about discovering such a completely mundane fact about somebody decades after they died. I knew Mr N for years. I knew what football team he supported and what he thought constituted an adequate Sunday dinner.

I had absolutely no idea he’d once been a hairdresser’s errand boy.

By 1935 he’d moved into another phase of his life. Archie married Dorothy Shephard that year.

Four years later, the 1939 Register finds them together on Fernleigh Avenue. I suspect they may have moved there as newlyweds, possibly even into a newly built house, although that’s one part of the story I haven’t yet managed to prove.

Archibald Naylor, born 25 December 1906.

Dorothy Naylor, born 26 September 1902.

Both had the same occupation:

Hosiery cutter.

Perhaps that’s how they met.

I don’t know that, and records can’t tell us. Nottingham and its surrounding towns were built on hosiery, so two people working in the industry finding one another was hardly remarkable.

But I like the possibility.

What we can say is that in 1939 the young Mr and Mrs N weren’t at number 71.

They were at 57 Fernleigh Avenue.

At some later point Mr N’s address was number 67, because that’s where his wartime medals were sent. By the time I knew him, it was 71.

Fernleigh Avenue was still developing around them, with new houses appearing and numbering changing. Exactly when those numbers changed — and whether every change represents renumbering rather than a move a few doors along — is something I haven’t quite untangled yet, I’m pretty sure they never moved house though.

But the little cardboard medal box suddenly made something I’d never thought about before visible.

Mr N had been on Fernleigh Avenue for a very long time.

The medals themselves raise more questions than they answer.

The two I have are the Defence Medal and the War Medal 1939–45.

I have a vague recollection that Mr N’s war was spent at home, perhaps in something akin to the Home Guard. I certainly don’t remember him talking about serving overseas.

But memory isn’t evidence, and I don’t know.

That’s one of the strange things about this exercise.

Why didn’t I ask him?

The obvious answer is that I was a child and then a teenager, and Mr N was an old man who lived next door. Although, like plenty of teenage boys, I went through at least a passing obsession with the war, which makes it slightly surprising that I never thought to ask.

People don’t generally introduce themselves to children with an eighty-year autobiography.

And when somebody is part of your everyday life, you tend to know them in the present tense.

Mr N was simply Mr N.

His lounge had decorative plates on the wall depicting Bill Sikes and Fagin. I remember those.

He had an elephant door knocker. I remember that too. In fact, the elephant survived him, migrating next door and spending its retirement in the garden room at Mum and Dad’s.

I remember his football team.

I remember his dinners.

I don’t remember ever asking what he’d done to earn the medals.

As he got older, Mr N increasingly relied on Meals on Wheels.

There was, however, a flaw in the system.

They didn’t deliver on Sundays.

So Mum started plating up an extra Sunday dinner and we’d take it round to him.

The first time we did this, Mr N inspected what we’d brought and asked about pudding.

We didn’t habitually have pudding.

This apparently constituted a serious failure in the service we were providing.

Mum frantically improvised something.

Thereafter, we had pudding on Sundays.

Thanks, Mr N.

Eventually somebody reached the fairly obvious conclusion that if we were cooking Mr N a Sunday dinner anyway, carrying it next door was unnecessarily complicated.

So instead of dinner going to Mr N, Mr N came to dinner.

And then Christmas.

I hadn’t thought until doing this research about the fact that every Christmas Mr N spent with us was also his birthday.

Christmas Day 1906.

I must once have known that. Perhaps we even marked it at the time. But it had disappeared somewhere into the enormous collection of things you once knew and didn’t realise you’d forgotten.

The record gave it back to me.

There was one occasion when I got home from school before Mum and Dad.

The phone rang.

It was Mr N.

He wasn’t very well.

I was old enough to understand that something needed doing, so after popping over to him and finding him struggling, I called an ambulance.

Unfortunately I wasn’t quite smart enough to reliably calculate which direction house numbers went.

We lived at number 69. Mr N lived next door, so in my youthful wisdom I subtracted two and confidently told the emergency services operative that he was at number 67.

He wasn’t.

He was at 71.

Mr N, despite being ill enough that I’d just summoned an ambulance for him, had to correct me.

I find that particularly funny now.

Because sitting in front of me today is a cardboard box addressed:

Mr A. Naylor
67 Fernleigh Avenue.

I was right.

Just several decades too late.

Archibald Naylor died in the first few months of 2004.

He was 97 years old.

That number surprised me even though I knew he’d been well into his nineties. Ninety-seven years is an enormous amount of life.

And what follows is an almost comically inadequate summary of one.

He had been born before the First World War.

At fourteen he ran errands for a hairdresser.

He married Dorothy in 1935.

They cut hosiery for a living.

He lived through another world war and undertook some form of service during it, although I still don’t know exactly what.

He spent decades with Dorothy.

He lost her in 1988 and lived another sixteen years without her.

And that’s about it.

Ninety-seven years compressed into a handful of facts gathered from forms filled in decades apart.

I don’t know what Archie was doing on his twentieth birthday. I don’t know where he and Dorothy went on their first date, or whether they had one. I don’t know what they did on Saturday nights, where they went on holiday, what frightened them, what they argued about, or what made them laugh.

I don’t even know what he did during a world war whose medals are sitting on the desk in front of me.

But I do know that, much later, he expected pudding with his Sunday dinner.

And perhaps that’s the strange bargain between records and memory.

The records can tell me things about Mr N that I never knew. They can introduce me to Archie: the Derbyshire boy, the fourteen-year-old hairdresser’s errand runner, the hosiery cutter, Dorothy’s new husband, the man already living on Fernleigh Avenue before the Second World War had begun.

But the records don’t know about the Bill Sikes and Fagin plates.

They don’t know about the elephant door knocker.

There is no box on the 1939 Register for enjoyed enquiring about Nottingham Forest after a defeat.

And nowhere in the official record of the life of Archibald Naylor will it say that an elderly widower once asked where his pudding was and consequently changed the Sunday dining habits of the family next door.

Those are the bits we get to keep.

Between the records and the memories, perhaps we can see a little more of him than either could preserve alone.

Not a 97-year life. Not even close.

Just fragments of one.

For more than twenty years, two of those fragments have been sitting in a little cardboard box.

I kept Mr N’s medals because I knew they mattered to him. I still don’t know exactly why.

But they made me curious enough to ask.

And perhaps that’s what telling somebody’s story really amounts to.

Not recovering everything.

Just making sure that a little more of them survives.

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KAOS at the Pit Tips

Posted on August 30, 2026 by Alan

Somewhere underneath the landscaping, redevelopment and general passage of more than thirty years, I like to imagine there is still a faint chalk mark on a forgotten piece of concrete at the former Gedling Colliery.

KAOS.

There almost certainly isn’t. The surface I wrote it on has probably long since disappeared, and chalk was never built for posterity.

But for a brief period in the early 1990s, KAOS was my tag. When I say a brief period, it was likely just one afternoon.

I should probably explain.

When I was in my mid-teens, a friend and I spent quite a lot of time exploring the bits of Nottingham that were not really intended to be explored. This was the early 1990s, when teenagers seemed to enjoy considerably more freedom to disappear for hours at a time without anybody being entirely sure where they were.

Or perhaps our parents just made a serious error of judgement regarding just how sensible we’d be on our very loose leashes!

One of our favourite destinations was Pit Tips—our name for the sprawling remains of the recently closed Gedling Colliery.

Our timing, although we did not appreciate it then, was rather extraordinary.

Gedling Colliery had closed in November 1991 after nearly ninety years of mining. If my memory is right, our expeditions were around 1992 or 1993. We were not exploring some ancient industrial ruin that had been abandoned for decades. The place had barely stopped being a working coal mine.

Today, when something survives from our industrial past, there tends to be a nice path, an interpretation board and perhaps a QR code.

This was not like that.

There were still buildings. There was still machinery. Conveyor belts and great pieces of industrial equipment whose purpose I could not have explained then and certainly cannot now. Astonishingly in retrospect, two teenage boys could apparently just wander into some of it.

I have very clear memories of being inside those buildings.

I do not remember encountering security. I do not remember particularly substantial fences. I do not even remember having the sense that getting inside was especially difficult.

Fortunately, I also do not remember finding anything that offered access underground. Gedling’s mine shafts descended hundreds of metres beneath the surface, so I am extremely grateful that our particular brand of teenage curiosity remained resolutely above ground.

At the colliery, at least.

Because we had another underground playground nearby.

But before we get to that, there is the small matter of the vandalism.

Teenage delinquents. Sort of.

On at least one expedition to Pit Tips, we had gone prepared.

We took chalk.

Because while we clearly considered ourselves pretty badass, we apparently were not badass enough for spray paint.

Armed with our terrifying arsenal of coloured calcium carbonate, we liberally decorated bits of the abandoned colliery with our chosen tags.

Those tags provide an almost perfect way of dating the experience.

My friend chose Warchild.

Warchild was one of the surfers in Point Break, released in 1991 and therefore still relatively new. We were both into skateboarding at the time—although neither of us was especially good at it—so a Point Break-inspired alter ego probably made perfect sense to us. It was a respectable choice for a teenage boy attempting to establish an edgy identity.

I chose KAOS.

Not after a film. Not after a gang member. Not after anything anybody without an Amiga was particularly likely to recognise.

KAOS was a section from the first Megademo by a Danish Amiga demo group called Budbrain.

Even my teenage rebellion was nerdy.

Amiga demos were awesome

For anyone who missed that particular corner of home-computer culture, demos were programmers, musicians and graphic artists showing off. Groups produced increasingly elaborate demonstrations of what they could persuade computers like the Amiga to do, often seemingly exceeding what the hardware ought to have been capable of.

They spread on floppy disks, copied from friend to friend, and the best became minor legends among Amiga owners.

Budbrain’s first Megademo appeared in 1990 and included a section called KAOS. It clearly made enough of an impression on teenage me that I adopted it as my nom de vandalism.

So naturally I wrote it all over a recently abandoned coal mine.

In chalk.

Move over, Banksy.

Beneath the Pepper Pots

Pit Tips was not the only enticingly inadvisable place nearby.

Hidden in the trees was the eastern portal of Mapperley Railway Tunnel.

The tunnel had once carried the Great Northern Railway beneath the ridge between Gedling and Woodthorpe. Opened in 1875, it ran for 1,132 yards—just over a kilometre—before emerging on the other side of the hill near what is now Weaverthorpe Road.

By the time we found it, trains had not run through it for more than thirty years.

Getting there meant following the old railway cutting through the trees. One landmark I remember particularly clearly was an old burned-out Ford Fiesta sitting not far from the tunnel portal.

Because of course there was.

It was an abandoned railway cutting in Nottingham in the early 1990s. It would almost have been suspicious if there had not been a burned-out car in it.

The tunnel portal itself was simply open.

There may have been signs telling us not to enter. There may even have been some token attempt to discourage access that I have forgotten.

But whatever was there clearly was not sufficient to defeat two teenagers.

So in we went.

The tunnel had two ventilation shafts along its length, topped at ground level by structures locally known as the Pepper Pots, for the fairly obvious reason that that is what they looked like.

We knew them from above as well as below. At least one formed part of the site used by a local Scout group, and we had been to bonfire parties there.

Underneath, one of the shafts demonstrated another long-established local tradition: chucking rubbish into any sufficiently large hole.

People had apparently been using it as a convenient vertical dumping ground for years, resulting in an enormous cone of detritus piled on the tunnel floor beneath it.

We carried on past it.

Mapperley Tunnel had suffered badly from mining subsidence during its operational life, including a major collapse in the 1920s. After the railway closed, part of the tunnel was eventually filled.

But not quite all the way to the roof.

This was important.

Because if you are a teenage boy and somebody has gone to the trouble of filling an unsafe railway tunnel with tonnes of material but has accidentally left a narrowing gap above it, you do not interpret this as “clearly we should turn around.”

You interpret it as a challenge.

At first we could walk normally. Then we had to duck. Then duck a little further.

The ground kept rising towards the roof.

Somewhere beyond the earth ahead of us was the western portal near Weaverthorpe Road. Another Scout group had premises nearby, and friends who went there brought back tantalising reports that somebody had once dug around the buried portal and reckoned there was open tunnel behind it.

That was all the evidence we required.

We did not make it through.

Eventually the gap became sufficiently small that even our teenage brains began to register that crawling further into a partially filled railway tunnel with a long history of subsidence might not be entirely sensible.

I think we got to somewhere around where Plains Road runs overhead before finally admitting defeat.

Looking back, I find it reassuring that we apparently possessed some instinct for self-preservation.

It just kicked in considerably later than would generally be recommended.

There was also something beautifully circular about the whole expedition. One of the Pepper Pots above us was associated with one Scout group. Our mythical destination was beside another.

We were, quite literally, passing underneath one Scout group in a vain attempt to reach another.

Going back

Years later, I went back. I wrote about it on here, in fact.

By then the entrance was fenced off, which was probably a sensible development.

There was still a way in.

Which was probably less sensible.

In 2012, I returned with friends, better torches and the vastly improved judgement and maturity that comes with adulthood.

We went into the tunnel again.

We passed beneath the Pepper Pots again.

We reached the backfill again.

And we carried on until the steadily diminishing headroom persuaded us to turn around.

Again.

So apparently the principal difference between teenage me and adult me was better illumination.

What had changed much more dramatically was the world outside the tunnel.

The Gedling Colliery I remembered was gone.

The buildings we had wandered through disappeared as the site was cleared. The machinery and conveyors vanished. Nature gradually reclaimed areas that had once been dominated by heavy industry.

Even the waste recycling centre that had arrived on the site in the 1990s had gone, another brief role for the landscape blinked in and out of existence between my forays.

Eventually, much of the former colliery became Gedling Country Park.

It is, objectively, a much nicer place.

But it is almost impossible for me to walk around there without mentally superimposing another landscape on top of it.

I remember Pit Tips.

And I think that is what fascinates me most about these memories.

We happened to catch Gedling Colliery between identities.

For nearly ninety years, it had been a workplace. Thousands of people had passed through its gates. Generations had earned their living there. Coal had been hauled from hundreds of metres beneath the ground.

Then, in 1991, it stopped.

For a relatively brief period afterwards, the infrastructure remained but its purpose had gone.

And into that gap wandered two teenage boys with some chalk.

Today, I suppose what we were doing would be called urban exploration. There would be photographs, YouTube videos and online communities devoted to it.

We did not know we were urban explorers, we were making memories, not content.

We were just going to Pit Tips.

There is always a danger when remembering childhood of concluding that everything was better then.

It was not.

And I am not convinced that teenagers being able to wander unchallenged through recently abandoned coal-mining infrastructure and then disappear into a condemned railway tunnel represents an unambiguous triumph of early-1990s childhood.

In hindsight, some of it was bloody stupid.

But I am still glad we did it.

Because places in transition have always fascinated me. There is something exciting about somewhere whose original purpose has ended but whose next purpose has not yet arrived. The people have gone, but the physical evidence of what they did there remains.

Eventually somebody decides what happens next.

The buildings come down. The machinery is removed. The fences go up. The landscaping begins. Trees grow. Paths appear. Houses arrive.

And gradually the place you knew survives only in photographs and memories.

I suspect the days when people can wander into Mapperley Tunnel are numbered too. Development is pushing ever closer and, entirely reasonably, an open entrance into an unstable Victorian railway tunnel is not the sort of neighbourhood feature developers generally advertise in the brochure.

Perhaps one day it really will become inaccessible.

Perhaps that is no bad thing.

But whenever I pass that part of Nottingham, there is still another version of the landscape tucked away in my head.

A burned-out Fiesta in the cutting.

A black tunnel mouth in the trees.

Pepper Pots overhead.

The remains of a coal mine that had only just stopped being a coal mine.

And somewhere amongst it all, two teenage idiots wandering around with a box of chalk.

One of them was Warchild.

And the other—because apparently I was incapable of being cool even while trespassing—was KAOS.

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Walking back into Sneinton

Posted on August 11, 2026 by Alan

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.

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Walking through the Lagoons..

Posted on July 18, 2026 by Alan

Over the last week I’ve found myself doing a lot of wandering. I think it’s time well spent when I have a few days off work. One walk leads to another, and before long you’ve found yourself revisiting places you haven’t properly thought about for decades.

Yesterday’s walk began somewhere that was familiar long before I reached the footpath.

I parked on Godfrey Street in Netherfield, outside the first house I ever bought. It’s funny how ordinary somewhere can look once enough years have passed. At the time it represented everything that came with finally becoming an adult: my first mortgage, decorating rooms that were suddenly my responsibility, discovering just how many things can unexpectedly break when you own a house. Standing there yesterday it was simply another terraced street with cars lining the kerb. If I hadn’t lived there, I’d probably have driven straight past without giving it a second thought.

From there I wandered down towards Netherfield Lagoons.

If you’ve never visited, it’s a remarkably peaceful place. Reeds sway gently beside the paths, dragonflies dart over the water and birds seem to outnumber people. It’s difficult to imagine that this landscape was once anything else.

Yet that’s not how I remember it.

As children, Dad would occasionally bring Rich and me here armed with an air rifle and a pocketful of pellets. We weren’t hunting anything more exciting than tin cans balanced on old banks or tucked safely into whatever earthworks we could find. My memories are hazy now, but I remember rough ground, overgrown ditches and a landscape that felt forgotten rather than protected. There were railway lines too, active ones from memory, where crossing points seemed rather more casual than modern health and safety would ever tolerate.

Perhaps memory has exaggerated some of that. Perhaps I simply didn’t quite find the same corner yesterday. Either way, I found almost none of the landscape I remembered.

Instead there were butterflies drifting across wildflowers, birdsong replacing the metallic soundtrack I’d half expected, and cyclists, dog-walkers and birdwatchers quietly enjoying somewhere that has become one of Nottinghamshire’s loveliest nature reserves.

Walking beyond the lagoons and alongside the River Trent brought back another memory.

I remember meeting my uncle here while he was fishing. I couldn’t tell you whether he caught anything that day. I can’t remember what we talked about. I simply remember him sitting there, rod in hand, as though he’d always belonged beside the river. Funny how memory works like that. It often remembers the person far more clearly than the event itself.

A little further downstream I reached Trent Lock, where the river briefly divides around the weir before boats continue their journey through the lock. It’s one of those pieces of engineering that quietly does its job without demanding much attention.

No boats were using the lock whilst I was there – which probably spared me from reliving a somewhat traumatic canal boat holiday from childhood. That’s perhaps a story for another day.

Leaving the river, the footpath heads back across the fields as you reach the village of Stoke Bardolph.

Most people know Stoke Bardolph for its water treatment works. As children, however, we had a rather less sophisticated name for it.

It was simply “the shit farm.”

Dad would occasionally bring us here too, where we’d stand at what seemed a perfectly acceptable distance throwing stones into what I now know was sewage slurry. Looking back, I’m amazed we were ever allowed anywhere near the place. Today, mature trees screen much of the works from view and modern security makes wandering up to the edge completely impossible.

It’s probably for the best.

Some childhood adventures are best left in childhood.

The more I walked, the more I realised how thoroughly this landscape has reinvented itself. The lagoons themselves exist because people reshaped the floodplain. Gravel was dug here, railway sidings once spread across the area, and later the settling lagoons received coal slurry pumped back from nearby Gedling Colliery after the coal had been washed. It was a working landscape, built to serve industry rather than wildlife.

Now, nature has quietly reclaimed almost all of it. That’s the most remarkable transformation of all: a landscape once shaped entirely by industry now feels as though nature was always in charge.

It’s remarkable how completely it has succeeded. Standing among the reeds, it’s difficult to picture excavators, freight wagons or industrial settling ponds. If you didn’t know the history, you’d assume the birds had always been here.

As I looped back towards Godfrey Street, it struck me that I’d spent much of the afternoon searching for places that no longer really exist.

The rough ground where we balanced tin cans has disappeared beneath grass and wildflowers. The industrial landscape has softened into wetlands. Even the sewage works has hidden itself behind a curtain of mature trees.

Yet somehow the memories remain perfectly intact.

Perhaps that’s what these walks have really been about.

Not finding places exactly as they were, because they often aren’t – although not every landscape changes so dramatically. Lambley Dumbles and Colwick Woods still feel remarkably close to the places I remember growing up.

Places evolve, just as we do. Industries close. Nature returns. Houses change hands. Children grow older.

What stays with us isn’t the landscape itself but the moments we borrowed from it.

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Looking for the Perfect Stick

Posted on July 15, 2026 by Alan

This week I’ve been doing a lot of wandering and pondering. I think it’s time well spent when I have a few days off work. Today I found myself drawn to another place from my childhood.

I’d planned a longish walk – around five miles – that would take me from Carlton Hill, down towards Sneinton and up into Bakersfield and eventually into Colwick Woods before looping back again. Looking at the map beforehand, I realised something I’d never really considered before.

Growing up in Mapperley, then buying my first houses in Netherfield and Gedling I’d spent years quietly orbiting Carlton. Dad’s side of the family seemed to inhabit every corner of the suburb, so we were frequent visitors whether it was to see Mama on a Saturday or one of my uncles and aunties, they were all there – those still with us still are!

And right on its doorstep is Colwick Woods.

I honestly can’t recall when Dad first starting taking me and Rich there.

It feels as though they were simply always part of childhood.

The funny thing about childhood memories is that they don’t usually arrive in chronological order. They arrive in flashes. One moment I’m searching the woodland floor for the perfect stick. Not just any stick, but the sort that absolutely had to become a magnificent longbow.

As far as I can remember, none of them ever did.

Finding them always seemed to be far more important than making them. Then another memory surfaces.

Dad telling us about one of his childhood friends running full speed down a hill and straight into a tree. I’ve often wondered whether that actually happened or whether it was simply an inspired piece of parenting designed to discourage two energetic boys from doing exactly the same thing. Either way, it mostly worked.

Some memories arrive attached to people – one afternoon I think nearly back at the car I managed to disturb what was probably a wasps’ nest. I remember John, a dear family friend sadly no longer with us instantly leaping into action. At the time I simply remember him furiously swatting wasps that had dared sting me. I don’t think I ever saw John express anger before or after that event.

I don’t think he was really angry with the wasps, perhaps he was simply furious that something had hurt one of his people.

Other memories arrive attached to the sky – I clearly remember standing in the open grassland watching the Red Arrows thunder overhead. I recall it was planned. I’ve no idea where they were going, or what event they were performing at, or even how my parents knew they’d be passing overhead. None of that mattered. We simply stood there looking up.

The same hills became sledging runs when winter decided to oblige. Looking back now, they don’t seem anywhere near as steep as they once did. Perhaps hills shrink as we grow, or perhaps imagination simply makes everything bigger.

Another memory has stayed with me for decades despite never actually happening. Throughout a chunk of my childhood I had the same recurring dream.

Somehow, a travelling fair had arrived on the open grassland beside the woods. I remember winning a toy fire engine before wandering into the woodland with my friends Carl and Phil. The woods were familiar and weird all at once. The ground undulated almost like freshly ploughed earth and, somehow, the branches and shadows in the trees formed enormous smiling and frowning faces, like the comedy and tragedy masks you see outside old theatres.

The dream was viewed from the side as we wobbled over the uneven ground, apparently unconcerned with our eerie surroundings. I haven’t dreamt it for years. Yet I can still picture it more vividly than places I’ve actually visited. Memory is a strange thing. Sometimes imagination leaves deeper footprints than reality.

Returning to today, I found myself noticing how much had changed. The broad grassy areas I remembered being closely mown and green have become flowering meadows as part of the woodland’s management as a local nature reserve. In the July sunshine they’d taken on that familiar straw-coloured appearance that only comes after a spell of proper summer weather.

Yet the woodland itself felt reassuring familiar. The valleys still scoop away towards the railway and Colwick Loop Road, there are still glimpses through and over the fence across the Trent Valley, Colwick Hall and Nottingham Racecourse. The paths still invite you to wonder what’s around the next bend, or which fork to choose.

Although these days I’m no longer looking for the perfect stick, the woods still have a habit of leading me down rabbit holes. Only now they’re nostalgia and local history warrens rather than imaginary archery.

Even the name Colwick tells a story. I’d always idly wondered whether it might somehow have been an accidental mutation of “cowlick” over the centuries, but probably not. It almost certainly derives from the Old English Cola’s wīc – a farm or dairy settlement belonging to someone called Cola. Over the centuries, Cola’s Wic quietly became Colwick.

Maybe that dairy fixation leads to the twice-extinct Colwick Cheese. Rich wrote about this before so I won’t repeat the point here.

By the time William the Conqueror’s surveyors compiled the Domesday Book in 1086, Colwick was already a substantial place (listed as Colewic). It had a church, a mill, woodland, meadow, fisheries on the Trent and around thirty-four households spread across three separate manors. While my childhood imagination was busy turning sticks into longbows, it never occurred to me that people had been making their homes around these woods for at least nine centuries before I arrived.

The woods themselves are older still – parts of them are designated ancient woodland, surviving as one of those increasingly rare fragments of woodland that has remained wooded for centuries. They once formed part of the deer park belonging to Colwick Hall and, like so many old landscapes, every generation seems to have found a different purpose for them. Even during the Second World War, the wider area found itself playing a role as a prisoner of war camp for German and Italian prisoners.

I didn’t think of any of this as a child – I simply thought they were woods. Only years later do you begin to realise how many stories they’ve quietly witnessed – ranging from moments of grand historical significance to individual formative moments.

As I dragged my weary legs up the hills of Bakersfield back towards the car, I realised Colwick Woods has two different histories – the version you’ll find in books and from Google searches: ancient woodland, deer parks, OId English place names, estate history, wars, nature conservation.

But then there’s the other history.

Dad carrying sticks while two boys searched for ‘better’ ones, John defending a clumsy boy from angry wasps. The Red Arrows overhead. Snow on the hills. Dreams that somehow still linger decades later.

Neither history is more important than the other. One belongs to the landscape, the other belongs to my family. They’re now impossible for me to separate.

Maybe that’s why certain places stay with us – not because they’re especially beautiful, not because they’re historically important (although Colwick Woods ticks both those boxes), but because – without ever realising it at the time – they quietly become woven into the fabric of our lives.

When I was a boy, Colwick Woods was simply somewhere Dad took us at the weekend or during the school holidays. Now, walking the same paths, I realise he was giving us something rather more valuable, a place we’d carry with us for the rest of our lives.

I very much doubt Dad ever imagined that one day I’d come back here wondering who Cola was, looking up entries in the Domesday Book or writing about ancient woodland. He probably just thought he was taking his boys for a walk.

Addendum: the airshow in question was the annual Nottingham Air Show hosted at Tollerton Airport. We’d take a picnic and enjoy a grandstand view from the grassy hill overlooking Trent Valley.

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