Nottingham Suburban Railway
Nottingham Suburban Railway, Part 2

A good deal of my Diaries seems to be one long, continuous set of brick porn as I detail my affaires with various walls positioned in different parts of St Anns, Nottingham NG3, England. Sadly, today is no different. Witness your surveyor as he gets up close & personal with the tattoo on a wall next to (what used to be) Thorneywood Station.

I began surveying Honeywood Estate last Sunday 22 May. The estate (and particularly at the upper end) is sat within the site of the former Thorneywood Brickworks (Nottingham Patent Brick Company). Robert Mellors, the owner of the Brickworks in the 1880s, was anxious to get access to a railway as to be able to ship his bricks to all parts of Britain. He was therefore one of the instigators of the Nottingham Suburban Railway (NSR) (I believe that St Pancras Station in London is faced with Thorneywood brick).

Here is a picture of the rear of the New Engine House Pub:

Jim, the last Brickyard worker left living within Honeywood Estate, and who I met via an introduction within the pub, told me that the pub was built around the Engine that was used by the Brickyard to pull wagons from Thorneywood Station up the hill to the yard. That Engine was a horizontal steam engine made by Tangyes, of Birmingham in 1850 and bought 2nd-hand by the Brickworks in 1867 from a Nottingham Colliery (Thorneywood Station was opened in 1889). 100 years later the pub opened up with the Steam Engine in a glass cabinet in the Lounge. Later, when the Brewery decided to refurbish the pub, it donated the Engine to the Nottingham Industrial Museum at Wollaton Park.

The original location of the Brickworks was likely to have been just within the southern-most fringe of the legendary Sherwood Forest, which itself was surrounded by fields, and just a mile or two from the walls of Nottingham town.

All this part (NG3) of Nottingham land is composed of alternating horizontal layers of clay & sandstone, and continues like that right up to Nottingham Castle. An aeon or two ago, this part of England was a few miles offshore from a large river within a much warmer climate. Alluvial clay from the river settled upon the sand beneath. The clay was impervious to water & marvellous for making bricks, whilst the sandstone was a perfect pot for rainwater; streams poured forth from wells both natural & man-made.

The surface of the land fell as the Brickyard workers dug with their shovels into the side of the hill. The NSR & Thorneywood Station were established because folks with money were finally pouring out of Nottingham & into Thorneywood & St Anns. That also meant that roads were being built all around the Brickyard, and houses being built along those roads (many built of Thorneywood brick, of course). It happened with remarkable speed: the brickyard was no longer in a rural location, but was within the suburbs.

The hill could not withstand the Brickyard shovels, but the Brickyard could not overcome those new houses.

My surveying followed the course of those workers as they dug away at the hill, and also turned around at the same points. Honeywood Estate is surrounded by a 30 foot / 9m hill on two sides (Standhill Road & Cherrywood Gardens) and by rising hills on the other two sides (Carlton Hill & Porchester Road). Here is a view of the quarry wall at the west side:

Porchester Road is just beyond the trees at the top, whilst the entrance to Cherrywood Gardens is a little further up Porchester on the right.

Here is an east side view (shot halfway up the hill at the The Brickyard Work Out) (that is “House on the Edge”, an interesting house built in 1913 on Standhill Road, in the background):

Another view of the back of the estate quarry wall, shot from near the top of Brick Kiln Way (a footpath that runs from the base of the estate to Standhill Road) (the building at the top is “House on the Edge” again):

Finally, this a view of the south-side of the quarry face:

Carlton Hill is a little beyond the trees at the top, with the entrance to Standhill Road a little further beyond on the left.

To complete this circumnavigation we need to look at my original focus of interest:— just where exactly is/was the Porchester tunnel that allowed goods wagons from Thorneywood Station to pass under Porchester Road (at the lowest point of the whole estate) and to be pulled by ropes up the hill to Thorneywood Brickworks?

This is a 1952 photo from the Thorneywood Station page of disused-stations.org.uk:

At front left is the 1889 blue-brick wall that served as a base for the Coopers Arms pub. Here is the top 2m of that same wall in the garden at the rear of the house of a lovely couple of folks that were charitable enough to let me photograph it:

On the other side of the fence above is the old Cooper Arms public-house (now a hostel). You can also see The Station-House beyond & also on the 1952 photo.

Notice that the bricks in this astonishing 1889 wall are of Tamworth Blue Brick. The wall turns a corner to the left near the far right-hand-side of this photo and, shortly before it leaves the garden, one of the coping stones is imprinted with the mark of it’s maker:

Hathern Brick Cº, Tamworth, Staffordshire. These are 1ₛₜ quality Engineering Brick: virtually water impervious, hard as rock, almost vitreous in nature. I got an insight from Jim into these bricks. He described rare occasions in which bricks being cooked may turn “jelly” in the kiln and begin to topple; any nearby workers would need to leg it to survive. Blue Brick are cooked at the highest temperature to gain their qualities.

I was also a touch naïve; I thought that the colour came from the heat at which they were cooked. Of course not. It is a question of the tints and/or glazes applied to the surface of the brick that gives it it’s colour.

Returning to the 1952 photo above: just beyond the wall on the left is a spur-siding below the Station-masters’ House. The track runs to the left through a tunnel under the modern Porchester Road (then called “Thorneywood Road”) and on up through the modern Honeywood Estate to the Thorneywood Brickworks. One rather odd thing is that I can trace little information & photos of this particular tunnel at either end. However, I now am sure of the location of the western end.

This is the only photo that I’ve been able to find of the Porchester tunnel that led to the brickworks (2019-02-09: bah! railwaymaniac.com has gone, and that last photo with it)

The location is below the extension of that wall. It is just beyond the southern boundary of the Coopers Arms, in the rear of a house in Len Maynard Court, and I am going to have to visit yet another home-owner & beg to take a photo (Tue update: I called at tea-time & after confirming that the tunnel entrance was in her garden, and my asking to be able to photograph it, she said ‘I’m eating, come back later’ so I went back today & she said ‘no’).

Rather than ending on such a negative, here is a rather good view I found today (Tuesday 31 May) from Porchester Road whilst surveying the final houses on the Honeywood Estate:

My back is to Wheatfields Road in this picture. It shows the drive up from Claygate at the bottom to The M.A.D.D. College at the top in the distance (the passage is not actually possible due to a swing barrier at bottom & top, a feature that keeps defeating taxi drivers using Sat Navs based on OS Maps!).