We are fast approaching the Equinox (Lord Google tells me that it will be on Monday, 20 March at 10:28 UTC this year). Here is a splendid photo taken a week early of some St Ann’s municipal grass with Spring flowers, taken from St Ann’s Well Road looking North-Eastwards on Monday 13 March (and yes, England really is as green as that in Spring):–

St Ann’s used to be known as Clay Field before it’s 1845 enclosure & development in the 1860s, 70s & 80s¹. Under the road pictured above is a culvert carrying spring-water from the St Ann’s Well. That well was a medieval place of pilgrimage for Kings & others, but was destroyed in 1889 when the Nottingham Suburban Railway (NSR) was built. A photo from last year, showing the remains of the bridge pillar that killed the Well (together with some of the story of the NSR) is at the bottom of my 3rd Diary post.

Up until the 1960s the same road was the busiest shopping street in Nottingham. A very large part of the St Ann’s housing was shoddy and was due for demolition & renewal (enacted in the 1970s²). The council wanted to create a new shopping centre within the centre of town at the same time, so took the opportunity to destroy, but not replace, all of those St Ann’s shops as to remove all competition for their new baby. In this way, Nottingham councillors destroyed the livelihood of hundreds of local traders in order to enrich a handful of national companies and — in my view — maintain their own prestige. You are actually looking at a scene of historic carnage.

Update 6 July 2022

Mapillary has changed it’s download URLs & therefore all links within my diaries that used photos stored in Mapillary in the old format are broken. I’m slowly going through to update them. The new URLs are terrifyingly long, but show OK on my screen (and I hope also on yours).

1. There were 3 fields involved in the Inclosure, each of which were common land. Two were north of the town: Clay Field + Stony Field (which latter is called Sand Field in the George Sanderson map published 1835). The third was to the south of the city, was low-lying & known as The Meadows. ↩

2. Lots were on a 100-year-lease and that came due in the 1960s, which allowed the council to force-purchase the land, citing shoddy housing, which showed staggering hutzpah when it included some of the best Nottingham housing (eg Robin Hood Chase, which originally ran from St. Ann’s Well Road in the south to the Corporation Oaks reservoir in the north. A Parliament Standing Order of 1839 enforced that all subsequent Enclosure Bills contained adequate provision for recreation, and Nottingham got 120 acres. The Chase was a tree-lined walk which had some of the best houses in Nottingham facing in to that green corridor. The council demolished them all). ↩