Radburn Design Housing is houses arranged so that each house (often terraces of houses) present their backs to everyone else, whilst the fronts of each house face each other. It is named after a Radburn, New Jersey estate built in 1929 and has become a byword for bad practice (an Australian architect said of his own housing estate designed on Radburn principles:– “Everything that could go wrong in a society went wrong … It became the centre of drugs, it became the centre of violence and, eventually, the police refused to go into it”). It seems that Nottingham got there first in c1860, but also in 1970 with the St Ann’s redevelopments.

Nottingham was one of the last places in England to enclose Common Land (Laxton village still has “Open Fields”) and, until the 1845 Enclosure Act (not fully enacted until the 1880s), the fields to north & south of the old city were open fields & Common Land, meaning that the main part of the population was restricted within the town walls. At this time the population was soaring. The practical combination of those two factors was foul living conditions & mass death, largely from water-borne diseases such as cholera (see St. Mary’s Rest Garden) (a poignant tombstone from that former churchyard, commemorating the deaths of Henry Davis (died June 21, 1846 aged 8) and sister Elizabeth Davis (died December 9, 1851 aged 16) is below). It therefore seems reasonable to call the expansion of the town-folk out into 1,068 acres (432 ha) of the Clay Field (the former name for St Ann’s) an “explosion”.

It seems that the local constabulary refused to enter this early St Ann’s. We are going to meet this again in the 1970s! Many of the 1860+ houses were quickly & cheaply built 2-up/2-down houses in a courtyard-arrangement (Radburn Design once again) that rapidly reproduced the insanitary conditions of Nottingham town. That latter became a national scandal and was one of the factors which led to the 1875 Public Health Act, which itself finally led to control over shoddy building practices. Neither helped with the already-built worst parts of St Ann’s.

Most of the buildings from the 1860s-1880s were demolished in the 1970 clearances. However, there is a small collection of terraces near Robin Hood Street/Campbell Street, close to the town centre — and thus to the old Nottingham boundary — that are now Grade II listed. These are dated at c1860 & clearly follow the Radburn Design principle, as you can see here with 2 sets of Campbell Grove terraces:–

Walking down Campbell Street is eerie, as it is quite long and yet not a single building is mapped onto it (excluding the modern Oaks Residential Home) whilst on the other side of Campbell Street are Foljambe Terrace and Harcourt Terrace, yet more c1860s terraces showing their gable-ends to the street. Facing Campbell Grove are the similar Grade II and c1860 Robin Hood Terrace & the splendid Promenade (all walks, and not a street in sight):–

Nottingham councillors seem to find it very hard to learn from past mistakes. Their forefathers had made a mess of much of St Ann’s, and in the 1960s they decided that a simple repetition of past mistakes would be an excellent idea. So, they commissioned Wimpeys to build rat-runs of Radburn Design Housing which the police did not want to enter. The 1960s City Architect declared to Ruth Johns (“St Ann’s NOTTINGHAM: inner-city voices”; ISBN 0 9543127 1 6 2nd Edition Plowright Press 2006) that kick-backs to council members from Wimpey were involved within the commissioning. John Paulson & T Dan Smith became notorious for council corruption in the same period in Newcastle, but I’ve never heard any other mention of similar corruption in Nottingham apart from that one mention in Ruth Johns’s book.

Here is a small example of some 1970s, recently-refurbished apartments at Wasnidge Walk (not the worst, just the only photos that I’ve currently got of new St Ann’s):–

Update 7 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).