Nottingham sits alongside the River Trent. Once known for Raleigh bicycles, Players fags, guns, both making and shooting of, willy nilly (apparently, though I don’t believe the hype), coal mining, Trent Bridge cricket ground for all the willow lickers, world class lace manufacture, some twat known as Robin Hood – this has never been milked for what it could have been worth, Brian Clough (my dad went to school with him in Middlesbrough), Torville & Dean – really? Two universities, too much football and Saturday Night & Sunday Morning. Graham Greene hated it by all accounts – Nottingham, not Sillitoe. Get me, going all literary like. Ideas above my station and second class comp.
We never did any of the classics at school or what might be considered English Literature, or grammar, as you may have gathered already. Shakespeare? Never mentioned. Dickens? No chance. Modern maths, the SMP project or some tosh. No algebra. The very first wave of modern “comprehensive” education, a failed experiment by some faceless government department in the 1970’s. An alternative to grammar schools, with a watered down, “modernised” curriculum. Useless, put us teenagers miles behind. Probably not dissimilar to the educational kicking that Covid dished out.
Sadly, most of the aforementioned manufacturing, industry and all the mining has now completely disappeared. Shut down, sold off and outsourced.
Jesse Boot, the founder of Boots the Chemist, that global pharmacy brand, was born on Woolpack Lane, now home to Nottingham city centre’s only guitar shop – that’ll be me then. Boots is still hanging in there but now possibly owned by some US corporation, or other.
So on to the shop and its woes. Another thing that seriously annoys me, along with many other issues, is the smug bastards who walk in saying “Oh, I didn’t know this was here, how long have you been open, not long I suppose?”
The unspoken words written across their fizzer are quite plainly “This place won’t last five minutes, be shut down in a heartbeat… loser.”
“Twelve long years mate, you should get out more.” I respond, while wondering if I should jab the soldering iron in their eye. Punter strutting about, as if gracing me with their presence will improve my meagre lot. Affecting some over-lordly attitude, they of course, being King of this local Lace Market, in their pea-brained heads, exuding a slightly disgruntled undertone, that they were unaware of my presence in their manor and seem irked by that fact. How ever did I slip the net? How come they hadn’t seen me before? Dickheads. They always leave after about five minutes, without ever letting the moths out of their wallets. Which is how they live their mean lives on a daily basis.
“See you again, in about another twelve years, not.” I chirp to the back of their pastel pink Fred Perry sweater, as they breeze out the door and traipse off up the street, swinging a man bag. Sometimes they sport that little crocodile logo on the jumper, whatever the fuck that is, but nothing to do with tennis, I guess. I doubt they’ve ever played tennis, don’t know who Fred Perry was and don’t have a boat, not even a dinghy, despite wearing boating shoes with no socks.
To the uninitiated Nottingham’s Lace Market was a thriving, bustling manufacturing area for many years, located in the city centre. Charming Victorian mills crammed full of proper working people, mostly women. And guess what, it made and sold loads of quality lace, exported all over the globe. I guess the mills were only charming to the casual architectural observer, but not if you had to spend your entire working life entombed within such.
Lace net curtains. When I was a kid we had those at every window, if you were lucky enough to have windows. Everyone seemed to have net curtains in those days. This separated the truly down at heel from the lightly downtrodden aspiring classes. Lace nets stopped you being spied on within. Trapped flies. There seemed to be loads of flies in my childhood. Always buzzing about. Big blue bottles. You don’t see them much anymore. You could buy fly papers then. Who knew flies could even read? Try finding fly papers these days. It will all be digital now. Fly News. Don’t believe a word.
“Vapona” fly spray. Some highly toxic aerosol that you sprayed at and on errant flies, chasing them around the kitchen. Like an off shoot of Union Carbide, a mini nightmare Bhopal – look that up – spraying toxins all over the worktop. Merrily inhaling vapours, both you and the fly. They would go berserk once sprayed, the flies that is, kids were already doing that. They get diagnosed with ADHD today. They were just called little bastards then. (Thanks to the great Alexei Sayle for that one).
God knows what that spray did to us, certainly completely absolutely fucked the flies. It used to say on the can “Safely tested in rabbits’ eyes until they died, do not inhale vapour, wash your hands after use, do not spray on food, recommended for outdoor use only.” What fuckwit uses fly spray outside?
I don’t think the Bhopal victims ever got paid out. That’s big corporations for you, and we worry about a bit of dodgy tap water today.
Curtain twitchers sat behind lace nets spying out, usually some lonely old bag molesting a cat, waiting to shout at you, or rush out and stab your football with a handy garden fork they kept at the side of the sofa, should the ball happen to land in their front yard. Or “garden” as my mam preferred. In the winter the nets would freeze to the inside of the glass, stuck solid, thickly iced over with ludicrous frost patterns. Your mam would go mad if you pulled at the fragile weave, tearing it free from the ice. Lace was everywhere – lace table cloths, bridal wear, doilies (whatever they are), and tons of other crap you didn’t need.
In those days the Lace Market positively buzzed at lunch time and finishing time. Workers drank in the local pubs, shopped local, out and about, grabbing a sandwich.
All that is, until gentrification blighted the area, starting in the late 1990’s. Folk snapping up Victorian mills and converting them into a myriad bijou apartments for very small people. All the bigger folk just had to make do and sleep with their feet poking into their newly acquired open plan kitchen/living/dining/bathing/storage/utility area/toilet, all rolled into one.
This is the serious bit.
In those days I used to dabble in such matters, being involved in construction, until a less lucrative career side-tracked me. But I’m happier now, always looking on the bright side… I can remember inspecting one such local mill conversion. It was blatantly obvious that the development did not comply with Building Regulations, with respect to Means of Escape (in case of fire, not usually much other reason to want to escape, although I always plan for a hasty exit whatever the circumstance). Escape is a feature one would deem absolutely crucial in building design, particularly a building in which people sleep and just happens to catch fire.
I spoke about this matter to Nottingham’s head Building Control Officer at the time. He advised me he was very well aware of the breach, that “they” had 12 months to serve notice on the developer, the clock was now running at eleven months two weeks and he was retiring very soon, so rest assured, nothing would be happening. Notice would not be served. Straight to the point. That cleared that up. A very real, true conversation, had by me. The building is still there. Residents blissfully unaware. Issues like this were going on all the time, probably all over the country. Major and minor breaches.
This particular property developer was a local, clearly minted. An obnoxious confrontational sort of bloke. Boat shoes, and in this case I’ve no doubt a boat, a long one. I’ve no idea whether money ever changed hands. More likely intimidation. Or did the inspector retire to a Spanish villa, new boat shoes waiting by his new front door?
Locally we had buildings converted and erected with blatant extra storeys, outside of the granted planning consent. Or buildings converted without planning consent, then obtained retrospectively. I remember one conversion catching fire as the original incoming electric main had never been upgraded to cope with the massively increased demand of various new apartments, all with electric heating. This was kept quiet but the fire was very real. The required new floors had been laid directly over the original filthy old office carpets, which had never been stripped out during conversion. I queried this during construction, as a professional bystander invited to take a look, and was informed “It all added to the sound proofing…” “Now fuck off, this is not your contract….”
That was some local God Squad building company, sign of the fish plastered on their vans. They presumably had the Big Man on their side. Got away with it.
At some point way back when, we had private Building Control introduced nationally, to compete with the long-standing, quality, relatively impartial, Local Authority Building Control system. Don’t you just love the free market. I can’t remember the exact timeline. The whole concept stalled initially as the insurance industry refused to underwrite the new private risk. So no one could get professional indemnity insurance. Not sure how they finally got around that one.
Basically anyone could (and still can) employ a private Building Inspector – the property owner, client, developer or the contractor. They paid his fees. Bang goes any chance of impartiality. Many fledgling new inspectors relied heavily on income from the same developers every time. Would you rock their boat or dance to their tune and feed your kids? Fuck the fire escapes.
Common faults were holes and gaps in service risers running vertically through the building, allowing fire to spread easily between floors. Missing smoke control lobbies – took up too much space, plastic pipes penetrating fire barriers and fancy recessed lighting that cut a hole through the essential fire barrier between floors. Sound proofing was another joke we won’t go into.
I recall retrospectively inspecting three privately “signed off” commercial premises in Nottingham city centre, one a restaurant with flats above. All still had obvious, glaring, fire proofing omissions. This would allow rapid fire spread throughout the building. Truth of the matter was, they had never been inspected by the private inspectors in the first place, who never even left the safety of their offices, just signed bits of paper, at their client’s, their developer paymaster’s, request. Outside the city I inspected a fully “signed off” new housing development, about fourteen dwellings on a new road, people just moving in. The Building Inspector was an ex-city council cove, turned private gun for hire. Unbelievably four of the finished houses had no drains laid whatsoever, and the new developer-laid sewer in the brand new road had a whole section of pipework missing in the middle. The shit was clearly all staying on site. This one was definitely not getting blamed on under investment by the local water company.
They’d also elected to not lay mains cables for any street lights, or indeed put up any lamp posts in the newly constructed pavements. Save a few quid there. The list was long and serious. People were raising mortgages on these new “signed off” dwellings and unwittingly moving in exactly as I was carrying out my audit.
The majority of this was first-hand experience on my part, not conjecture, rumour or assumption.
We’ve had successive governments who cannot even sort out regulations stipulating the optimum level of domestic insulation. What chance fire safety? On a separate note, I believe the “construction industry” is one of the biggest donors to political parties…
Fast forward twenty years and now we have a rush to develop student accommodation everywhere. Defunct post-Covid offices. New builds and conversions in the city centre. Built with no future proofing for change, should the market disappear down the line, along with a whole bunch of disillusioned students, with no job prospects. All this, with a very cash strapped, near bankrupt local authority, with a miniscule budget for Building Control, who provide the very necessary regular construction inspections on new building works. Unless of course one elects, as a developer is permitted to do, to employ the services of a clearly incompetent, possibly corrupt, private building inspection company – I wonder where all that will lead?
Developers big and small banging up student blocks everywhere. Apparently, Nottingham has the largest student population in the country, a difficult fact to digest, as it is a small city, but there are thousands and thousands of them. I also happened to notice the vast majority of them do not play guitar. No silver lining for me. My shop is slowly being encircled by new student housing, with even more in the system, yet to rise. They are just everywhere. Unless you run a fried chicken emporium there is very little benefit and it’s a business model that, by necessity, must survive on an improbably short 32 week trading year.
The theory goes that Nottingham City Council no longer wants students “blighting” outer residential areas, as they have done traditionally for many decades. I would say an obvious known factor and consideration if you choose to move into such an area. So, in their wisdom the City Council decides to cram them all into the city centre, with little thought, forward planning or design. They can’t even get the bin storage correct. Keeps the middle class voters happy though.
Students traditionally occupied properties resembling, and quite possibly used as, a Young Ones set. Watch that on YouTube. I lived in such accommodation in the 1980’s. In those days all the landlords were locals, usually living in the same area themselves. Student rent formed part of their income and was therefore spent and recirculated within the local economy. Win, win. Not anymore.
Now landlords are huge corporate concerns, possibly overseas, bleeding money from the system and paying dividends elsewhere. Student rents are massive, paid with money loaned from the government – which may never get repaid. Hapless youngsters hoodwinked into a non-existent future career, with little or no prospects. Gone are the good old days. Get a degree, get a good job. Bollocks. Get a bike and a Deliveroo vest.
Or maybe we have Universities now investing their staff pension funds in lucrative new-build student accommodation, keep it all in-house, literally – talk about putting all your eggs in one basket.
Gentrification spreads like a ripple in a pond. A peak and a trough, moving through time. I feel a trough fast approaching. Looking more like a Mariana Trench from where I’m stood. I might just buy some boat shoes and punt off.
