The price of each book includes a donation to Nottingham Civic Society – you can join them and attend their program of talks and walks for just £12 per year.
There are very limited numbers of each book at the moment and there are also some copies of Ken Brand’s Watson Fothergill book available. Postage is at the flat rate of £2.70 which allows you to purchase multiple books.
Nottingham Civic Society have found a number of books on Nottingham architects and architecture that they have asked me to sell. I have now added some of these to my shop.
Nottingham Civic Society have found a limited stock of Ken Brand’s book on Watson Fothergill and asked me to get them out into the world!
I am going to be selling these from the site for £5 plus postage and hopefully, I will also be able to make them available on the walking tours (if they’re not too heavy!). Each sale will include a donation to Nottingham Civic Society. You can also join the society for a small annual fee – which entitles you to updates, access to talks and supports campaigns for Nottingham’s historic buildings. Thoroughly worthwhile!
NEWS FLASH! The first small batch of these books has sold out really fast! I hope to get some more within the next couple of weeks and will post again when they’re listed on the shop. So keep your eyes peeled! Meanwhile thanks for your enthusiasm for all things Fothergill and sign up to the mailing list for news and tour dates.
The late Ken Brand was responsible for formative research on Nottingham’s Victorian architects and his work is the basis of everything that has followed. This book contains a selection of black-and-white photos, reproductions and drawings of Fothergill buildings that are not available elsewhere. The book is not currently available on Amazon or Abebooks… so get them while there are some left!
Visit the SHOP page – payments can be made by card, PayPal or Apple Pay. The postage price is for 2nd class Royal Mail.
If you have any questions, please contact Lucy here.
Last week I attended the launch (via Zoom) of the new edition of The Buildings of England: Nottinghamshire, commonly known as The Pevsner Guide.
The hefty new edition of The Buildings of England: Nottinghamshire.
You can watch the interview with Clare Hartwell, who has throughly revised and updated the Nottinghamshire guide, on Five Leaves Bookshop’s YouTube channel.
As you can see the new 2020 edition (bottom) has somewhat expanded on the previous editions! (the 1997 reprint of the 2nd edition, and the pocket-sized Penguin from 1951).
The Pevsner Guides are pretty much the bible for anyone doing research on architects and architecture and I’ve now got all three editions of the Nottinghamshire book, as well as Elain Harwood’s Nottingham City Guide.
The edition of the Nottingham city guide that I regularly use for researching my walks. As you can see, I’ve bookmarked a lot of buildings!
Nottinghamshire was the second county of England that Nikolaus Pevsner covered when he originally put the guides together in the 1950s. The guides have evolved from pocket-sized paperbacks to hefty hardbacks that offer a summary of the architecture of each county.
The first edition also features Southwell Minster on the cover, but the book was considerably cheaper and more portable!
Much as I wish they were a little more portable, the new one is more than double the size of the last edition and weighs almost a kilo, it is really worth taking them with you on your travels (or perhaps making appropriate notes before you set off). I wonder, have Yale University Press considered making an online version available to purchasers of the book? It would make a fantastic app! (So far there’s only a Pevsner Architectural Glossary available).
Plenty of bookmarks in this, the 2nd edition, that I bought second hand at the much missed Jermy & Westerman bookshop.
Something of Pevsner’s eccentricity may have been lost – indeed in his first Nottinghamshire edition he attributes the bank in Newark to “Fothergill & Watson”, Fothergill’s name change being the source of no end of confusion! – but as a basis for discoving more details about the architecture around you, the guides are completely indispensible.
The new edition has been lavishly illustrated with photographs, the majority of which are by Martine Hamilton Knight. Here’s Watson Fothergill’s Office (as well Papplewick Pumping Station and Trent Navigation Warehouse in Newark)
For more on Pevsner listen to this excellent BBC Radio 4 Programme, Pevsner: Through Outsider’s Eyes (I’m off to listen to it again).
When I first started working on tours – back in Glasgow, researching material for Walking Heads’ Clydeside Promenade – one of our contributors was journalist Peter Ross. I remembered Pete from my early forays into student journalism and so I’m always pleased when he has a new book out.
His latest, A Tomb With A View: The Stories And Glories of Graveyards, is available from 3 September 2020, it’s had rave recommendations from Hilary Mantel, Ian Rankin and Robert Macfarlane among others and I’ve been lucky enough to read it in advance.
In the book, Peter explores his own fascination with graveyards and looks at stories of people and places in cemeteries around Britain and Ireland. There are great chapters on Highgate in London, Greyfriars in Edinburgh and an in depth look at the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The relationship between ghost story writers and their graves is explored. He traces remarkable lives as well as forgotten ones, and as always with Peter’s journalism, personal stories are the heart of what he writes about.
My interest was piqued earlier in the year by Peter’s tweets with photos from his local graveyard, Cathcart Cemetery. He had uncovered the grave of a Scottish architect, William Gardner Rowan, who would have been practicing around the same time that Watson Fothergill was working in Nottingham. Like Fothergill’s grave stone in Nottingham, this one was designed by the architect himself.
After finishing A Tomb With A View, I took a long delayed walk into Rock (Church) Cemetery at the top of Mansfield Road, Nottingham, close to where I’ve been starting my Carrington Crawl walks.
Gates of Rock Cemetery, Nottingham. Photo: Lucy Brouwer
Both Watson Fothergill and Lawrence George Summers, his chief assistant, are buried there. I had seen Fothergill’s headstone on a long guided tour given by Nottingham Civic Society a couple of years ago, but I had not yet been to look for Summers. Thanks to a generous researcher, I had the plot number I needed help me find it.
I asked at the gate house for some help and James, the caretaker, looked out a copy of the St Mary’s Mount map and caught up with me at the far end of the graveyard (litter picking as he went).
Searching for LG Summers’ grave plot.
We tracked the plot number to find… a gap. There is no stone for Summers and his wife Louise (both buried here, 10 feet down according to the records). I was a little disappointed not to find a marker and snapped a picture in the hope that I’d be able to find the spot again. I can’t say I felt as comfortable in this cemetery as Peter Ross seems to be in graveyards in his book. It was slightly less daunting than it had felt on the 3 hour Civic Society tour, but no less Gothic.
LG Summers’ grave (unmarked). Rock Cemetery, Nottingham. Photo: Lucy Brouwer
It started to rain, but I pressed on to find Watson Fothergill’s grave. The stone he designed himself is unusual in shape and colour compared to those around it. Some people think it looks a bit like a bird table. In contrast to the lack of stone for Summers (who is understood to have been a more modest man), Fothergill makes a typical statement of his individuality with the hexagonal red granite column.
Grave of Watson Fothergill, Rock Cemetery, Nottingham. Photo: Lucy Brouwer
His names and death date are carved around the top in a typeface that appears familiar from his other work.
Grave of Watson Fothergill, Rock Cemetery, Nottingham. Photo: Lucy BrouwerGrave of Watson Fothergill, Rock Cemetery, Nottingham. Photo: Lucy Brouwer
At the bottom, I spotted this stag, perhaps a symbol of Nottingham, where Fothergill spent his working life and where most of his buildings are located.
A Nottingham stag? Grave of Watson Fothergill, Rock Cemetery, Nottingham. Photo: Lucy Brouwer
You can’t quite see the top of Mapperley Road, where Fothergill built his house, from here but the site is only a few minutes walk away. It would have been hard to have laid him to rest any closer.
I’d highly recommend A Tomb With A View. I was particularly struck by the chapter about the life and death of Dublin graveyard tour guide Shane MacThomais, where a friend of his sums up the secret of a good tour guide: “Make them laugh, make them cry, tell them something they know, tell them something they don’t.” And this is exactly what this book does, like a good tour it takes something you previously took for granted and makes you see it in a new way.
You can order A Tomb With A View by Peter Ross from your local bookshop (Nottingham has Five Leaves Books who are still doing orders by post). Or try Hive where you can support an independent book shop of your choice.
