Prompted by a question about this building on the Nottingham Hidden History Facebook page…
This building on the corner of Bridlesmith Gate and Victoria Street was a bit of a mystery… Photo: Lucy Brouwer
Ever since I noticed the details in the frieze above the first floor on this building I’d been wondering what the symbols, which on close inspection are an N and C overlapping and a club like you’d find in a deck of cards, could signify.
The frieze in more detail. Photo: Lucy Brouwer
When researching my Hine Hike tour, looking at the buildings of Thomas Chambers Hine, an architect whose work in Nottingham was prolific between the 1850s and 1870s, slightly predating that of Watson Fothergill, I found out more.
Along with the frieze, there are also monogrammed iron grills on the Bottle Lane side of the building.
More hidden letters in the grills on Bottle Lane. Photo: Lucy Brouwer
So what does it all mean? This rather elegant building was originally built as The Nottinghamshire County Club, set back from the road to allow the members to alight from their carriages. It was designed by Thomas Chambers Hine and his Son, George Thomas Hine who he had recently taken into partnership. The club opened in 1869.
Established in 1864, The Nottinghamshire County Club was a gentleman’s club containing billard, reading, card and coffee rooms. It also had bedrooms and “all the conveniences of a first-rate club”; there were around 200 members. Members paid a subscription and there was a reduced rate for gentlemen residing within ten miles. It was a place for meetings, a place to receive messages (for example, adverts were placed in the newspaper for items for sale and the club was used as the address to apply to). There were stewards and a secretary.
Originally there was a tourelle on this corner but it’s possible it was destroyed by the 1929 fire. Photo: Lucy Brouwer
Originally the building had a tourelle on the corner but this has been removed. A severe fire in 1929 destroyed most of the club’s early records and the name doesn’t make it an easy thing to search for in a city that not only has a Notts County football team, but also NCC (Notts County Cricket) and NCC (Notts County Council)! These are unrelated to these premises.
In 1954 it was sold to the Leicester (later Alliance and Leicester) Building Society and the Club leased back all but the ground floor. Access to the first and second floors was by lift via a new entrance on Bottle Lane.
The building is featured on my Hine Hike walk looking at the life and work of Thomas Chambers Hine. I hope to run this tour again in the summer, so sign up for the mailing list for news of dates. The Hine Hike is also available as an illustrated talk, in person or via Zoom so contact me for more details to set up a session for your group.
During my visit to the newly reopened Nottingham Castle I spotted a few clues that point to the architect who originally transformed the ruined Ducal Palace into the first municipal art gallery outside London.
But does anything remain of “The Midland Counties Art Museum at Nottingham”?
Nottingham’s not really a castle.. it’s a Renaissance Ducal Palace you know! Photo: Lucy Brouwer
Nottingham Castle’s new Rebellion Gallery does a dynamic job of telling the story of how Nottingham Castle as we know it has survived a turbulent history – from the demolition of the Norman fortress by Oliver Cromwell after the Civil War to the damage caused by protesters against the 1831 Reform Bill, when the Riot Act was read and the Duke of Newcastle’s Palace was torched – but what happened next?
Thomas Chambers Hine, prominent architect of Victorian Nottingham and the 5th Duke of Newcastle’s Surveyor of Estates, took it upon himself (along with his son George Thomas Hine) to transform the gutted shell of the building into a Public Museum and Gallery of Art and Science. All the woodwork – floors and staircases – had been destroyed in the fire so Hine added new stone staircases with cast-iron balustrades and the three floors of the palace were replaced with two, cutting through the old staterooms.
The top lit picture gallery was modelled on the Grand Gallery of The Louvre.
Picture (by Hine?) of the Gallery space now on display at Nottingham Castle. Photo: Lucy Brouwer
The gallery as it is today, with the skylight still performing its function. Photo: Lucy Brouwer
The Midland Counties Art Museum At Nottingham was opened by Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (Later King Edward VII)and his wife, Princess Alexandra on 3rd July 1878 and the occasion was marked with a royal procession through The Park Estate.
Stained glass window (now part of the Visiting Exhibition Space – currently hosting ‘Hello, My Name Is Paul Smith’) commemorating the Royal Visit and the Castle’s Civil War associations. Photo: Lucy Brouwer
TC Hine had a fondness for local history and published a book to mark the occasion, it detailed each phase of the building’s history and was entitled: ‘Nottingham Its Castle, A Millitary Fortress, A Royal Palace, A Ducal Mansion, A Blackened Ruin, A Museum and Gallery of Art’. It was published in two editions, the first in 1876 and a second in 1879 with a supplement covering the Royal Visit.
TC Hine’s history of the Castle, now on display in the Castle! Photo: Lucy Brouwer
Thanks to Google Books you can browse the pages of the book and look at some of the illustrations. (A copy is also available at Bromley House Library). In the book, “a labour of love”, Hine recounts the history of the Castle through the reign of each successive English monarch, notes significant incidents in the history of Nottingham and even lays claim to be the person who found the spiral stairs leading to the cave known as Mortimer’s Hole. As he goes through a timeline of the years, he notes important events, population figures and makes note of the buildings being built in the town. The book is almost a scrapbook (which is how it is described in the exhibition) although it actually contains printed pictures that have been stuck into each copy rather than the plates being directly printed onto the pages.
Nottingham Castle as a ruin, 1876 from Nottingham, Its Castle…” by TC Hine. Source: Google Books.
The deaths of notable personages are recorded and Hine describes buildings including the Nottingham Exchange, “standing as it does on the finest site in all England”, expressing the opinion that the building looked more like a “large retail establishment” than a public building fit to host the “Midland Counties Art Exhibition in connection with the South Kensington Museum”. He also describes the colonnades which distinguish Nottingham’s Market Place, even suggesting that they be developed as a feature, like the covered walkways of Bologna!
All in all, Hine’s book is a treasure trove of historical incidents and as he reaches years covered by his own lifetime, he notes the activities of other Nottingham architects as well as his own.
In summing up he compares the Castle, standing as it does upon a rock, to “the Acropolis at Athens or the Capitol of Rome”, and expresses the hope that ‘beauty and refinement “sweetness and light”‘ will arise from use of the Castle as a gallery and museum.
And so, we too must hope that in its latest incarnation, Nottingham Castle will continue to be such a beacon of “higher and nobler aspirations of the human mind.”
Closing paragraph of TC Hine’s ‘Nottingham, It’s Castle…” (source: Google Books)
To learn more about Thomas Chambers Hine and his buildings in Nottingham, join Lucy for her guided tour, The Hine Hike. The next date is 29 August 2021.
Tickets for this and all over events available on Eventbrite.
At the moment, we’re not able to go out at our leisure to look at Nottingham (or anywhere else for that matter), so I decided to catch up with some of the interesting people who I’ve met through doing these Watson Fothergill Walks. For this installment I talked to Felicity Whittle, of Gold Star Guides, who conducts the Nottingham Booklovers Tour and she recently launched a programme of virtual #NottGoing Out tours, including one of Nottingham’s Exchange Arcade.
Lucy Brouwer: You conduct the Nottingham Booklovers Tour, looking at writers produced by the city and the places that feature in their books. Have you found that there is a sense of place in Nottingham literature?
Felicity Whittle: Yes, many local writers most definitely convey a sense of place and you can often follow a route through the city in their novels. There is an online Alan Sillitoe trail that imagines following the two squaddies who are out to get Arthur Seaton in ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’; it follows their progress across the city through the various places and pubs that are mentioned in the novel.
The novels of John Harvey, with his police detective Charlie Resnick, have a great sense of place, though the Nottingham he (Resnick) worked in has changed somewhat over the last couple of decades. But Harvey includes events such as a film festival at Broadway, visiting stalls in the Vic Centre market or shops in Broadmarsh, and you get a real sense of the neighbourhoods in which his characters live, be that St Anne’s or the Park estate.
Kim Slater, who writes thrillers under the name KL Slater, has said that although she uses several different parts of the city for her novels she does sometimes move things around a bit to fit the requirements of her characters or her plots. I’m sure she’s not alone amongst writers in doing this!
LB: Do you have a favourite building in Nottingham? Which one and why?
FW: The Council House. I’ve recently become a volunteer tour guide there so have learned more about it and about Exchange Arcade – I love its grandeur and the sense of civic pride that it evokes. There are all sorts of amazing details, from the vacuum system built into the skirting boards, to the paintings that incorporate Nottingham people into historical scenes, which make it a very special place.
Nottingham’s Council House, by architect Thomas Cecil Howitt. Photo: Lucy Brouwer
LB: Nottingham architect Thomas Chambers Hine‘s granddaughter Muriel was a novelist, have you read any of her work? Does she draw on her family background in her books?
FW: Her most autobiographical book is probably ‘A Great Adventure’, in which a family move from Wollaton to a house in the Raleigh Street area of Lacingham (a thinly disguised version of Nottingham!). The father is an architect who wins a competition to design a hospital… so you can see the parallels with her own family life.
The house on Raleigh Street, Nottingham where Muriel Hine’s father George Thomas Hine lived. Designed by Hine and Son. Photo: Lucy Brouwer
In ‘Wild Rye’ the main character comes to live in Lacingham with her grandparents who seem to be based on Hine’s own grandparents. In the novel they live in a big house in the Oxford Street area, so again you can see the influences of her own experience.
Thomas Chambers Hine’s house and office on corner of Regent Street and Oxford Street, Nottingham. Photo: Lucy Brouwer
Other of her novels address very specifically the changing position of women at the turn of the 20th century, the struggle for the vote and whether they needed a man, marriage, children, etc. to feel complete or what the possibilities were of life without any of those things. They are interesting to read because although it can seem quite foreign to us, she was writing about attitudes and conventions that were very real in her lifetime.
LB: Do you find that people notice the buildings in Nottingham? Do you think conducting tours changes the way people see a place?
FW: I find people notice buildings to a certain extent, but often don’t see the detail. One of the best rewards for a guide (as I’m sure you know), is one someone says the ‘I never noticed that before’ phrase, often about somewhere that they’ve walked past a thousand times, or worked nearby but never really looked at. It makes all that research worthwhile!
Without trying to sound too philosophical or mystical about it, I think that hearing the stories about a building, knowing that some other person had a particular connection with it, sort of personalises our built environment and gives us a relationship with those who have been in this place before us.
Many thanks to Felicity for answering my questions. You can keep up with all her tours, both virtual and live, via her Facebook page.
Felicity is hosting a short series of themed virtual tours of Nottingham locations:
After the success of my sold out talk at West Bridgford Library back in June, I will be delivering my photo illustated talk on that other well known Victorian architect of Nottingham, Thomas Chambers Hine at Beeston Library on 19 February 2020.
The talk starts at 2pm and should last around 1 hour. Tickets are £3 each. Beeston Library has disabled access and there will be space for wheelchairs.
I’m enjoying working with Debbie Bryan and her team, adding a little social element to my guided walks. (The bottomless tea and great food helps!) We’re trying out a version of The Hine Hike where you can choose to upgrade from your tea and cake to a cream tea or a light lunch of soup and a savoury scone.
The walk, with me, Lucy Brouwer, looks at the Nottingham architecture of Thomas Chambers Hine, a prolific Victorian architect whose buildings dominate the city. The next date is Sunday 28 July, 2019. Starting at 12noon (at Nottingham Playhouse) and finishing at Debbie Bryan at 2pm. This is a walk of approx. 3km / 2 hours.
Tickets are available from Debbie Bryan’s website or in person from her shop at 18, St Mary’s Gate, Nottingham, NG1 1PF.
Debbie Bryan’s shop and tea room in the heart of The Lace Market.
T.C. Hine’s Adams Buildings is full of beautiful details. Explore the Lace Market with Lucy Brouwer.
Thomas Chambers Hine’s Victorian buildings dominate the Lace Market. If you prefer a shorter walk, we are running the Lace Market Heritage Tour again on 18 July 2019, starting at 5pm. Explore St Mary’s Gate on a leisurely stroll, lasting approx. 45 mins. Tea and cake included. Tickets are also available at Debbie Bryan (online or in person).
I’m running another chance to join me for The Hine Hike: The buildings of Thomas Chambers Hine on Wednesday 5th June 2019, starting at 6pm. Tickets here.
Thomas Chambers Hine, 1813-1899, was possbly Nottingham’s most prolific architect of the Victorian Age. His work across the 19th Century ranges from overseeing the development of The Park Estate, to building the biggest lace warehouses in the Lace Market, and includes the conversion of Nottingham Castle to England’s first provincial art gallery outside London.
Explore the buildings of Thomas Chambers Hine “the father of the Midlands Architects” and his impact on the built environment of Nottingham city centre. This evening walk will take in a overview of the Park Estate, progress via Hine’s home and office on Regent Street towards Nottingham Castle. The walk will continue across the city centre to investigate some of Thomas Chambers Hine’s lesser known buildings and finish up with some of his large scale projects in the Lace Market.
This is a walk of 3km (1.9 miles) approximately 2 hours. The walk starts at Nottingham Playhouse and finishes in the Lace Market.
