Research, Watson Fothergill in Nottingham

Four Lions at Nottingham Castle

Three Lions may belong on a shirt… but there are four lions at Nottingham Castle that I am particularly interested in…

The four stone lion sculptures found in the grounds of Nottingham Castle… Photos: Lucy Brouwer

As I mention on the Watson Fothergill Walk, these four stone lion sculptures originally adorned the tower of the Black Boy Hotel. On a visit to the newly reopened Nottingham Castle I found them in the grounds welcoming visitors. Each one has weathered to give it an individual character and their paws look almost as if they’re raising a toast!

Two of the lions at the top of step to Nottingham Castle. Photo: Lucy Brouwer

You can just see 2 of the lions on the corners of the tower, added to the hotel by Fothergill in 1897. Picture Nottingham.

Fothergill worked on the hotel over many years, coming back to rebuild and extend it on several occasions. On the tower, added in 1897, you can make out the lions, each a standard bearer with a shield – their poles are now long gone but you can see where they would have held them in their paws.

The Black Boy Hotel c.1939

The hotel was demolished in 1970 and replaced by Littlewoods (now Primark) on Long Row. The lions have been at the Castle ever since.

Read more about The Black Boy Hotel here, or join the Watson Fothergill Walk to learn all about the building, its architect and his work in Nottingham.

Tickets for forthcoming guided tours with tour guide Lucy Brouwer.

Events, Thomas Chambers Hine, Watson Fothergill in Nottingham

New dates! June & July 2021

Tickets have just been released for a raft of new dates in June and July!

Tickets for the following walks are now on sale:

The Carrington Crawl, 26 June 2021, 1 pm – 2 returns now available!

(with added access to Clawson Lodge thanks to The Ukrainian Cultural Centre).

A look at the domestic architecture of Watson Fothergill and his chief assistant L.G. Summers in Mapperley Park, Sherwood Rise and Carrington (with tea and coffee available at Clawson Lodge and a chance to look around inside) 2 hours/ 3km.

The Carrington Crawl, 26 June, 1 pm tickets £15

Watson Fothergill Walk – 27 June 2021, 10 am The original city centre walk, looking at the flamboyant Victorian architecture of Watson Fothergill, also known as Fothergill Watson! 2hrs/ 2km.

Watson Fothergill Walk, 27 June, 10 am, tickets £15

An evening Watson Fothergill Walk – 1 July 2021, 6 pm

An evening version of the city centre walk, with a chance to stop off at Fothergill’s pub at the end. 2hrs/2km.

An evening walk, 1 July 6pm, tickets £15

Watson Fothergill Walk – 18 July 2021, 10 am

The original city centre walk with a look at the architecture of Watson Fothergill. 2hrs/2km.

Watson Fothergill Walk, 18 July, 10 am, tickets £15

Hine Hike: The Buildings of Thomas Chambers Hine – 25 July 2021, 10 am

A look at some of the work of another architect who made a big impact on Victorian Nottingham – Thomas Chambers Hine. 2hrs/3km

Hine Hike, 25 July, 10 am, tickets £15

Tickets for all walks are £15 each and numbers are limited to 12 people per tour (for now!)

Lucy is also available during the week for private tours for small groups so please email if you have a group of friends or family who would enjoy discovering Nottingham from a new angle!

Events, Watson Fothergill in Nottingham

We’re Back! Return of The Watson Fothergill Walk.

The Watson Fothergill Walk is back! I’ve set a date for a walk in the city centre on 30 May 2021 starting at 10 am. I’ve reduced that capacity to allow for social distancing so there will be just 12 tickets available!

Tickets are £15 each available from Eventbrite.

This is the original Watson Fothergill Walk starting at Nottingham Tourism Centre. Learn about the buildings of one of Nottingham’s most prominent Victorian architects, his signature style and the influence of the Gothic on the city’s buildings. A walk of approximately 2km (1.25 miles)

More details and tickets.
 
The Watson Fothergill Walk, 30 May 2021, 10 am Tickets £15 each
If you would like to book a private guided walk or Zoom talk with tour guide Lucy Brouwer, please send an email via this page.

Events, Online, Watson Fothergill in Nottingham

April Zoom Talk: Watson Fothergill Virtual Walk

I was overwhelmed by the great response to the Watson Fothergill Virtual Walks earlier in the year, so I’m going to do one more…

Tickets for 22 April here.

The next Watson Fothergill Virtual Walk Zoom session will be on Thursday 22 April 7 pm. Tickets are £5 with a small booking fee (and you only need one ticket per household/device).

I’m hoping to get full scale “real life” walks going again this summer, when restrictions on social distancing will hopefully be relaxed… Meanwhile until then, private walks for small groups can be booked at times to suit your group. For more details, contact Lucy.

Watson Fothergill in Nottingham

Private Walks… for 6 people or 2 households

Walking The Carrington Crawl in 2020. Photo @bigoldhouse

While I’m really looking forward to being able to lead tours again, until at least 17 May 2021, the maximum number of people that can be accommodated on a guided walk is 6* (or groups from 2 households). The guide (me!) is NOT included in that number.

While social distancing remains in place, 8 people (from 2 households) is the maximum group size that can be accommodated. If you’d like to organise a private walk then please contact Lucy to pick a date.

The original Watson Fothergill Walk, Hine Hike and Carrington Crawl walks are all available for a minimum fee of £75. More details on the Bookings page.

*as per guidelines from Visit Britain.

Lawrence G Summers, Research, Watson Fothergill in Nottingham

The Brigadier, The Librarian and the Awkward Squad

The more I work on Fothergill, give talks and promote my guided walks, the more contact I receive from people who want to know if the building they have spotted is the work of Watson Fothergill, architect.

Recently, I’ve been sent several photos, either houses people have spotted while on urban walks or pictures they have seen posted on social media, each with the question: Is this a Fothergill?

But is it a Fothergill? Pics from l-r, Wilford Grove/ Wilford Crescent East by Chris Pyke-Hendry, Hardwick Road by Lucy Iliffe and Lenton Boulevard spotted on Facebook (originally from Picture Nottingham)

I always direct people to Darren Turner’s Fothergill: A Catalogue of The Works of Watson Fothergill, Architect, an extremely thorough piece of research that has been invaluable to me in putting together my tours. In the book, Darren has found evidence for every attribution he makes and the results are compelling. However, there remain a group of buildings he calls “The Awkward Squad”

Many of these dodgy attributions persist. This goes back to the over-enthusiastic obituarist in the Nottingham Journal who in 1928 laid claim to Fothergill’s distictive buildings being found in “almost every city and town between Nottingham and London.” (I’m not really sure that a bank in Loughborough, a cemetery chapel and a coffee house in Ongar and a solitary house in Sydenham really hold this to be true.)

Clip from The Nottingham Journal’s notice of Watson Fothergill’s death, 7 March 1928. Source: British Newspaper Archive.

There are also a lot of photographs that originate from Nottingham’s council archive, many now online at Picture Nottingham, that are labeled as being buildings by Watson Fothergill. A great many of them are genuine Fothergill’s and there are some wonderful photos available, but some of them are part of “The Awkward Squad” or have even proved to be designed by different architects entirely. Several of these photos from the 1960s are credited to Mr FC Tighe.

F.C. Tighe, City Librarian (standing), with composer Eric Coates (who himself also has a connection to Fothergill!) 1953, Nottingham Evening Post. (source: Picture Nottingham)

Francis Charles Tighe was the Nottingham City Librarian (from 1953 until his death, aged 48 in 1964). In the early 1960s, Mr Tighe entered into correspondence with Brigadier George Fothergill Ellenberger, Fothergill’s oldest grandson (WW1 veteran and son of Eleanor Watson Fothergill Ellenberger and Georg Hieronymous Ellenberger – see blogs passim). Mr Tighe was preparing a lecture on Fothergill and Ellenberger sent him several family records including Fothergill’s diary. The microfilm copy held by the University of Nottingham archives still has the numbered tabs that the Brigadier added to correspond to a list of buildings “with which he may have been concerned whether as architect or renovator”.

The Brigadier typed out a ‘generous’ list of his grandfather’s works – 39 buildings, all but one of which are demonstrably by Fothergill. The problem comes from another fifty-odd projects that were handwritten onto the list. Ellenberger was not claiming them all for Fothergill but many of them have become firmly associated with the architect.*

These include, among others, several house in The Park Estate (Edale, which proves to be by Thomas Chambers Hine; Brightlands – now Adam House which was actually built for Samuel Bourne by Arthur George Marshall; and several houses on Hope Drive and Peveril Drive).

After the success of his lecture on Fothergill, Mr Tighe became a passionate Fothergill-Spotter and began to see them almost everywhere. Many of the photographs on Picture Nottingham that include the generic Watson Fothergill biography seem to originate from this period (indeed many are credited to Mr Tighe or are from what looks like the same batch marked c. 1964). This combination of attributions, and the way the keyword search on the site works, would seem to be responsible for the proliferation of these images to various social media platforms.

Indeed, I have found buildings by Fothergill’s assistant, L.G. Summers in Duke Street and the corner of Cedar Road that are cited as Fothergill’s on Picture Nottingham and other buildings that bear more resemblance to Summers’ later work.

As for the ones I have been sent recently – I think that the Lenton Boulevard houses (pictured above) are likely by Brewill & Baily. (See the latest Pevsner Guide To The Buildings of England: Nottinghamshire, p. 503) The Nottingham-based partnership of Arthur William Brewill (d.1923) and Basil Edgar Baily (1869-1942) were working in Nottingham during a similar period to Watson Fothergill, and there are bound to be some similarities in the material they used and their overall architectural influences. Other houses on Lenton Boulevard were photographed for Mr Tighe and to me, these feel like they are among some of his more wild guesses.

115 Lenton Boulevard, attributed to Fothergill but I’m very doubtful about this one. Photo: Google Street View. BUT IS IT A FOTHERGILL?

Number 115 Lenton Boulevard retains its attribution to Fothergill even in the latest Pevsner Guide. If anyone has any more information on any of these buildings, the pedant in me would like to straighten out the records!

Former Leenside Police Station, Canal Street. Photo: Lucy Brouwer NOT A FOTHERGILL!

Another Fothergill attribution that persists (due to how often photos of it are posted online) is the former Leenside Police Station on Canal Street. Despite red bricks and a turret, this is not listed in Darren Turner’s Catalogue at all. It was actually built by the City Engineer’s Department in 1901-2.

The Trent Bridge Inn. Photo: Wikimedia NOT A FOTHERGILL

The Trent Bridge Inn, another building whose shape might suggest some connection to Fothergill is in fact another ringer, having been built by William Bright (1888-90) with additions by Thomas Jenkins (1919). (Some info on The TBI and other Nottingham buildings that have become Wetherspoons pubs via Nottingham Civic Society.)

Building at corner of Wilford Crescent East. Photo: Chris Pyke-Hendry.
Some features might point to L.G Summers but does anyone have any more clues? IS IT A FOTHERGILL???

The building near Meadows Library (above) photos of which were sent to me recently remains a mystery. To me it has some 1890s characteristics that might point in the direction of L.G. Summers, but as we have seen, a lot of building took place in the city around this time and there’s no evidence to substantiate who the architect might have been (not so far anyway).

Hardwick Road, photo: Lucy Iliffe

The actual Fothergill among the photos at the top of this blog (also above) is at the corner of Hardwick Road and Hartington Road, in Sherwood. Apparently some renovation is currently taking place. Built in 1890 as a villa on what was then called Cavendish Hill, for Mr Thomas Gallimore – who worked for Smith & Co Bank at the Long Eaton branch (itself designed by Fothergill). Gallimore also seems to have been a friend of L.G. Summers (Summers was present at Gallimore’s funeral in 1935). So even when we say something is a Fothergill, it shouldn’t discount the work of his chief assistant! You can see from the patterning of the bricks, the shape of the features like the windows and the chimney that this house resembles other known Fothergill’s more closely than any of Mr Tighe’s hopefuls that I’ve mentioned here.

I think what this really goes to show is that Nottingham is full of interesting buildings that are worth noticing and I hope it encourages you to go Fothergill-Spotting on urban walks! I’m still digging into the stories of the buildings that people have told me about and I’m always interested to hear from you if you live in a Watson Fothergill house or an interesting Victorian-era property that might be connected to the other architects of the period.

You can contact me HERE and sign up to the mailing list for the latest news on the return of the Watson Fothergill Walk in summer 2021.

*For more on this story, see the chapter “The Awkward Squad” in Fothergill: A Catalogue of the Works of Watson Fothergill, Architect by Darren Turner. Available from Five Leaves Books.

Events, Online, Watson Fothergill in Nottingham

February Zoom Talk

Another chance to join tour guide Lucy Brouwer for a virtual version of The Watson Fothergill Walk.

Get tickets for Thursday, 4 February 2021, 7pm

Explore the highlights of the Watson Fothergill Walk with an illustrated talk on Zoom. Look at the beautiful details of some of Nottingham’s most flamboyant buildings and learn more about the architect who designed them. The next date for the Zoom “Virtual” walk is Thursday 4 February 2021 at 7 pm.  

Tickets are £5 each, plus a small booking fee. 

Research, Watson Fothergill in Nottingham

Research and Distractions

While I’m still available for walks (Covid-19 regulations permitting) as private bookings and I have gift vouchers on offer (if you’d like to have a walk to look forward to in 2021), I’m also trying to research more buildings for future walks and talks on the architecture of Nottingham. But I get so easily distracted…

I was thinking about a photo that I’d seen online, but could not remember where I’d seen it. (The constant stream of content on social media makes it tricky to pin down sources.) But, a few tweets fired at some contacts proved that I hadn’t imagined it, here was the picture:

Thanks Nottinghasm who originally found the photo in one of the Iliffe and Baguley Victorian Nottingham books which feature images from the illusive Nottingham Historical Film Unit. These books, published in the 1970s, are scattered around Notts Libraries Local History shelves…

A photo of the construction of the railway from Nottingham Victoria Station, the construction of which had caused the demolition of Watson Fothergill’s original office on Clinton Street. The photo shows Fothergill’s 1896 Furley & Co building, which now house Lloyds Bank on the corner of Lower Parliament Street and Clinton Street West (it features on The Watson Fothergill Walk).

The corner of Clinton Street West, from the opposite angle. Photo: Lucy Brouwer
The front of the building on The Watson Fothergill Walk. Photo: Dominic Morrow.

A flurry of further tweets uncovered a higher quality version of the railway construction photo:

Clinton Street railway cutting 1899. A clearer version of the photo. Thank you Mike

And another photo of railway work next to a Fothergill building turned up. This time the Nottingham and Notts Bank on Thurland Street, which is visible on the left hand side of this picture:

Thurland Street Railway Cutting (circa 1899) Thanks to Nottinghasm and Nigel for bringing this one to my attention.
This is the reverse angle. Thurland Street Bank on The Watson Fothergill Walk. Photo: Alison Cussans.

Nigel King, who is a photographer himself, then ran the Clinton Street photo through a colouriser on the My Heritage website and this brought out some remarkable details!

Here’s a colourised version – you can just see the signage on the side of the Furley & Co building. Thanks Nigel
You can even see the workmen! Thanks Matt

So you can see how a bit of research can turn up some great views of Nottingham’s past, but also how it’s very easy to get thrown off course! It’s also very difficult to credit photos correctly, the original books are full of such treasures.

If anyone knows any more about the whereabouts of the original photos from the Nottingham Historical Film Unit, please get in touch!

Events, Watson Fothergill in Nottingham

Social Distancing in Action!

Trying out my tours with smaller groups has worked well so far. Here are some photos from The Carrington Crawl this weekend.

The Carrington Crawl: Social Distancing version Photo: @theparkestate

This was a private booking for 5 people, and as you can see there is room to spread out and see some beautiful examples of Fothergill and Summers’ domestic architecture.

The Norris Homes on The Carrington Crawl. Photo: @theparkestate
Looking at The Norris Homes. Photo: @theparkestate
Homage to Fothergill. The Carrington Crawl. Photo: @theparkestate

By the way if you live in any of these buildings I’d love to trade stories about your house, so get in touch.

The Carrington Crawl. Photo: @BigOldHouse

I’m hoping to set up more Carrington Crawl dates in the near future, or you can book a walk for your small group by emailing Lucy via this page.

Events, Watson Fothergill in Nottingham

Watson Fothergill Walk – BACK FOR AUGUST 2020!

At last! The walks are returning with added social distancing! Having completed the preparation for Visit England’s We’re Good To Go mark, I am now delighted to invite groups of up to 5 people (maximum groups are 6 so that includes your guide!) to accompany me on The Watson Fothergill Walk, tour of Nottingham city centre.

Tickets for 2 August

As groups have to remain small for now, I am offering private tours for groups of up to 5 people. Please contact me if you can make up a group of 5 or are happy to join another small group to make up a tour. The walk takes 2 hours and is best at quiet times of day.

I am also scheduling Sunday morning walks… the first will start at 10am, on 2 August 2020. Tickets are £12 each.

Tickets for 16 August

The next will be on 16 August 2020, 10am. Again tickets are £12.

NEWS FLASH! These have filled up very quickly so I have added more and will add more as demand dictates. If you can do weekdays please let me know as with small groups it might be possible to conduct tours at quieter times. TICKETS for all forthcoming dates (August 2, 16, 23, 30) are on Eventbrite.

If you would like to organise a walk for up to five people, please contact Lucy to select a suitable date and time.