Guided tours of Nottingham
Thanks to everyone who joined me for The Watson Fothergill Virtual Walk last week – I’ve now added more dates so I hope you can make it along!
Tickets are £5 plus a small booking fee.
Dates:
Lucy is also available to give talks to groups – get in touch to set up a meeting.
This year I haven’t been able to take as many people as I would have liked out on the Watson Fothergill Walk… but I have been able to take more photos of some of Nottingham’s most interesting Victorian buildings.
So I’m delighted to present an online version of the tour – The Watson Fothergill Virtual Walk! I’ve picked my favourite buildings to put together a live online version and I hope you will be able to join me zia Zoom.
The first of these will be on Thursday 3 December at 7pm and tickets are £5 (plus a small booking fee). I hope to add more dates so get in touch and let me know if you’d like to take part.
When it becomes possible to lead tour groups again (in 2021) I will be planning lots more walk dates.
Meanwhile you can buy gift vouchers which can be exchanged for tickets (via Eventbrite).
If you have a group like talks on interesting subjects, I am now able to offer the Watson Fothergill Virtual Walk as a private illustrated Zoom talk. Reasonable rates! Get in touch for more details.
Hope to “see” you soon!
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:
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).
A flurry of further tweets uncovered a higher quality version of the railway construction photo:
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:
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!
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!
Last week I attended the launch (via Zoom) of the new edition of The Buildings of England: Nottinghamshire, commonly known as The Pevsner Guide.
You can watch the interview with Clare Hartwell, who has throughly revised and updated the Nottinghamshire guide, on Five Leaves Bookshop’s YouTube channel.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
Or read this great article by the ever sardonic Jonathan Meades in History Today from a few years ago.
You can buy The Buildings of England: Nottinghamshire from Five Leaves Books (support your local bookshop!)
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.
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).
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.
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.
His names and death date are carved around the top in a typeface that appears familiar from his other work.
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.
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.
September 2020 sees the return of The Hine Hike – my tour looking at the buildings of Thomas Chambers Hine, another architect who had a big impact on Victorian Nottingham.
The first date will be Thursday 10 September, 2pm. Tickets are £12 each. All tours operate with reduced numbers and social distancing measures in place.
The next Watson Fothergill Walk will be on Sunday 13 September, 10am.
For the following two Sundays, tours will be available for booking through Debbie Bryan. Tickets will include tea and cake or cream tea at her Lace Market shop at the end of the tours. Dates are:
Watson Fothergill Walk – Debbie Bryan Edition, 20 September, 10am
The Hine Hike – Debbie Bryan Edition, 27 September, 10am
Tickets for these walks are £15 for tour + tea and £32 for tour + traditional cream tea (vegan, vegetarian, and gluten free options available on request). All the details of this special package can be found on Debbie Bryan’s website.
Finally, there’s a chance to visit Clawson Lodge at the end of The Carrington Crawl... The Ukrainian Centre has reopened and they are offering a small group a chance to have a look around inside and to enjoy tea and biscuits at the end of the walk.
This walk will take place on Saturday 19 September, starting at 1pm. Tickets are £12 each and there will be small charge for refreshements at the Ukrainian Centre. Again, all walks are subject to social distancing with reduced numbers.
Tour Guide Lucy is also available to lead private walks for small groups – please get in touch to explore Nottingham’s great Victorian architecture.
Trying out my tours with smaller groups has worked well so far. Here are some photos from The Carrington Crawl this weekend.
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.
By the way if you live in any of these buildings I’d love to trade stories about your house, so get in touch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At the moment I am only able to take groups of up to 6 (including me!) so there are just 5 tickets for The Carrington Crawl on 15 August 2020.
NEWS FLASH! The first walk is already full! But I have added more dates (Aug 20, 11am & Aug 22, 2pm): Tickets for all forthcoming walks are available on Eventbrite.
If you have a group of 5 people or less and would like to arrange a time to do the walk then please get in touch. (I can also do walks on weekdays.)
We successfully tried out the walk with social distancing in place and so I’d like to try more dates.
Here are tickets for August, priced £12 each.
The Carrington Crawl looks at the domestic architecture of Watson Fothergill and his assistant LG Summers at Mapperley Road, Sherwood Rise and Carrington.
Sign up to the mailing list or email Lucy for more information on future tour dates.
Following consultation with fellow guides, detailed examination of the Government’s Coronavirus Guidelines for England and completion of a new risk assesment, I’m pleased to say that Watson Fothergill Walk can now display Visit England‘s We’re Good To Go mark.
For now this means tours will be limited to groups of up to 6 people (including myself) and to private tours for up to 5 people. I am hoping that this will be able to be increased as guidelines are relaxed.
If you would like a private tour, please get in touch.
For the time being tours will not include refreshments – however I will be able to direct you to venues that are open and bookings can be made on request (subject to availabilty).
You can see the We’re Good To Go certificate and WFW’s C-19 risk assessment here.
