IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Astley Drive, NOTTINGHAM, NG3 3EU

Looking towards what was from 1889-1951 the north end of St Ann's Well station and yard. Beyond the trees straight ahead the line passed under Bridge No 10 and curved gently left towards the south portal of Sherwood Tunnel, about half a mile to the north. See Image] for more history.

There is an Ordnance Survey benchmark Image on the side of the right hand house at its front corner, beside the black downpipe

Ordnance Survey cut mark benchmark levelled at 83.692m above Newlyn Datum in 1962

Looking downhill towards the city centre.

The Victorian house on the right was originally the home of the station master at St Ann's Well on the Nottingham Suburban Railway (1889-1951). The station, of which there is now no trace, was largely on a wide embankment behind the council houses further down the hill, and the railway crossed The Wells Road a little way to the south on a high lattice girder bridge. The NSR (operated by the Great Northern) lost its passenger service in 1916 in face of competition from the city's trams, but the goods yard continued to supply coal merchants and serve the Somnus bed company until closure. The NSR was promoted by the owners of the Nottingham Patent Brick Company and the house is built of red bricks and terra cotta tiles from its brickyards at Thorneywood and Mapperley. (A more celebrated station built of NPBC bricks is St Pancras.) This was one of the more relentlessly rainy mornings of the wet summer of 2012.

The house ahead was built for the opening of the Nottingham Suburban Railway in 1889. For more about the house and the NSR, see Image The road to the left, leading to houses built on the former railway goods yard, is Dooland Drive - named after Bruce Dooland, the classy Australian leg-spinner who played for Nottinghamshire in the 1950s and was my first cricket hero. This was a horribly wet and gloomy morning, even by the standards of the summer of 2012.

Almost unreadable plaque attached to frontage of 455/457 The Wells Road close to the former site of St Ann's Well Station on the Nottingham Suburban Railway.

The picture is taken from roughly where the north end of the southbound platform once was. The grassed area behind the railings was the site of sidings and a goods shed, used until closure of the Nottingham Suburban Railway in 1951. The main entrance to the station for passengers was on Kildare Road (offstage right). Beyond the modern brick house the line crossed The Wells Road on a huge lattice girder bridge supported by brick arches. For more history, see Image

Built in 1857-9 as the County Lunatic Asylum, later known as Coppice Hospital. It is now converted into apartments. The name is in honour of the building's architect, T.C.Hine.