IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Cranmer Street, NOTTINGHAM, NG3 4GJ

A school playing field belonging to St Augustine's R/C Primary School is overlooked by a low-rise block of luxury apartments. Mapperley Road at the far end of the football pitch.

In 1833 a Select Committee on Public Walks recommended the creation of “properly regulated” public walks for the “middle and humbler classes” in order to improve “their cleanliness, neatness and personal appearance” and provide a venue for a man to show off his wife and well-behaved children. Such walks were seen as an alternative to the “drinking shops, where, in short-lived excitement, they may forget their toil, but where they waste the means of their families and too often destroy their health”. It became possible to implement these recommendations after the 1845 Enclosure Act, and by 1852 walks and other green spaces had been established in an arc north of the town centre, from Robin Hood Chase in the east, along Corporation Oaks and Elm Avenue to the Arboretum and the General Cemetery. The Forest recreation ground was also established. A journalist then wrote that “Nottingham might vie with any town in England for its well-grown and well-dressed women of the operative classes who on Sunday throng the park and public walks.” (All of this information comes from “The transformation of green space in old and new Nottingham” in Volume 118 of the Transactions of the Thoroton Society.)

Elm Avenue from Cranmer Street, looking towards Bellvue Reservoir. This delightful traffic-free avenue runs, as Elm Avenue, from Huntingdon Road, A60, to Bellvue Reservoir then as Corporation Oaks and as Robin Hood Chase to St Ann's Well Road.

From near the Belle Vue reservoir. The trees are probably replacements for elms destroyed by the Dutch Elm Disease epidemic of the 1970s

A zoom view towards Cranmer Street and Mansfield Road, with Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station on the hazy skyline, eight miles or so away. "The wise policy of the Corporation in providing these stately avenues of elms and oaks in the midst of the crowded city is self-evident; the only regret is that things are not more so, as we see meadows and gardens rapidly despoiled by the builder in utter neglect of the things which go to make life—especially child-life—healthy and bright" (Illustrated Handbook to Nottingham, 1906).

The 1845 Enclosure Act set aside 130 acres of land to the north and east of Nottingham city centre as public open space, comprising Queen's Walk, Queen's Walk Park, Victoria Park, Robin Hood Chase, Corporation Oaks, St Ann's Hill, Elm Avenue, the Arboretum, the General Cemetery, Waterloo Promenade, Church Cemetery, and The Forest.

At this scale the gateposts look to be the same, but a closer look reveals that each is dedicated to a different tree or plant. Elm Avenue and the Chase capitals http://www.geograph.org.uk/search.php?i=5558919&displayclass=slide

But whether you want modern or Victorian, it's all the upper end of the market. Off Cranmer Street.

Closed in 2008. http://digitalanthill.com/elms-primary-schoolabandoned/

This fine house on the corner of Cramner Street and Mapperley Road is now used as offices for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.