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Longmead Drive, NOTTINGHAM, NG5 6DP

The gate, designed by young people from Edwards Lane Community Centre, reflects the place's relatively recent past, as part of the Great Northern Railway's Nottingham-Derby railway, known as the Back Line. An information board gives a good potted history of the line, with pictures. Though in the Sherwood area of the City of Nottingham, the park is not far from the site of Daybrook Station.

Now council offices

Nottingham Borough Council built a huge number of council houses between the 1920s and the early 1950s. The bulk of them were built to a limited number of designs which can be found all over the city. The eight houses here represent one of the commoner designs: a terrace of four houses with a central arch giving access to the back gardens of the central houses. Houses grouped along a pedestrian footway (usually known locally as a twitchell) are also a characteristic feature of the design of the estates where most of this housing was built. Also visible are the original picket fences: usually supplemented, as here, with privet hedges.

Detached houses dating from the late 1930s and very typical of Nottingham's suburbs. Compare this picture with Image

This design appears to have been used across many Nottingham council estates between the mid-1920s through to the late 1940s (as here). Usually they occupy corner plots at junctions, with the two houses characteristically belonging to different streets. Earlier examples may be pebble-dashed or tile-hung rather than having exposed brickwork.

There were three blocks of maisonettes containing 36 dwellings (69-139 Rosecroft Drive) located here until around 2008. The maisonettes are an unusual building type in the housing stock of Nottingham Borough Council. Existing examples are located on Abbey Bridge, Marchwood Close and Kibworth Court. I presume that the individual flats are single-aspect (i.e., back-to-back) given the size of the buildings, number of flats and doorways located on all sides of the building.

This picture was taken by the then owner of the house, my uncle Harry Lees, a headmaster. It shows his mother, Helen, who had been widowed since the 1890s and lived with him until her death in the early 1950s. Compare this picture with Image

The houses of Longdale Road are built on the site of Daybrook Station, on the Great Northern line to Derby. Daybrook Station and the section of the line between Basford North and Gedling closed in April 1960 when Mapperley Tunnel was declared unsafe.

It's clear that virtually none of these has seen any use for a long time.