IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Montpelier Road, NOTTINGHAM, NG7 2JW

The current home of the successors to what was a significant firm of rope manufacturers for industrial and other purposes. The following is a resume of an article in the Lenton Times (journal of the Lenton Local History Society) for October 2003: "William Coates set up in business as a ropemaker in 1840 and established a number of ropemaking operations in the Nottingham area. Following his father's death in 1894, Herbert Coates took over the business and decided that he needed to incorporate the latest technology if he were to keep ahead of his competitors. So in 1903 he bought an industrial property in Spring Close which had additional land attached to it. Here he had a huge indoor ropewalk built and installed the most up-to-date steam-driven machinery. For reasons which are explored in the article the company was eventually forced into liquidation in the mid-1930's. Their city centre premises were closed down, the work force laid off, the Lenton premises put up for sale and most of the machinery either auctioned off or sold for scrap. In due course most of the premises were acquired by W.J. Simms, Sons & Cooke Ltd. When Herbert Coates died in 1949 W.J. Coates & Sons found themselves with little option but to sell their remaining Spring Close properties to Simms, Sons & Cooke and move elsewhere. The article concludes by bringing the story up to date and recounts how Stewart Coates, great grandson of the original founder, continues to operate the business from 10 Montpelier Road." Old OS maps show a rope and twine factory behind houses on the opposite side of Montpelier Road to the current business which appears to date from around the period when the spring Close property was sold, as outlined in the article, but it's not clear whether this was part of the business. (Spring Close was in the area now occupied by the Queens Medical Centre.)

Advertising image from the early 20th century in the window of the Coates and Sons shop http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3006216 .

Housed in the former Dunkirk Primary School which relocated to neighbouring Marlborough Street.

The horizontal bar is clean, but there is no evidence of even the top of an arrow behind the gas valve plate. Even this is quite old, and I would have thought unlikely to have been sited to cover the mark. Is the bench mark simply the horizontal cut?

The gable of the building with the ring road flyover beyond. The bench mark in http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3004935 is at the far end of the building.

From the A52, which flies over the roundabout

The oldest part of the area known as Dunkirk, the name deriving from a local farm.