IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Knighton Avenue, NOTTINGHAM, NG7 5QD

The road slopes down from Churchfield Lane to the River Leen. There are similar houses in nearby Kingsford and Knighton Avenues and on Churchfield Lane, all built in the late 1930s as the city expanded westwards beyond its Victorian and Edwardian edges.

In the 18th century Radford Grove Lane led down to Radford Folly, a fashionable pleasure garden by the banks of the Leen (see http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/whatnall1928/radford_folly.htm ). In the last century, the background of this view was dominated by the tall Players cigarette factory on the far side of Churchfield Lane, now demolished and the site of a retail park. The trees on the right are in Radford churchyard. Image] shows the Churchfield Lane end of this row of houses.

The brown-brick houses on Knighton Avenue, Woodstock Avenue, Kingsford Avenue and the west side of Churchfield Lane are all of a piece, with these distinctive half-timbered gables.

The former graveyard of St Peter's church.

It is indeed stationary - but sells stationery....

A long-established newsagent's shop on the corner of a late-Victorian block. See Image] for a view of it in November 2009, before the Lifestyle Express branding. (There was no such thing as lifestyle fifty-odd years ago when my mother and I walked up Churchfield Lane every week to pay the paper bill.)

Streets of distinctively-gabled houses laid out in the 1930s as the city expanded westwards beyond its Victorian and Edwardian edges.

St Peter's churchyard is to the left. This part of Churchfield Lane used to be shadowed at this time of the morning by the tall Player's tobacco factory on the right. Its site is now a retail park.

A friendly man walking his dog told me this area was "The Hidden Jewel of Bobbers Mill". It's hard to imagine that this tranquil spot was until the 1960s next to a busy colliery. Old photos of Radford Colliery show the concrete-post-and-iron-rail fence which now borders Maun Avenue. The streets of houses to the right were built in the 1970s on colliery and railway land. In the 18th century, though, this was Radford Grove http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/whatnall1928/radford_folly.htm , a fashionable pleasure garden, and Radford Folly, a stuccoed brick tower, survived in ruins into the 1950s, in a sea of colliery spoil.