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Churchfield Lane, NOTTINGHAM, NG7 5QY

These houses were built, I think, in the 1920s, pre-dating those behind the camera. As a small child growing up in nearby Newquay Avenue I was intrigued by the quoins (though then I didn't know what they were called) and the red stars. Like all Nottingham houses with any pretensions to gentility, they have Bulwell stone garden walls.

Much of this part of Nottingham was built between the wars as the city started to expand westwards - a process which accelerated after the war.

The former Capitol Cinema, now a gospel church, is on the corner of Churchfield Lane and Newquay Avenue.

A lot has changed since I caught the bus into town from a much less informative bus stop here when I lived in Newquay Avenue from 1948-68. The art deco Capitol Cinema, on the corner of Churchfield Lane and Newquay Avenue, is now a gospel church. When I was a boy there were lock-up garages screened by advertising hoardings straight ahead, on the corner of Churchfield Lane and Alfreton Road, where there is now a KFC. For a view down Churchfield Lane towards here, see http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1506889.

See also Image

The semi-detached houses on the west side were built in the late 1930s and are the same design as those on nearby Newquay Avenue.

Built in the late 1930s at the same time as many of the nearby semi-detached houses, the voluptuously-curved Art Deco Capitol (where I saw Olivier's Richard III and immediately fell for Shakespeare) at the corner of Newquay Avenue and Churchfield Lane is now the Mount Zion Millennium City Church.

Now The Mount Zion Millennium City Church, The Cappo was designed by R W Cooper and built in the late 1930s, like the houses on Newquay Avenue (to the right) and the west side of Churchfield Lane (left). The picture was taken from the corner of Bobbers Mill Road, with Alfreton Road in the foreground - my view as I waited on my bike to cross on my way home from school fifty years ago (and, street furniture apart, really very little changed in the intervening years, as I did not include KFC, offstage left, in the shot). Earlier pictures show that the cross was new in 2010: Image] Image]

Looking towards Radford Boulevard and Alfreton Road from Churchfield Lane on a grey September morning. Until the late 1930s this was the edge of Nottingham in these parts. Behind the camera are houses built just before the War as the city began the huge westward expansion which continued in the fifties and sixties. The white house on the left used to be a corner sweet shop.

The voluptuous Art Deco frontage of the former Capitol Cinema (now a gospel church) is shown in other photos nearby. The blank red brick walls of the rear of the building are less glamorous and loom over the back gardens of the south side of Newquay Avenue and Truro Crescent.