IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Greet Court, NOTTINGHAM, NG7 5RT

Narrow roads and turning circles laid out in the 1930s with the small cars of that time in mind. The Dartmeet Court flats on the extreme left were built on the site of a woodyard.

The Dartmeet Court flats are on the site of a timber yard.

This was the access road to Radford Colliery until it closed in 1961. The pithead was behind and to the left of the camera position. The concrete-post fence was the eastern boundary of the colliery land. The houses of Poulter Close were built on the levelled site of the embankment which carried the colliery's railway headshunt (siding). I was pleased to find a Skills bus parked here: until the 1960s Skills pale-green private-hire coaches were garaged at a depot on St Peter's Street, only a few hundred yards south of here.

A big area of the Mill Allotment Holders Association's plots stretches from Ascot Road to New Bridge, between Grassington Road and the railway. The railway is over the hedge at the back, and the houses on Poulter Close (built on the site of Radford Colliery) can be seen through the trees on the other side of the railway. These allotments feature in Radford author Alan Sillitoe's short story "The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller", set in the 1930s.

Poulter Close and Greet Court, south-west of Bobbers Mill Bridge, are on the site of Radford Colliery, which closed in the 1960s. The Leen runs behind Lynmouth Crescent (to the left, behind the trees), then south through Old Radford and Lenton before joining the Trent. The concrete-post-and-iron-rail fence, which shows in old photographs, is the only surviving evidence of the colliery here. I remember it well, and seeing the colliers coming on and off shift, as we fished for tiddlers from the left bank.

To a four-year-old this gentle slope seemed very steep. I lived at the house in the centre of the picture for the first twenty years of my life. The rear extension and the garage at the side have been added since my parents moved in 1968.

Looking towards Truro and Lynmouth Crescents. The flat-topped houses seen through the trees in the distance on the right are on Poulter Close, built on the site of Radford Colliery on the other side of the River Leen.

This housing development on the banks of the Leen was built on the site of Radford Colliery, which closed in the early 1960s. The streets are named after Nottinghamshire rivers - the Poulter, the Meden, the Greet and the Smite, but not the Leen.

For a view of the street where I lived as a child taken 55 years after this one, see Image Much is the same (the houses themselves, and their Bulwell stone garden walls), but much has changed. The wooden gates, windows and front doors (all various species of mid green in the mid fifties) have all been replaced, and thanks to the Clean Air Act, the end of steam on the nearby railway and the closure of Radford Colliery (which was behind the poplar trees visible between and above the houses on Lynmouth Crescent) the pebble-dash on the upper storeys now stays bright white and not the smoky grey it was then. The lad on the bike is me, proudly riding my first (second-hand) two-wheeled bike past our house (offstage left). Mum’s writing on the back of the tiny Brownie print dates it July 1955 and notes that I am six – so it’s before my birthday at the end of the month. The bike was maroon – but only I can see this black-and-white snap in colour....

The gas lamps had gone, the paintwork was brighter and the Capitol Cinema (extreme left, on the corner of Churchfield Lane) was a bingo hall, but new garden gates, doors and windows apart, all was still much as it had been in the fifties and sixties, when I lived here.