IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Sturton Street, NOTTINGHAM, NG7 6HU

This zoom shot from The Forest shows (from left) Mount Street Mill, the spire and gables of the former High Pavement (and later Forest Fields) Grammar School, then the former textile mills on Beech Avenue, with the three-storey terraces of Gladstone Street in front of them.

The rear entrance of a former Victorian school on Sturton Street. Until 1956 this was the High Pavement Boys' Grammar after which time High Pavement School decamped to a new building in Bestwood and this building became the co-educational Forest Fields Grammar School. It is now a training location used by the Nottingham Fire and Rescue Service.

Successively used by High Pavement and Forest Fields Grammar Schools, these buildings are being refurbished to form a new home for Forest Fields Primary School. When I was here (1959-66), the building on the left housed FFGS's biology and chemistry labs. For comparison, see David Hallam-Jones's Image], also taken from the top of Sturton Street.

A view from an upper-floor window in Forest Fields Primary School, taken during a visit by former pupils of the two grammar schools which once occupied the building. Sturton Street is in the foreground, Sherwood Rise in the middle distance, Mapperley Park beyond and Mapperley Plains on the skyline. The large building a few streets away on the right is the former Apollo Cinema, now the Jameah Fatimah mosque.

The tall late-Victorian school on Stanley Road, successively High Pavement and Forest Fields Grammar Schools, is being restored to house Forest Fields Primary School. The tall windows have been repaired at considerable cost. Compare this August view through the site fence with Image], taken on May Day 2013.

When I came here as an eleven-year-old in 1959 this was Forest Fields Grammar School (and before that it had been High Pavement Grammar School for Boys). The fine late-Victorian building was refurbished as a primary school in 2013. Image] shows the restoration work in progress.

A view from Sturton Street of the rear of what was successively High Pavement and Forest Fields Grammar Schools, now being refurbished to house Forest Fields Primary School. When I was at FFGS from 1959-66 the art room (presided over by the wonderful Mrs Marjorie Macmillan) was at the top of the wing straight ahead, with the library below it. The tall windows to the right were those of the classrooms reached from the upper and lower halls, which were used for assemblies and PE.

The poster on the left announces that the City Council is "proud to be investing in the expansion of Forest Fields Primary and Nursery School" - in the buildings which formerly housed High Pavement and then Forest Fields Grammar Schools. This picture may be of interest to others who, like me, were educated here. The two doors next to the yellow site gate are in the end of what in my time was the boys' toilets. The building whose corrugated red-oxide end gable shows above the wall was the physics laboratory where it rapidly became obvious to me that any talents I had lay in the arts rather than the sciences; I think the bi-metallic strip was about the last thing I understood, in the third week of the first year....

The building dates from the 1890s and was successively High Pavement and Forest Fields Grammar Schools, then Claremont Secondary. The new stretch of wall further up Sturton Street, in paler brick, is where the biology and chemistry laboratories were in my time at FFGS. Earlier views from the other end of Sturton Street: Image] (2012) Image] (2013)