IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Northdown Road, NOTTINGHAM, NG8 3PF

This estate was begun before the Second World War but not completed until after it.

This short twitchel links New Bridge and Northdown Road. Fifty years and more ago I hared along it most evenings, having skidded round the hairpin bend at the bottom of the lane from the bridge shown in Image] or lugged my bike down the steps (possibly a short cut, saving the second or two vital to twelve-year-olds), to watch the Waverley Express pass Robert Shaw Playing Field on the curve west of Radford Station.

Private houses were built at this end of the Ainsley Estate. The first of the council houses on Northdown Road are in the distance, where the road curves to the right. The Woodlands flats dominate the Radford skyline in the way the now demolished John Player & Sons cigarette factory once did. To their left is the spire of All Saints' Church, still further away.

There have been changes since I was last here in August 2010 (Image]), but quite what they are in aid of is not clear, so I shall have to return.

Looking up Ainsley Road on a September morning. For comparison: Image] (2010) and Image] (2011).

Looking east over the bridge, with the tower blocks on Hartley Road in the distance. Years ago this view was dominated by the Player's Tobacco Factory on Churchfield Lane, now demolished.

This small council estate to the east of Western Boulevard was laid out in the late 1930s. I wondered if this concrete structure was an air-raid shelter entrance, but my friend Tim Dale, who lived nearby in the fifties and sixties, thinks it is something to do with the drainage system.

At the bottom of the slope beyond the parked cars the lane narrows to a path through the allotments to Ascot Road and Aspley Lane. The houses in the distance are on Grassington Road.

A foreshortened zoom view over the wall where Wollaton Road crosses the railway. The builder's yard in the foreground is on the site of the northbound platform of Radford Station (closed 1964). The line straight ahead is the former Leen Valley (now Robin Hood) Line to Mansfield and Worksop. The line to Trowell and the Erewash Valley main line can be seen curving away to the left. The factory units on the right are on the site of Radford goods yard and the sidings serving Radford Colliery. New Bridge crosses the railway in the middle distance and the brewery building on Alpine Street in Old Basford shows above it - it is getting on for two miles away.