IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Southfield Road, NOTTINGHAM, NG8 3PL

Council-built houses on Southfield Road. The Ainsley Estate was planned before the Second World War but not completed until after it, as Nottingham continued to expand westwards. Image] shows the rear of these houses.

Council-built houses on Southfield Road. The Ainsley Estate was planned before the Second World War but not completed until after it, as Nottingham continued to expand westwards. Image] shows the fronts of these houses.

The green-and-white buildings in the distance are the Opal 1 student accommodation (Image]) built on land east of the former Radford Station once occupied by sidings, Chettle’s and Butterworth and Walker. This picture updates Stephen McKay’s Image], taken from the same place in 2008, before Opal 1 was built. From the 19th century until the building of Western Boulevard and the council houses either side of it, a railway linking Babbington (Cinderhill) Colliery and the Nottingham Canal at a wharf immediately south of Wollaton Road crossed the Radford-Trowell main line at right angles and on the level here – where the tree on the right of the railway in the middle of this shot is; the colliery railway continued due south on a line corresponding to the boundary between the allotments and the back gardens of the houses on Newland Close (the first of which is on the right) and there were sidings and a weighbridge further south where Marchwood Close now stands. Until the abandonment of the colliery railway there was a signal box here, originally west of the colliery railway and later to the east. Babbington Sidings ran parallel to the main line back under the bridge and almost as far west as Woodyard Lane. For other vestiges of the Babbington Colliery line, see Image], Image], Image] and Image

This council estate was planned in the late 1930s, at the same time as Western Boulevard. My school friend Tim Dale lived in the house in the centre. We listened to a lot of early sixties music in the back bedroom "between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP".

Robert Shaw Playing Field - named for the nearby primary school - is the triangle of land between the Nottingham-Mansfield and Radford-Trowell railway lines at Radford Junction. Beyond the embankment of the Trowell line are some of the houses at the end of Kennington Road. The Radford author Alan Sillitoe describes children's fights on this bit of railway and the building of the council houses on either side of the line in the 1930s in his short story "The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller". A more peaceful child, I cycled here most evenings fifty or so years ago to see the St Pancras to Edinburgh Waverley Express go by, coal trains on the Mansfield line and shunting on the Radford Colliery sidings away to the left.

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.

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.

In the early 1960s this was a good place to hang out with schoolfriends. A lot of trees have grown since then, obscuring the railway line to Mansfield and Worksop straight ahead and the line from Radford to Trowell Junction and the Erewash Valley Line to the right. Industrial units and student flats now occupy Radford sidings and goods yard on the other side of the Mansfield line, along which countless coal trains from the Leen Valley pits passed. The Waverley Express to and from Edinburgh via the Settle & Carlisle, which so excited small boys, no longer uses the route to Trowell.

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