“In this book we shall be looking out of the window to try to explain the long history of Nottingham”. That is a simple image on a human scale which commends by its simplicity; it comes from the editor’s introduction to this monumental tribute to a city whose glamour ‐ for anyone fortunate enough to have experienced its amenities ‐ never fades. Urban history today is very different from the merely celebratory accounts of municipalities once fashionable; of recent growth, it now takes the form of well researched symposia of scholarly contributions, scrupulous analysis of evidence based on sound underlying theory. The present volume is an outstanding example of the genre. Its closest forerunner is probably Nottingham and its Region, published by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (in accordance with its usual practice) on the occasion of its Meeting there in 1966, a compendium of articles examining the history, geography, economics and culture of the city.
The history of this Midlands metropolis is ‐ to interested students ‐ familiar enough, thanks to a historiography dating back to 1677 with Robert Thoroton’s Antiquities of Nottinghamshire and continuing through Deering’s Nottingham (1751), John Blackner’s History of Nottingham (1815), James Orange’s History and Antiquities of Nottingham (1860), city librarian Duncan Gray’s Nottingham: Settlement to City (1953) and Nottingham Through 500 Years (1960), and local author Geoffrey Trease’s Nottingham: A Biography (1970). This new Centenary History, marking the conferment of the city charter in 1897, is the most comprehensive, multifaceted account of the city’s evolution into its present condition as a major industrial centre.
Physically the book is a pleasure to handle. It has a satisfying (almost) square shape and compactness, and the eye is immediately entranced by the choice of illustration for the book jacket, a panoramic view of the city in its landscape as seen by the Flemish artist Jan Siberechts in 1700. The typography (Palatino) and ornament, the layout and the enhancing illustrations throughout are pertinent and happily augment the thread of the narrative. This seems worth emphasizing since a book should be a visual and tactile as well as an intellectual encounter. It is divided into four parts: Origins to the medieval period; Early modern, 1550‐1750; Industrial Nottingham 1750‐1914; and Twentieth century Nottingham, each edited by a different authority in the field. Parts I and II occupy 186 pages, Parts III and IV, which are much more extensive, cover 433 pages; inevitably there is considerably more raw material for the specialists to digest in the later period. A lengthy bibliography lists the primary and secondary printed sources; the index when randomly tested proved efficient.
It is not within the competence of this reviewer to assess the validity of the conclusions reached by the contributors in the 23 essays which constitute the book, but to an amateur with some knowledge of the sources and a sense of the city’s past the text reads convincingly, bristles with vitality and unfailingly relates all its judgements to the surviving evidence. It is an impressive sequence of sustained and reasoned argument. The authors are drawn from a range of different backgrounds, all with hands‐on experience of their craft: archaeologists, archivists, academic historians, geographers, local historians, educationists and people actively engaged in the civic and social life of the town. Almost uniquely, Nottingham’s borough records survive in unbroken succession from the 1440s, and clearly this richness has been fully exploited and reinterpreted in the light of contemporary practice and methodology. Much new evidence from archaeological, architectural and documentary sources is here deployed in full synthesis. It would be invidious to select: the medieval borough is vividly restored to view by Trevor Foulds, and the 200 years up to 1750 are sensitively recreated by Adrian Henstock, the county archivist, while John Beckett almost single‐handedly rewrites and reconstructs the history of industrial Nottingham from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century.
A persistent note throughout Nottingham’s history is one of turbulence, a tradition of rebellion presumably originating in the folk hero Robin Hood who threatened (either in legend or in fact) the stability of the Castle establishment on the steep hill at one end of the market square, overlording the greenwood which stretched northward from the base of the fortress, the literal and symbolic Sherwood Forest, haunt of all that was inimical to Authority. In 1835 the Nottingham Journal commented: “Nottingham is generally branded as the nursery of sedition, a stronghold of agitation, continually the scene of some revolutionary tumult or other”. Certainly there is clear historical evidence for insurrection and civil disorder as early as the fifteenth century, and Chapter 9 details the bitter faction fights which broke out intermittently from 1550 to 1750, especially during the Civil War when Nottingham was a focus of Parliamentary resistance to Charles I, despite the fact that the war was officially launched from that castle when the King’s standard was raised there in 1642. Chapter 13, “Radical Nottingham”, reminds us of the more recent tradition of working class revolt which began with the first serious outbreak of Luddite activity from 1811‐17 after a long history of frame‐breaking by despairing unemployed hosiery workers. Food riots in the 1750s, electoral conflicts in the 1790s influenced by the writings of Tom Paine, the Reform riots of 1831 which necessitated a permanent garrison of Dragoons near the great central square, and the Chartist disturbances from 1838 to 1848 all testify to the ever volatile and forceful political consciousness of the citizens. Was that unusually spacious Market Square a natural focus for assembly, drawing the disaffected from miles around to hear the orators as it did customers to the market stalls? That is a question given a considerable airing in the later pages of the book.
Nor is the account purely historical; Part IV offers a thoroughly contemporary view of the city and adroitly emphasizes the rapidity of change in the late 1990s with corresponding effects on the local economy and culture. One disappointment may be recorded here: the writers associated with a place are the seeds of its immortality, yet there is scant reference to its literary tradition. In a literal as well as a deeply subjective sense, D.H. Lawrence was a prophet imbued with the Nottingham spirit ‐ he was in the most profound sense a local author, yet he merits only one line in the book. In the second half of the twentieth century two authors ‐ Alan Sillitoe and Stanley Middleton ‐ embody that same sense of this place, yet Sillitoe receives only a sentence and Middleton goes unsung. Still, Sillitoe did contribute the Preface, and we might end with a characteristically shrewd observation from him therein: “The more one reads the more one realizes there is much left to learn, and with local history most of all, which one goes on reading in an attempt to make sense out of the lives of people who by their reactions to adversity reveal that human nature rarely alters”. Amen to that.
