Early Council Housing in Nottingham

I've been doing some research into Council Housing in Nottingham and have written this guest blog for the excellent Municipal Dreams site. Enjoy.

Nottingham's Early Council Housing

More On That Secret Nuclear Bunker

Further to this post, I realised the other day that I'd missed out a critical part of the story that first got me interested in this sort of Cold War history.  

As you can see from this brief story, a local historian has managed to get hold of a set of maps put together by the Russians during the cold war, showing an extraordinary level of detail of the country and Nottingham in particular.  

The exhibition mentioned in the article was excellent, albeit criminally under-publicised and there was a little card suggesting that the maps could be bought from Mr Grimes along with his email address.  Being a nerd and a maps nerd at that, I of course sent of a criminally small amount of money and get back a CD of the maps in return.  

There is a reference to a couple of articles by John Davies called, "Uncle Joe Knew Where You Lived" and Part II here which give a wealth of fascinating detail of how the maps were compiled.  

The four Nottingham maps on the CD are at 1:10,000 resolution - ie incredibly detailed: the usual map that you might use for a walk in the countryside is 1:25,000.  The bits that I found most strange when browsing through the maps is the phonetic rendering of English places names into their Cyrillic equivalents.  

I'm hoping that I'm not in massive breach of the intellectual property that exists in the maps if I post some little extracts.  If I am then please get in touch and I'll take the images down immediately.  

This is The Park Estate and the eastern side of city centre

To bring us back to the original secret nuclear bunker post, this is the Russians' view of our regional command centre;

Note the special pink colour for military installation

A couple of things worth noting - the orange colour of some roads wasn't by chance - this was to designate which roads were wide enough to accommodate the width of the tanks that the Russians were planning to invade the UK with.  Is it just me for whom this creates a terrifying image of military hardware rolling down the ring road?  

Secondly, bearing in mind these maps, according to the "Uncle Joe..." series as linked above, were based on independent research rather than cribbing from existing maps, compare the maps of the Broxtowe and Aspley estates above and on the modern Google Maps.  

If anyone is interested in getting hold of a copy of the maps then please do let me know either through a comment below or via direct message on my twitter and I'll put you in touch with Mr Grimes.  

Secret Nuclear Bunker

Image courtesy of: http://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/how-anarchists-exposed-secret-nuclear-bunkers.html

A friend sent me a link to this planning application which is for the Secret Nuclear Bunker in the Chalfont Drive complex off the Ring Road in Nottingham.  Most Nottingham people have driven past the turning for it a hundred times but very few will have been inside.  I certainly haven't but would love to one day!

The bunker is here;


View Larger Map View Larger Map

If you zoom in on that map you start to see the uniform shape of a planned development.  Most people who took their driving test in Nottingham until a few years ago probably started off from this location.  I say until a few years ago because the site is slow being cleared for housing and other use and the various government departments that used to be there are slowly dispersing. The varied and interesting government uses means that there are lots of interesting things to be seen in this area - all of which appeal to my inner geek.  

(One of these things, and not really the focus of this blog is the presence of an Ordnance Survey Trig Point.  The specific point now seems to have been removed but there are some old shots on that second link.)

The main exciting thing at the Chalfont Drive (which is also the home of HMS Sherwood which as the Navy acknowledges, is a bold location for a naval facility...) is the Nuclear Bunker.  The site has received a fair amount of attention over the years and is well documented here.  

Correctly a 'Regional Seat of Government' this is one of a chain of facilities that existed throughout the country up until the early 1990s to be used in event of a nuclear war.  The planning application is pretty prosaic, changing the external doors to make sure that they are still secure, but the main interesting thing is the Heritage Statement.  This is required because the building is Listed - as you can see here.  The Listing statement is excellent, some choice extracts;

In the late 1950s, with the greater threat posed by the Soviet H-bomb, the earlier system of emergency central government was restructured. In place of the smaller War Rooms, the Commissioners in each Region (London was now deleted) were supplied with a Regional Seat of Government for around 200 staff. Their larger size is significant as it was envisaged that the regions would need to remain autonomous for a longer period due to the far greater devastation posed by the H-bomb.  

and

The Cambridge and Nottingham RSGs comprise the only purpose-built examples and, moreover, the most impressive examples of Cold War 'architecture' (by which we mean monumental structures which have applied and conscious external treatment) in England, augmented by the example at Kirknewton in Scotland which is essentially identical to the Cambridge bunker. These features borrow from contemporary Brutalist architecture in order to clearly exhibit their grim function through their architectural treatment.

and

It is probable, indeed, that such buildings needed to be visually impressive and forbidding - which they undoubtedly were - as much to impress visiting government ministers or local leaders and dignitaries, as for truly functional reasons. As the Cold War was essentially an era of bluff and counter-bluff, the illusion of being well prepared for nuclear strike might have been considered as important as the actual preparations themselves. The same could be said for impressing our allies and the local population, fulfilling a need to show that there were preparations in hand should the unthinkable happen

The Heritage Statement as linked above also has some great details including the final photograph of the steel door - imagine if this was your final view before entering into the bunker for an indeterminate time as the nuclear winter raged away above you.  

Ghost of Christmas Past

During the interregnum that inevitably features between Christmas and New Year I took the radical (for me) step of going shopping in the January sales.  As I was staying with my parents down South for a few days I had the somewhat unedifying choices of Crawley, Brighton or Croydon.  I finally decided to go to Croydon as I'd been working in store before Christmas in Crawley so didn't really fancy going back and the train down to Brighton felt like a bit of a drag.  

It was only as I got off the train at East Croydon station that I started to think about how long it was since I was last there.  I reckon it's close to a decade which was a bit sobering.  For the uninitiated  I grew up and went to school in this part of the world - so always have half an eye out for news from this unloved London Borough that I called home until I was 18.  I never really 'came home' after University - I lived for a year in York after I finished with my studies and then moved to Nottingham for work. 

Anyway, train done, I wandered down towards the town proper from the station and started to feel oddly nostalgic.  But then you know when you go back to somewhere or something that it totally familiar to you but then it turns out not to be quite the same as you remember it?  Very dislocating when you're convinced that something has moved.  For example - I often frequented (after the age of eighteen, obviously) 'The George' pub on George Street but if you'd asked me if Croydon's tram ran down that street I would have sworn that it ran on a parallel road.  As I say, very odd.  

I spent many happy hours as a teenager browsing the serendipitous racks of Beanos record store (I love the bathos of the phrase in that article, "STUFF marketplace officially closed on 30 April 2010 due to too little business") and owe my love of Elvis Costello's 'Armed Forces' and the lost genius of The Beekeepers (seriously, if you want a treat then get can a copy of 'Third Party, Fear and Theft'; it's brilliant) to that place.  So I was naturally very sad when it closed down and this meant that my CD shopping was restricted to popping into 101 Records.  They were handily enough having a half price sale so was able to make progress on my Dylan completism for relatively little money.  

I'd somehow created a further false memory for myself that Croydon was included in Owen Hatherley's smart and provocative book, 'A Guide To The New Ruins of Great Britain'.  I've just checked and it's not but you should read this book anyway anyway, not least for the chapter on Nottingham. 

 

For a much maligned placed architecturally, Croydon does have some gems of Modernism that have a real place in my heart - Apollo House and Lunar are famous for (i) being hilariously dated by their moon-landing inspired names, (ii) now housing the UK Border Agency so a key first destination for many migrants to the UK and (iii) appearing many times as filming locations for 'Peep Show'.  But whilst structurally the town was looking much the same, the changing face of the shops and rest of the streetscape was striking.  The closure of Allders has obviously hit a blow at the heart of the community and I kept expecting to find other shops that had long gone and moved away.  Sad.  

Finally, and on a more upbeat note, there are some good signs of regeneration and redevelopment happening.  An active BID (a model that works well in Nottingham too) looks to have put together some good plans and is certainly very visible.  And there are some great looking plans for East Croydon station (itself an iconic cantilevered building) that will improve its links to the rest of the town.  

Just a collection of thoughts really but hopefully a little treat for my midlands friends...

Walgreens and Wright

Slightly behind in blogging as no WiFi at the place I'm staying at. 

I'm now in Minneapolis and whilst there isn't any Purple Rain it's certainly very cold so I've taken refuge in a coffee shop to catch up on emails etc.  

The final couple of days in Chicago were as good as the first two - I spent a great day with the team at the Walgreens Deerfield 'Community Support Centre' (Head Office) and also saw some excellent architecture from Frank Lloyd Wright. 

I won't go on too much about the Walgreens visit as it'll be pretty irrelevant to most people outside of D90 but it was a really useful and insightful day.  I met with John Gremmer who heads up their CSR programme and he was able to introduce me to lots of people around the office including a brief chat with a couple of the Board members which was unexpected and very interesting.  

A few random notes, mainly on cultural differences / similarities between Walgreens and Boots (for those who don't know the two companies are merging at the moment - see some info here).  

- The company used to be head-quartered in Chicago city-centre but moved to their current suburban location in the 1970s.  This move caused some bad blood with the Daley family (who have run the city on-and-off for the last 30 or so years) which still lingers even now.  An interesting angle for my Company Towns research.  
- The company has an internal motto of "doing well by doing good" which fits really well with the Boots company ethos.  
- This includes a 'Four Way Test' which I saw displayed is everyone's office and in most of the corridors too.  
- The company is doing some really interesting things to combat Food Deserts (which I walk about here in Detroit) - certainly the range and selection of fresh food in some of the stores we visited was very comprehensive.  
- Oh, there's an own-brand range of beer: Big Flats - something the team at Boots should definitely consider...

A fascinating day that I've only just skimmed some of the nuggets from.  

Only last (half) day in Chicago (sob) I went over to Oak Park west of the city.  It was here that Frank Lloyd Wright lived for a time and designed a number of very impressive family homes.  You can tour his home and studio (which I didn't do for lack of time) or do a walking tour around the houses (which are all still in private ownership).  Despite it being a proper MidWest autumn day (ie freezing cold) I opted for the latter.   

I really impressive collection of homes, some photos below, and what looks like a great community of people.  

I then had to get back downtown, pick up my bag and navigate O'Hare Airport to get to my flight on time.  I like to blame the cold weather for slowing me down as I nearly missed my flight...  Got to Minneapolis to find that it was even colder - starting to be glad for the huge amount of clothes I've dragged with me here!