Featured Image Martyn Williams Photography
Environmentalist, historian and former Nottingham Post staff journalist Mark Patterson has produced a really rich insight into the people, places and history of the Trent Basin for the new Waterside development along the River Trent. Called Connecting City Life and Waterside Living, it’s available as a PDF
The new development is by developer Blueprint who created Green Street Eco Homes on Green Street in The Meadows:
:
The new development is the beginning of a renaissance of the river bank which was artist and community led, out of the Hinterland Project developed by Jennie Syson Jennie now has the fantastic Syson Gallery which presents work by newer contemporary artists. It’s across the road from Nottingham Contemporary.
The new housing development on the river is on the site of two old warehouses, built by public works in 1933.
Mark first came across them walking, cycling and running along the river, thought they looked like concrete relics of Stalingrad, wondered what they were and found them again when he was writing about Curator Jennie Syson’s Hinterland project in 2008.
In Warehouses 1 and 2, Cadburys and Frys stored their cocoa, Hobson and Bampton, Sons and Knight stored Timber here. Raleigh bikes, Players cigarettes, dredged Trent grit, wheat, bagged flour, concrete, timber, paper, wire coils, bone meal, Finnish wood pulp, Norwegian ferro-silicon and Dutch strawboard, as well as tomatoes, fish and coconuts for funfairs…..’ to’d and fro’d down to the Humber along the Trent Basin, Connecting City Life and Waterside Living p11 By Mark Patterson.
Below is the plan and image of the warehouses originally built in 1933, demolished in 2012 by the Homes and Communities Agency and some great images that give you a feel for the streets that are now running along the riverbank.
signsofanopencity 
it’s important to know the history/ies of everywhere, and Mark is good at unearthing and reminding us of our history/ies
LikeLiked by 1 person
Definitely. I’m reading his histories of Nottingham and Derbyshire at the moment: surprising for me but he made me wonder about how people lived through those eras…
LikeLike
Mark Patterson really helps uncover the ancient and the modern and the people and environment that runs through everything. His energy is infectious and I look forward to reading his work on the Romans in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. His is a mind that wants to know how things like empires worked, practically for people, on the ground (or not!)
LikeLiked by 1 person