Alfreton Road, ever changing, always busy
It has gone through hard times but Alfreton Road always seems to be a bustling centre of community life. ANDY SMART looks at its history, starting as what now seems an unlikely pleasure garden
HOW times have changed. Two hundred years ago Radford was described in print as “a delightful place of public resort”. It is perhaps not a label you would attach to the inner city suburb today. But that was in the days long before Raleigh, Manlove Alliott and Player’s cigarettes brought their industrial might to the area and changed its image forever.
It acquired its name from red ford, a layer of sandstone that once existed along the banks of the River Leen, but which is long gone. A Redeforde Manor was mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 and a settlement was built up around Lenton Priory, founded by William Peveril.
It is hard to imagine the scene a couple of centuries ago. Radford Folly was developed by a man called William Elliott, who diverted water from the River Leen to flood a boating lake which ringed a six-sided, three-storey observatory tower, visitors reaching it by a Chinese bridge, like the ones you see on Willow Pattern plates.
After his death another wealthy man, Charles Sutton, acquired the gardens, and spent more money stocking the lake with fish and raising exotic plants and birds on its banks.
And when he died, publican William Barr developed the idea of Radford Follies as a public attraction as Nottingham’s answer to London’s Vauxhall Gardens.
In 1832 and then called Radford Grove, it boasted tea gardens, walks, and at night Chinese lanterns and spectacular firework displays.
It wasn’t to last.
Changes for Radford that would make it pretty well unrecognisable to William Elliott’s creation were just round the corner.
In 1848, the Enclosure Act came into force and Nottingham’s boundaries were absolutely, and oppressively, defined, making it unable to spread outwards despite the growing population.
Once a delightful garden city, Radford’s appeal declined as industry made its mark.
There were textiles, and, nearby, mining, the latter putting paid to Radford Folly, whose ornamental gardens ended as a coal wharf.
Its last remains, the summer house, survived through to 1957, when it was demolished by the Coal Board.
Now most of those industries have disappeared although there are still some reminders of its earlier days, in the three-storey stocking-frame knitters’ cottages on the northern side of Alfreton Road.
And that, if nothing else, serves as a reminder that Alfreton Road, from Canning Circus down to its junction with Bobber’s Mill Bridge, Gregory Boulevard and Radford Boulevard, has its real origins in pre-victorian Britain.
Alfreton Road’s importance grew, with shops and industry, and its streets on both sides provided housing. Shop names have come and gone. The Co-op was there, Onion’s veg shop, Hallam and Wilson for bread, Cowley’s chemist, the ironmongery of Marshall and Hancock, Jack Taylor’s cycle shop, Skill’s toys … even a tripe shop.
But it was the people who made the area what it was, giving it an enduring spirit of community.
It wasn’t all industry. Some people had enough land to grow their own